How to improve your medtech sales efficiency
Medtech sales leaders know that having a sales team that’s both effective and efficient is essential for sustained success. But where effectiveness is about driving results—closing deals, meeting revenue targets, and engaging with decision-makers—efficiency ensures these outcomes are achieved without wasted time, resources, or effort.
An efficient medtech sales operation optimizes each step of the process, from lead generation to closing, enabling you to achieve strong performance without overspending or overextending your teams. This not only shortens sales cycles and reduces costs but also allows your sales reps to focus on high-impact activities, such as building relationships and tailoring solutions to customer needs.
In a market where sales cycles are long, products are complex, and competition is fierce, having lean, efficient sales strategies can be an incredibly valuable asset. This guide will explore actionable strategies and tips to help medtech companies improve sales efficiency so you can deliver better results in a smart, streamlined way.
Master sales basics
Sometimes the quickest wins come from getting back to basics. A well-defined and streamlined sales process that focuses on the fundamentals can unlock significant gains in efficiency without the need for drastic changes. Here are a few key areas you should focus on:
- Identify and define KPIs that define and quantify sales efficiency and success. These might include sales cycle length, close rate, customer acquisition cost, revenue per sales rep, and customer retention rate. Track and analyze these metrics often to see where efficiency can be improved.
- Create a well-crafted sales playbook that lays out the step-by-step approach to selling your medical device effectively. Include best practices at each stage of the cycle, essential product benefits, competitive insights, and responses to objections.
- Encourage your reps to work smarter, not just harder, with incentive programs that focus on reducing sales cycle time or increasing close rates.
- Maximize the productivity of your sales reps by minimizing their time spent on non-sales tasks like administrative work, scheduling meetings, and data entry by automating these tasks as much as possible.
- Ensure your sales team has a thorough understanding of the technical, clinical, and regulatory aspects of your products with regular training.
Whether you’ve brought one or 100 medical devices to market, there’s always room for improvement. Improving the foundation of what makes for a solid, fast-acting, and effective sales team can help you quickly improve your efficiency.
Use data and analytics to prioritize the best sales opportunities
In medtech sales, success hinges on knowing exactly who you’re selling to. Not all providers and facilities have the same challenges or needs, so pinpointing the specific organizations that can benefit the most from your medtech solution is key.
This is where healthcare commercial intelligence comes in to help you uncover your ideal customer profile (ICP). Think of it as a blueprint for your perfect customer. Start with demographics data and note down your customers’ industry, location, technology, organization size, revenue, growth rate, and other notable attributes.
Then, go a step further with medical and prescription claims data. Claims data can reveal which healthcare providers and facilities handle a high volume of procedures or treatments that align with your solutions.
For example, a medtech company specializing in orthopedic devices can use procedure claims data to identify surgeons or hospitals with high volumes of joint replacements, spinal surgeries, or other relevant procedures. Targeting these high-volume providers can help prioritize accounts that are more likely to generate significant revenue.
But claims data can offer your team so much more—it's basically a treasure trove. By isolating claims for specific treatments, devices, or diagnostics, you can identify provider specialties, patient demographics, and even comorbidities for incredibly granular market segmentation. This precision empowers your medtech sales team to tailor messaging to specific prospects, helping them have more efficient and effective conversations.
Improve pre-call planning with affiliations data
Pre-call planning is essential for any sales rep aiming to maximize the efficiency and success of their interactions. There’s nothing that haunts the dreams of a sales leader more than a rep going into a call or meeting unprepared. It wastes time and hurts your chances of winning the deal.
However, pre-call planning is more than just ensuring you showcase your device’s features and benefits. It’s also about aligning your sales approach to the specific needs and challenges of the healthcare facilities and providers you’re targeting.
What information you gather for your pre-call plan should align with where the account is within the sales process, your segmentation criteria, and what you know to be important about the specific account you’re targeting. Fortunately, you may have done the heavy lifting already if you’ve leveraged demographic, financial, technology install, and claims data to size and segment your market. For a deeper dive, read our blog on how to enhance your medtech pre-call planning.
One particular type of data that may often be overlooked is affiliations data. This information, which reveals the connections and relationships between providers, facilities, and networks, can also be valuable for medtech teams looking to improve pre-call planning.
Affiliations data can help you quickly identify the key influencers and decision-makers within healthcare systems, making it easier to direct your efforts to those who can authorize or influence purchases. Furthermore, affiliations data can even present opportunities for greater network penetration. For instance, if a physician is affiliated with multiple hospitals, gaining their endorsement or business could lead to adoption across multiple facilities.
Align sales and marketing efforts for a unified approach
A sales team in any industry can benefit from having closer alignment with their organization’s marketing department. When sales and marketing teams operate in silos, it can lead to miscommunication, missed opportunities, and inefficiencies.
Medtech sales and marketing teams that work closely together can ensure that messaging is consistent, accurate, relevant, high-quality, and addresses the unique needs of your target audience. Marketing can also share valuable insights from customer feedback or market trends, helping sales teams tailor their pitches.
Communication works both ways, of course, and the insights your sales team has can help you create better products. Regular feedback from the sales team on product development provides insights into what features customers are seeking or what challenges they face with current offerings. This helps the product team refine or innovate products that better meet customer needs, making them easier to sell.
Streamline the sales process with CRM tools
A clear sales strategy and streamlined sales process reduce administrative burdens and enhance reps’ ability to engage with prospects, shortening the sales cycle and increasing conversion rates. Having a robust customer relationship management (CRM) system with key integration capabilities can be a valuable tool here.
An effective CRM system allows sales teams to track interactions with prospects, manage follow-up tasks, and keep all relevant account information in one place. This data centralization enables sales reps to stay organized, reduce redundancies, and avoid missing important follow-ups.
Supercharge your medtech sales performance with Carevoyance
Getting your medical device into the hands of those who need it can be a complex, daunting journey. Fortunately, having the right data on hand can equip your sales team with the insights they need to close deals efficiently and effectively. If you’re looking to really elevate your medtech sales performance, Carevoyance from Definitive Healthcare has your back.
Carevoyance is a new sales enablement solution that solves frontline sales challenges head-on by harnessing our data within your workflow to deliver bespoke insights into your target patient cohorts and the providers and organizations that treat them.
Carevoyance makes it easy for medtech teams to segment markets, target prospects, and automatically generate reports, saving you and your sales and marketing colleagues precious time and resources that can be better directed toward engaging buyers and winning their business.
Interested in seeing Carevoyance in action? Book your demo call with us to get started.
And for a deeper dive into strategies for improving your sales efficiency and more, check out our comprehensive medical device sales ebook.