Developing an effective marketing strategy for your medical device launch

Ali Chaitin (00:00):
We’re on. Welcome to today’s webinar, developing an effective marketing strategy for your medical device launch. My name is Ali Chaitin, and I am a Marketing Campaign Manager for medical device at Definitive Healthcare. I’m joined by Ashley Volling, who is a Senior Product Marketing Manager here at Definitive Healthcare. Ashley has over a decade of experience in marketing for both medical device and pharmaceutical companies with a rich history of planning go to market strategies and marketing plan development at places like ICU Medical, Pfizer, and Hospira. I’ve worked with Ashley on many initiatives over the past year, and it’s amazing to be able to learn from her expertise, so I’m personally very excited for her presentation today.

Ali Chaitin (00:39):
Before I turn it over to Ashley, I do want to quickly mention that while we’ve only got 25 to 30 minutes, allotted for today’s session, we do want to try and leave time to address questions that you may have. Please submit them via the chat function at the bottom throughout Ashley’s presentation. And if we can’t get slim live today, we’ll respond to you offline and get you an answer. And with that, I’ll pass over to Ashley and we can get started.

Ashley Volling (01:04):
Great. Thanks for the intro Ali, appreciate it. Hi everyone, thanks for joining. When we talk about medical device launch, there are pre-revenue organizations that are getting ready to launch their first device, and there are experienced organizations that may have multiple on-market devices. This webinar applies to both because a good marketing strategy is a good marketing strategy and is going to vary depending on your device and your markets. In the next 25 minutes or so, we’re going to discuss the importance of cross-functional collaboration. Your gut reaction may be that this is an obvious one, but we’re going to focus on the who and the why with some success metrics, mapping your competitive landscape and what tools you should create for your organization using that information, best practices for identifying and segmenting your target markets and key personas, creating your messaging and positioning, and finally developing a customer centric omnichannel strategy.

Ashley Volling (02:07):
Marketing has touch points across the organization, a good marketing strategy isn’t made in a vacuum, so you’ll need to ensure that you develop strong working relationships with your counterparts in other departments, to ensure that you have open communication and collaboration. The role scene here are just a small handful of the departments that you should be working with. Outside of the role scene on the previous screen, marketing should always be closely aligned with sales. This ensures that the same accounts are identified and targeted by both teams. Once your device is marketable, marketing can engage prospects for sales to connect with to further qualify. Segment or account specific messaging should be used throughout the sales cycle, whether you are marketing to prospects, but also for sales to use later on down the funnel. According to the Aberdeen Group, aligning sales and marketing can lead to generating 32% higher revenue, retaining 36% more customers, and achieving 38% higher win rates.

Ashley Volling (03:09):
There are many ways and many activities that require cross-functional alignment. Some of the activities that overlap between marketing and sales include market segmentation, account target alignment, and identification of the buyer/audience. This ensures that the same accounts are being targeted by both sales and marketing post launch. Collaboration with sales ops or business analytics also plays an important role in the medical device launch process. Once a device is marketable, ensuring a line of communication or a system for communicating leads generated by marketing activities can help to ensure movement throughout the sales process and give the sales team line of sight into prospects that are engaged and ready to have a conversation. How do you do that? We’re going to start with understanding your competitive landscape, which is important so that you know what you and your sales teams are up against, but also to help with differentiation, messaging, positioning, and overall targeting strategy. Questions to consider, as you dive into evaluating the competition are, how saturated is market?…