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In some ways, medical device marketing strategies are no different than those in other industries. As you plan a go-to-market strategy, it's essential to develop customer personas first to ensure you understand your target audience – their demographic details, problems, concerns, wants, and needs. You also need to analyze your competitors and use what you learned to craft a compelling value proposition that differentiates your brand from 'the other guys.'
But too often, medical devices marketing strategies fall short. The ultimate measure of success is ROI, but most strategies fail to empower sales teams to engage prospects effectively and move them forward through the sales cycle in a consistent, streamlined way.
The most successful brands develop a medical device marketing strategy that arms reps with the right story and the right tools to deliver it. When this happens, everyone's job gets easier—not harder—as the company grows.
In this article, we'll explore five ways to create a modern medical device marketing strategy that'll set sales up to get more deals across the finish line and fuel revenue growth.
Medical devices are complex technical products. To be compelled to make a significant investment in the tools you're selling, surgeons, physicians, and other practitioners must first understand exactly how these tools solve their problems. Unfortunately, most medical device marketing strategies rely on legacy sales presentations full of busy diagrams, charts, and bullet point lists—and benefits get lost in translation. The burden of turning that chaos into a compelling story falls on individual reps, making for an inconsistent, unpredictable sales process.Â
It is marketing's job to craft a sales story that reps can deliver with minimal assistance and interpretation. For that story to be effective, marketers need to think outside the PowerPoint deck and arm reps with clear, concise copy and instructive visuals that relay complex processes and benefits with ease.Â
To build a truly effective sales presentation for medical devices, we recommend you show, don't tell. Focus on simplifying your messaging. In many cases, this is easily achieved by eliminating content overlap and converting busy diagrams and bullet lists into clean product visuals. Well-executed product visualizations are not only more engaging, they make it much easier for prospects to understand the complex functionality and nuanced benefits of medical devices. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.
So often, sales teams have a colossal 'one-size-fits-all' deck they send to every prospect. This deck tries to cover every benefit and value proposition in one fell swoop. Unfortunately, taking this approach leads to missed opportunities. It also signals that your sales team is operating with an underdeveloped pipeline, and it's likely your reps don't have the foresight to understand what resources will resonate best with prospects at each step in their buyer's journey.
A solid medical device marketing strategy accounts for potential customers having different needs at different stages of the marketing and sales funnel. From the Awareness stage—where a prospect has only just realized they have a problem they want to solve—to the Decision stage, you need to have content and assets ready and available for your sales reps.Â
Effective medical device sales presentation assets are designed with timing in mind. These strategies cater to prospects at their specific stage of the marketing or sales funnel. To meet prospects where they are, your team needs to be intimately aware of common questions that come up at each stage of the buyer journey and should have relevant resources ready to share with prospects every step of the way. The content a lead receives when they make an initial inquiry should not be the same content they see in a one-on-one sales demo. If it is, you have work to do.
In theory, organizing all of your marketing and sales content on a cloud storage platform like Dropbox makes sense. In practice? It's a mess.Â
Teams still end up with copy after copy of sales presentation decks and that “single source of truth” simply becomes a source of confusion. There's no version control, and it's incredibly difficult to update "the deck" when there are multiple versions of it. Poor file management isn’t just a nuisance. It quickly becomes a major problem that gets increasingly worse as sales (and sales teams) grow.Â
What's even more concerning: inaccurate or non-compliant information in a medical device sales presentation can lead to serious consequences. It’s a highly-regulated industry and, unfortunately, this is a common stumbling block.
How can you avoid it?
Investing in a modern Content Management System (CMS) is your best option. Whether you choose an enterprise-level solution like Salesforce or you opt to go with a CMS for medical device sales, your sales team can have easy access to company-approved assets. That means no one will be using an old deck with outdated product information, and no one can get creative and add their own flair to a presentation.Â
Investing in a controlled CMS environment is a win-win. It's easier to onboard and train new sales reps, and presentation updates no longer require sleuthing, which reduces lots of headaches for your marketing team.Â
So, let's say you've got a plan to develop a winning sales story and your sales content is well-organized and easily accessible. Now, how will your sales team create and deliver presentations?
Whether they're selling remotely, holding in-person product demos, or using a combination of both to win over a buying committee, there's a lot to consider before you turn your reps loose with a presentation design tool.
Many tools have a stunning array of beautiful templates and customization options, but at the end of the day your reps don't get paid to design presentations. They get paid to sell. For medical device sales, in particular, consistency with the presentation of technical details and product features is critical.
That's why a modular presentation platform with strict edit controls that still allows reps to tailor presentations to prospect needs is a sound solution. It allows reps to pick and choose the content that’s most relevant to any given deal and quickly assemble presentations – without the risk of going off message or off brand.
The best way to gauge the merit of your marketing strategy is to measure its impact on sales. You should engage in open dialogue with reps to hear first-hand how prospects are responding to sales content. While this is a helpful first step, anecdotal evidence only goes so far. Unfortunately, for many sales teams, anecdotal evidence is all they've got.
However, true sales and marketing alignment requires actionable data, and your medical device marketing strategy needs a plan to generate it. When sales presentations are sent to a prospect, sales and marketing leaders should be able to see if they opened it, when they opened it, and how long they viewed it.Â
Having access to this level of insight provides the power to see which presentations and content assets contribute to the most closed deals—and even which reps are most active. Not only does this help you develop more effective content, it empowers your sales managers to engage in more effective coaching—two things that are essential to improving your sales process.
Nuvue is the Modular Sales System that completes your medical device marketing strategy. Get expert creative help with your brand messaging and sales story. Build a library of company-approved assets in a single, easily accessible place. Push updates to all of it with ease. Share instantly to any device. Track everything.
Find out how modern medical device sales and marketing teams like yours are creating organized sales presentations at scale and fueling efficient growth by scheduling an introduction with Nuvue today.
