The medical device industry is facing a dramatic, game-changing transformation. Purchase decision-making is shifting from clinicians to procurement and buying groups in order for institutions to better monitor and control costs. To complicate matters, the contentious 2.3 percent medical device tax (passed in 2013) continues to be burdensome and distracting.
As a result, medical device manufacturers are confronted with a new selling environment. They are facing new audiences with different sets of needs and expectations and a longer purchase cycle with various touchpoints. To win in this arena, they have to understand and embrace a new audience of procurement and buying groups who start their purchase journey in a different way than other audiences. They have to learn how to sell in innovative, value-based ways. Medical device sales forces now have to demonstrate that their devices, whether new or improved, will improve patient outcomes and support their claims with data.
This shift isn’t easy, but it’s imperative. And it works. According to a recent study by the Aberdeen Group titled Value-Based Selling: Achieving Sales Success in the Medical Device, Equipment and Diagnostics Industry: “When companies excel at articulating the overall value, notably the economic value, of a medical product or service, they have significantly higher customer retention, market share, revenues and profits.”
Marketing has a crystal-clear imperative in this arena: to understand and master this new purchase path and decision-making dynamic. We need to uncover and make actionable insights that enable us to understand new audiences and new buying contexts. And with that will come the creation of messages, value propositions and other content, all delivered through relevant channels.
The trend toward value-based assessment and accountability will spill over to medical device manufacturers’ philosophy toward their marketing efforts. As we see in other healthcare sectors, emphasis will be on accountability, attribution and delivering ROI. Measurement and optimization will become more important than ever.
This is an excerpt from “Healthcare: When All The Parts Are Moving Parts.” To learn more, please visit gyrohuman.com.
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Wendy Lurrie – Managing Director, gyro:human
Wendy Lurrie is the managing director of gyro’s healthcare practice gyro:human based in New York. gyro:human is gyro’s newly formed U.S. division dedicated to all aspects of the healthcare industry. Lurrie is a healthcare industry ace who has worked with United Healthcare, Aetna, Eli Lilly and Company, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol-Myers Squibb, to name a few.
She held executive positions at major agencies Draft, DraftFCB and Grey, where her responsibilities included the management and growth of the healthcare portfolios. Lurrie has worked on the client side as a VP of marketing at Travelers as well as served a consultant specializing in marketing strategy.