The Issue: it’s a data problem, not a people problem.
In my day-to-day conversations with Medtech CCOs and Sr Sales Leaders, enabling portfolio-wide consultative conversations with Supply Chain, Physician, and Facility leadership is a key part of their growth strategy.
Consultative conversations are necessary today as customers need more than a clinical specialist; they need a consultant. All Medtech companies have a handful of Reps that do this naturally but have struggled to create a process that enables a Rep with less experience to have that high-level conversation across their entire portfolio or segment.
What I’ve learned is that this isn’t a personnel problem. It’s a data, data access, and scalability problem.
Silos of Data & Competitive Intelligence in Medtech:
- Competitive Product Cross Reference Intel sits in an analytics department, national accounts team, or locked inside a Rep’s mind. It is often inaccessible to Commercial Team end-users and rarely in a way that is usable for a Rep who isn’t an Excel wizard. Worse yet, there can be several “sources of truth” throughout different teams maintaining differing competitive cross reference intelligence.
- Competitive Pricing sits in Market Intelligence or other departments that have little to no interactions with Reps. Teams often must research competitive SKUs one at a time. You are paying for competitive insights; why is it held in an ivory tower and not leveraged in the field?
- Internal Pricing sits in yet another department or separate system and often takes several days to quote a large conversion opportunity. Often we see separate field sales teams simply maintaining their own pricing based on historical deals…a nightmare for any CFO or Pricing Professional.
- Building Large Analyses is not the main function of your Reps, nor do we want it to be. After collecting all this information, it is now their job to interpret it, find the right sales story for this opportunity, and display it consistently and professionally that makes sense to the customer.
The bottom line is that these silos create a process that is too complex, time-consuming, and manual to be effectively executed at scale in the field. Furthermore, the process lacks the necessary controls to easily implement updates to any one part without the guarantee that those changes will reach end-user Reps tasked to succinctly communicate the business opportunity.
That’s where Relatable comes in. Our commercial team workflow automation software provides the tools needed to unify and manage all siloed commercial data in a single platform that can be accessed by not only Sales but also Contracting, Marketing, Product Support, Market Intelligence, or any other team to simplify and streamline their efforts to support customer needs and drive new revenue.
The Typical Rep Story & How Relatable enables Medtech Field Sales Teams
A typical "large conversion" opportunity in Medtech normally takes 3-4 weeks to get impactful commercial insight in front of Supply Chain, Physician, or Facility leadership. The story below is an amalgamation of several stories we have heard recently from the field that outline a Rep's struggle to provide a portfolio-wide Business Review for a customer.
An award-winning Orthopedic Rep is touted as one of her company's best. She goes above and beyond to win business by using a consultative ‘Business Review’ process to differentiate herself from the competition in her territory. This process includes her promising a large ‘Business Review’ or ‘Partnership Consult’ to show what her portfolio can do for a prospective customer with which they have a very limited spend. She uses their past purchasing history (simply a list of SKUs and annual quantities purchased) and her own know-how to do this.
Historically, she would spend weekends locked in the home office doing this work as she is busy traveling to cases during the week. A typical analysis like this for a Supply Chain or Physician Leader can take 2-3 days of their time and up to 3-4 weeks of waiting on internal stakeholders to get something back in front of a customer.
Key Milestones for Large Conversion Opportunities:
- Approaches Physician Owner or Supply Chain leader to do a Business Review to analyze their historic implant and/or supply usage to highlight what Company X could do for them.
- Rep provides an example of what this Business Review looks like and what it will highlight (cost savings, SKU reduction, vendor consolidation, etc).
- Rep requests and receives a list of 250+ SKUs currently in use.
- Business Review Process Begins by Rep
- Cross references all 250 products with help from Product Marketers
- Gathers competitive pricing from corporate Market Intelligence Team
- Works with Pricing Team or additional platform to price 250 SKUs
- Reprices the portfolio to scenario model different pricing tiers
- Finds the right sales story (Ex. capital bundling, savings, SKU reduction)
- Reviews and receives approval from sales leadership
- Completes analysis and builds something presentable for the customer that includes the financial and product cross reference analysis
Pre-Relatable, it took about 2-3 days of personal work and 3-4 weeks to chase down all the other required data and approvals to get something in the customer's hands.
With a Relatable partnership, this process takes about 2-5 minutes for the analysis and approximately 30 minutes to finalize for the customer.
Keep in mind that these processes are typically used by the top-producing Reps. Do your less experienced Reps have the same opportunity and are you willing to wait the years it will take to learn these skills on their own?
Contact us to learn more about Relatable and how we are shaking up Medtech.
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I am lucky in my position as the growth leader at Relatable to be able to speak to some of the hardest working and high-performing Medtech Reps. As a person who ‘carried the bag’ in health tech for 10+ years, I get a thrill when I hear the success stories of Reps using Relatable to best serve their customers and drive new revenue. This is even more satisfying when these Reps are solving the systemic problems we see throughout Medtech commercial teams. To learn more about Relatable, contact me via direct message or comment below.
Ben Allemann
Vice President of Growth
Relatable Healthcare