The healthcare marketing landscape is undergoing a dramatic transition brought on, in part, by a wave of new regulations. Factors like the ACA, evolving sales and contracting models, consumerism in healthcare and corporate cost reductions, to name a few, are forcing the industry to reevaluate sales and marketing strategies.
Now, more than ever, it is important that medical technology companies and their customers evolve together. Manufacturers can no longer succeed by simply delivering incremental product and cost improvements and deploying a retail/detail sales force. Instead, hospitals and physicians are seeking broader, more strategic relationships with manufacturers.
Grey Matter Marketing conducted a direct survey to 20 thought leaders in the advanced general surgery field to uncover the most critical differences in today’s medical technology landscape. These surgeons put forth, and agreed on, several key points:
- Industry players can no longer succeed by simply delivering incremental product and cost improvements.
- Medical professionals want stronger clinical and health economics data to support their purchasing decisions.
- Deploying a retail/detail sales force no longer works; they are much more selective about who they will see.
- Peer-to-peer recommendations are the most powerful mechanism to try a new product or service.
Although these demands appear daunting, Grey Matter Marketing sees them as an opportunity to progress and lead. By changing the mindset around medical technology strategy, the ramifications from the ACA can be offset—and profit margins even increased!
So how will the sales and marketing strategy change in the ACA era? Med tech companies and their agency partners will move toward a more data-driven, value-based marketing model.
- Companies will provide compelling clinical and economic information to a growing stakeholder community while focusing on solutions and outcomes, not just products.
- Companies will abandon the retail/detail sales model and, instead, utilize technological tools, such as content marketing and automation, to focus on the right prospects, nurture customers more effectively and efficiently, and ultimately increase sales.
- Novel forms of communication will be essential to driving adoption, utilization and patient compliance. The solutions used to communicate company messages will need to be targeted to the right audience, at the right time, with the right information.
Finally, companies who are bold enough to take a hard look at their marketing programs—and tell the truth about what is working and what is not —will take advantage of the rapid sea change and come out ahead of their competition.
We believe that the right agency partner can provide the expertise to enable healthcare marketers and device manufacturers to increase impact while remaining headcount neutral to meet genuine customer needs and corporate goals. Let Grey Matter Marketing show you how!
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