Webinar: Launching your medical device: Sales strategy development

Ali Chaitin (00:01):
Hi, everyone. Welcome to today’s webinar, Launching Your Medical Device Sales Strategy Development. My name is Ali Chaitin. I’m a marketing campaign manager here at Definitive Healthcare in the life sciences space. I am joined today by Mike Soucey. Mike is our sales team lead here at Definitive Healthcare for the medical devices segment. He works every day with medical device companies to help solve their complex challenges in sales and marketing using data analytics. With that introduction, I’ll pass it over to Mike.

Mike Soucey (00:32):
Thank you, Ali, for the introduction, and everybody on the call, welcome. It’s great to have you and really appreciate your time. What I’ll be doing today is going through a detailed step-by-step playbook on several key factors to consider when you’re developing your sales strategy for a new device. Now, I’m especially excited to talk about this today after prepping the content with my team and thinking about it compared to conversations I’ve had with a lot of you leaders out there that are launching new devices. It seems that based on those conversations I’ve had, there are some critical steps that can often be overlooked or brushed over when developing sales strategy, so I’ll do my best today to thoroughly cover all of the critical steps necessary from the initial foundation of identifying and segmenting your target market, all the way through each individual step until you get to the process of preparing for your first purchase.

As I alluded to the first step, which really kind of serves as a core foundation to developing a successful strategy is going to be the identification of your total addressable market. This will be answering the questions of where your devices will be sold into and who will ultimately be purchasing your device. I know a lot of you out there that I’ve talked to are working on transitioning from sort of that old-school physician-based targeting model to a more account-based approach. With that approach, it’s going to be really key to have a complete handle on all of the potential care settings that your device could be used in, as we’ve illustrated up at the top here. Of course, each individual device that comes to market can be used by a different set of providers and used in a different set of care settings, so understanding what those care settings are and not missing any is going to be critical to make sure that you can hit your total addressable market.

Now, especially for the smaller companies out there who may have more limited resources, it’s also going to be critical to determine which types of accounts you want to start with, knowing that you can’t tackle all of the accounts out there at once, so a direction I’d potentially suggest to determine your total addressable market and where to start would be using some sort of data, for example, here claims data, as you can see in the illustration at the bottom of your screen, so this type of information can provide potentially some great visibility into where the patients you care about are actually seeking care or where procedures that are relevant to your product are being done, which can help to really makes sure your honing in on what your total addressable market is and how you want to segment it out in terms of your initial sales strategy.

Now, when you’re going about segmenting your market, it’s going to be critical to determine what the qualification criteria you want to use is to determine a really truly qualified account. Now, I know I just mentioned claims. Claims can be a very critical factor in this qualification in that do they see the patients that we care about or do they do the procedures we care about, or even looking at for more experienced organizations, any current customer commitments that you have. Is the product that we have on market today similar to the product that we’re developing that we can launch to the same types of accounts?…