Being involved in the highly competitive medical device industry means you understand the need for a strong sales enablement strategy to draw in new leads and convert them into believing customers. Beyond that, you need a sales enablement strategy that upholds compliance in a highly regulated field.
Having a robust sales enablement strategy can ensure you address compliance within your industry, as well as help target current customers with relevant buyer education to keep your brand top of mind. This relatively new avenue in marketing also aligns content across the channels you occupy to display your message with clarity and synchronicity.
Sales Enablement’s Role in Selling to Regulated Industries
Why Sales Enablement Is Vital for Medical Device Companies
Understandably, the medical device sector is highly regulated. From obtaining FDA approval to having substantiated evidence to back your medical claims, there’s no simple way to bring a new medical device to market.
Equipping your sales team with a sales enablement strategy means they will be able to step out assured of their regulated industry sales strategies. Sales enablement prepares your sales team for a process prospects deserve. From content that answers frequently asked questions to automation that ensures everyone is followed up with in a timely manner, Kuno can help.
Any sales enablement strategy worth implementing isn’t just directed at your sales team, it’s a process of getting your sales and marketing teams to work together, ensuring that every requirement is met within such a scrutinized industry.
Unique Challenges in the Medical Device Industry
In an industry where obtaining a new medical device directly impacts patients, your target customers are understandably cautious. Not only that, but more and more, patients are taking care into their own hands. Marketing to both patient and provider requires an understanding of a product that goes beyond surface level and to the very heart of why the device was created in the first place.
Having a solid solution for marketing and sales to work together to bring in new leads while also retaining existing customers is crucial for the success of any medical devices sales strategy. Having support tailored to your specific medical device and team can help ensure not only content-wide compliance in the medical device industry, but a solid strategy for moving forward.
Leveraging Compliance Training To Empower Sales Teams
Understanding the Importance of Compliance
HIPAA, the FDA, ISO standards and other laws and governing bodies provide strict guidelines for how healthcare organizations communicate. This is beneficial when it comes to protecting patients, but not understanding how compliance in sales enablement affects your end results can lead to a message that lacks cohesion across channels. Not only that, but failing to grasp the depth and breadth of compliance could tarnish your company’s standing and lead to mistrust in your potential customers.
Developing Effective Compliance Training Programs
So how does one avoid the common pitfalls associated with limited knowledge in a highly regulated field? Having a sales team that is up-to-date in compliance training works wonders. We’ve gone through these steps before; here are a few key components:
- Work with healthcare professionals who are familiar with the product and can explain its uses in-depth
- Demo the product in real-time so your sales team can see it in action
- Have regular sit downs to go over the latest clinical evidence and product brochures
- Make time for your sales team to engage with presentations and videos about your medical device
- Break down complex information into bite-size pieces, making it easier for your sales team to process and retain that information
- Once your team has a sufficient grasp on the information, let them take turns hosting the compliance training. This will solidify what they know and point out any barriers they may still have in their knowledge
Using AI To Revolutionize Product Education for Sales Teams
AI-Driven Solutions for Product Education
While AI is a relatively new tool when it comes to sales training, it’s already proving itself to be more than useful. According to Forbes, conversational AI “has the ability to offer personalized coaching and real-time feedback, analyze customer interactions, tailor pitches and even predict the best sales strategies.”
In a world where traditional training methods – think seminars and webinars – often fall short in conveying the intricate product details associated with medical devices, AI gives managers the chance to create more interactive and personalized learning modules for their sales teams.
One example of this is AI-powered role play. This gives your sales team the opportunity to interact in real-time with a customer look-alike, running into real-world questions and problems to solve without the pressure of having a real lead on the other end of the conversation. But in the same line of thought, AI is often adaptive in real-time, meaning it can challenge your sales team to adjust their pitch mid-presentation, as they might need to in a real-life scenario.
Not only can AI help your sales team prepare to present your product, but you can use it as part of your overall MedTech sales enablement solution when setting up your website. AI is a great tool to help answer FAQs when potential leads are surveying your content.
Aligning Sales Content With Buyer Needs and Stages
Creating Content That Resonates With Buyers
As beneficial as it is to have sales training for your medical device reps, creating content that’s tailored to your audience is vital in drawing in leads and fostering a trusted relationship. This starts by understanding your target audience.
Breaking down your audience into different buyer personas can help you and your team understand the different needs and pain points your audience might be experiencing and how your specific medical device might be able to ease those pain points.
