BackKey Takeaways
- Your customers have changed, and so should your sales model
- Go digital and omnichannel to engage customers and support your sales team
Why are sales flat or flagging at medtech companies? Are sales reps underperforming? Hardly. Sales are uninspiring because sales reps are overperforming. They’re a single channel doing an omni-channel job.
When most sales were made in person and customers relied on their trusted reps for all information all the time, your field team was the channel, the only channel through which medtech products moved from production to practice.
But your customers have changed – and the ways you market and sell should as well. Customers are engaging across many channels on their buying journey and much of this engagement is happening well before they ever meet with a rep.
In a digital world, where information is always at your customer’s fingertips, relying on a single, in-person, down-funnel channel is decidedly yesterday.
Diagnosing the problem
As they go digital and virtual, your customers travel less. In-person attendance at trade shows plummeted over the last ten years. So, most shows offer reduced rates for virtual attendees who won’t show up in your booth and won’t meet your sales team.
Your sales team simply doesn’t have the same level of access to customers they once had. Yet, your customers still need the same information, the same education, and the same support for decision-making that they’ve always needed.
They just don’t want to get it from your sales reps.
Building an omnichannel commercial engine
To both reduce reliance on your sales team and better support them, you’ll need to generate and nurture leads in the ways and places your customers are already seeking information. You’ll need to build an omnichannel commercial engine that engages customers where they are.
Do more than sell: personalize
When your commercial program engages prospective customers where they are across every stage of the customer journey, regardless of channel or device, from the top to the bottom of the funnel, you’re doing more than selling.
You’re also creating a constant presence for your messaging and influence in your customers’ experience. That presence is a partnership that delivers valuable information when and where your customers need it, building an enduring and personalized relationship between your company and your customers.
What does an omnichannel product launch look like?
Your omnichannel strategy means going digital from the top to the bottom of the funnel, starting pre-launch all the way to sales support and go-live.
Here’s how it works in four steps:
- Pre-launch campaign to sell the problem and freeze the market, before customers move to the competition.
- KOL campaign to promote the problem and the urgent need for a solution.
- Multichannel promotional launch, including: Email Campaign, awareness-building digital ad campaign, and tradeshow encounters that connect to digital campaign.
- Sales force launch supported by a sales map that pinpoints steps to execute the sales process, from lead nurturing to ongoing multi-channel engagement.
Your sales reps will thank you
Help your reps by expanding their reach and improving the quality of their engagements. When your sales reps are freed from the requirement of in-person visits, their still primary relationship with customers can become a seamless experience across digital, remote, and in-person encounters.
Key to their success in an omnichannel world:
- Consistency and reiteration of messaging across encounters
- Reaching targets at optimal moments in their journey
- Analytics to help sales reps optimize their outreach to targets
Albert Einstein famously defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Case in point: Sticking to a uni-channel approach to growth, despite the evidence that times—and your customers—have changed.