For example, the content you need to appeal to a hospital administrator is going to look different than the type of content a surgeon is looking for, which will be different than what you would present to patients, and so on.
Mapping Sales Content to the Buyer’s Journey
With each of these personas you’ve created comes an individual buyer’s journey. This journey includes all the touchpoints your prospective customer has with your company from when they’re first introduced to your brand and MedTech devices to when they close a deal and become a customer and beyond. Here are the five stages in the buyer’s journey and some of the content that goes with it:
- Awareness Stage
Simpler content aimed at initial pain points, including blog posts, social media content and infographics - Consideration Stage
Show yourself as a viable option to their problem with eBooks, checklists, whitepapers and buying guides - Decision Stage
This stage is critical, and it’s easy to lose potential customers who have come this far. Having enough relevant, up-to-date information on your product to answer any last questions your leads have is crucial. You can do this effectively through case studies - Support Stage
There are companies out there who don’t consider the support or retention stage to be part of the buyer’s journey. But we know that in order to create fully satisfied customers who buy into not only the product they’ve purchased, but the company that made it, they need a buyer’s journey that goes beyond when they click purchase. Content for this stage includes in-depth blog posts and relevant social media content as well as answers to FAQs - Retention Stage
You’ve made it to the final stage in the buyer’s journey! People in this stage are enjoying the full benefits of your medical device. They want to see content that is relevant to where they are in their journey with you. This might include best practice pieces, case studies, related products and advanced how-tos.
While putting your content together, it’s important to remember to keep up-to-date with regulatory guidelines during every stage of the buyer’s journey. This is a vital piece of building trust with your audience by showing them that you are aware of the latest rules and regulations.
Empowering Sales Teams With the Right Tools
Now that you have your content lined up according to your specific buyer personas, it’s time to equip your team with the right tools to handle incoming leads. A CRM like HubSpot is a great tool for separating your leads into more specific segments. You can group them by categories like organization size, location, job role and more. And with HubSpot’s capability to store sensitive data, your team can further their healthcare marketing efforts with the assurance they’re remaining compliant within a highly regulated industry.
How Kuno Creative Helps Medical Device Companies Enable Their Sales Teams
Customized Solutions for Regulated Industries
To fully engage with people in regulated industries, you need a comprehensive marketing strategy that will engage your target audience, help you maintain industry compliance and build trust within the healthcare community.
Kuno Creative has a proven track record of helping create and implement regulated industry sales strategies. From persona research and segmentation to content for all stages of the buyer’s journey, our sales enablement strategies for medical device companies have proven themselves over and over.
AI, RevOps and Sales Enablement
While we work closely with clients to identify if and where AI can be helpful, Kuno has the capability to integrate and leverage AI-powered tools for sales coaching, lead scoring and predictive analytics while doing our best to uphold adherence to industry and governmental regulations. We’ve found AI-powered tools in HubSpot are most helpful, including role-based access controls, automated compliance checkpoints and audit logs to maintain data security and governance.
Success Stories in MedTech Strategy
RapidAI was focused on giving users and customers the best possible experience, but struggled with gaining brand recognition and traction in the sector. They enlisted our help to showcase how artificial intelligence could assist in clinical decision making and reduce time to treatment. Six months after the launch of their new website, new organic contacts increased by 1,373% and RapidAI achieved the number one spot in Google for a critical keyword: stroke software.
Another medical manufacturer was overly reliant on traditional sales tactics: in-person events, booths in exhibition halls and distributor partnerships. With a shifting sales landscape, they recognized the need to change with the times and partnered with Kuno to make it happen.
We reviewed their processes and implemented a HubSpot-based marketing and sales strategy that placed a premium on data and qualification, speeding up the sales process and growing more efficient through no longer chasing low-quality contacts. The results? 600% increase in marketing qualified leads, over 200% increase in sales qualified leads and a stunning 1,100% increase in customers.
For MedTech or Any Regulated Sector, Kuno Can Help
With experienced sales and marketing strategists serving businesses across industries for decades, Kuno Creative is capable to both meet your needs and exceed your expectations. Our accredited RevOps team delivers leading HubSpot solutions that optimize processes and pipeless, increasing sales velocity and revenue, while our strategists, design professionals and content team work to develop brand and messaging that gets you and your products noticed and brings prospects back from consideration to decision and throughout the customer lifecycle.
Whether your sales process is on life support or just in need of some rehab, contact us for a consultation and let’s see how we can get your team back to full health.
