What's Your Mobile Strategy?

For the medical device manufacturer, distributor, and independent representative, it is an important question. As data storage and management moves to the cloud and sales reps abandon printed materials and laptops for tablets and smart phones, device companies around the world are rethinking how they manage their downstream sales and marketing processes.

For Medtronic, the answer is easy: build a homegrown app. For companies that lack the resources of a Medtronic, establishing and funding a mobile strategy is a bit more difficult to pull off. So what are the options?

1. Build, staff, and fund an internal business unit composed of world-class multi-platform UI & UX talent, that is equally talented in Rails, HTML5 and database management. They will understand your business and products, will be co-managed through your marcom, IT, ops and QA/RA departments, and will report to a member of the executive committee. Cost: $750k - $1.5m. Time to recruit and scope: 3 months. Time to design: 6 months. Time to develop: 6 months. Time for bug fixes, data migration, training... oh well, you get the picture.

2. Hire a custom developer for the project. Assuming you can find the right company to help you (see #1) and they are available for your project (not easy these days), iOS apps with basic functionality start at $50k to design, $200k to develop, and take a minimum of 6 months to launch. Apps with any enterprise functionality that interface with your current ERP or CRM will take several more months to develop, and of course add significantly more cost.

3. Get by with what you are currently doing, knowing full well that your competitors are not standing pat.

4. Hire us.

Downstream Navigator™ makes “downstream” sales, marketing, product management and post-market surveillance initiatives more efficient, more effective, easier to manage, and compliant. Our first offering is a best-in-class mobile/cloud solution for the medical device industry.

 

• Increase conversion rates and shorten sales cycles.

 

• Decrease cost of sales.

 

• Mine, manage, and leverage market intelligence.

 

• Stay ahead of trends in outcomes-based medicine and reimbursement.

 

• Mitigate compliance risk in all of your downstream marketing efforts.

 

• Create a bulwark against risks attendant to adverse event reporting, complaint handling, and post-market surveillance.

 



How it Works

 

• Data required for field sales (market, clinical, product, economic value) is hosted on the cloud and managed through an intuitive “back office” web-based dashboard.

 

• Sales and marketing personnel have immediate and comprehensive access to the data on their mobile devices.

 

• Specialized tools make it easy to build and share visually-appealing, multi-media sales presentations on the fly, using corporate-approved marketing collateral pieces.

 

• Integrated efficiency tools to manage sales leads, order status, and customer history that either replace or augment current CRM and ERP software.

 

 

Value to Medical Device Companies

 

• Sales personnel, whether direct, independent, or distributors, are working from a common set of approved sales materials. Messaging and branding remains intact over every channel.

 

• Materials can be updated, optimized and immediately made available for sales calls. The typical “lag” between the completion of the new marketing piece and its use in the field is eliminated.

 

• Document control for “labeling”, as required under ISO 13485 and FDA, is elegantly managed on the downstream side of the business, thus mitigating quality system risk from marketing and sales efforts.

 

• Sail through your quality audits and properly manage your digital IFU’s.

 

• International Distribution: approved and translated collateral material can be tightly managed through the system across the international channel.

 

• Lower anxieties and related risk that comes with customized presentations (deviations) by distributors and their sales agents.

 

• Training: deliver customized training materials to new employees through the cloud and mobile system. Reduce training costs, increase knowledge retention, and preserve corporate messaging with new employees and partners.

 

• Presentations: create custom multi-media presentations for specific customers: physicians, procurement and materials managers, etc. and deploy across channel with the touch of a button.

 

• Reduce the need to hire inside sales support personnel: clinical specialists, inside sales staff, dispatch, account managers.

 

• Sales managers have real-time access to field activity, and immediate feedback on sales techniques and tactics.

 

• Reporting: create sales reporting forms to reside in application. Reduce the reporting burden on sales staff and increase quality of field information.

 

• Utilize interactive presentation tools with physicians: shorten the time to make the sale.
  No need to bring bulky printed material, laptop or “canned” and/or obsolete sales material into customer call.

 

• Sales Management: Complete access to the latest field data - what presentation techniques are working, what are your conversion rates, and how do you optimize sales dollars.

 

• Conference Exhibition: managing conference materials has never been easier. 

 

 

Features

 

Custom Interface

 

Digital Catalog

 

This is where your products live. Forget about stacks of paper catalogs and e-mail messages with attached .pdf and .jpg data. The iPad is capable of loading tens of thousands of your products through our application, allowing you to showcase your entire inventory to potential customers. Products can be broken down in a number of ways — for example, by clinical specialty, device class, category, style, size/dimension, etc. Each product can be loaded with numerous details, including name, wholesale price, retail price, reimbursement, launch date, sizes, high definition photos, and an attached product brief. This solution gives you the ability to present your line of products like never before and ultimately place and complete orders right from the iPad.

 

 

Sales Tools and Tips

 

Knowing the brand and the product are two pieces of the successful sales puzzle. The third, of course, is knowing the customer. Keeping all of your sales brochures and target market information consistent and synched across the board to your sales team is key to closing accounts. Sales people can use this sales presentation app to study marketing strategies and frameworks to better understand not only the customers they are selling to, but also the customers that their customers are selling to. Ultimately, this gives the sales person the knowledge they need to explain the true value of the product they are selling.

 

 

Account History and Summary

 

Bringing on a new member to the team is never easy. Of all the pains and difficulties involved, the worst is probably training. Training a new sales person not only involves introducing them to your company, brand, product, customers, etc., but it also involves trying to transfer all of the knowledge your old employee had to the new employee. With the Account History & Summary module, you can synch years and years of data about an account's past activity to make it easier for your newest sales person to hit the ground running.

 

 

Sales Prep Tool

 

One thing many people do not realize or forget about when it comes to sales is the amount of preparation involved before a meeting. With all of the above-mentioned modules, there is the ability to mark items as "favorites" and arrange these favorites into categories. We believe that this is a much better solution than carrying around a binder full of pages and pages of documents. Once a user has identified various items and organized these items within a category, he or she can use them to prepare for a meeting with a specific account and even pull them up during the meeting to make things simpler and more efficient for both parties.

 

 

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Sample Material List for Collateral Catalog

 

Sales Tools

 

• Sample supporting letters for procurement and materials management staff.
• Clinical comparative analyses
• FAQ, common sales objections, and approved company responses
• Market study data to support sale: details on complication rates in competing products and procedures
• Economic value analyses for hospital procurement and materials management
• Product brochures and procedure videos
• Product demonstration graphics
• 3D Solid Model data for product demonstration purposes

 

Clinical Supporting Material

 

• SAB/MAB and reference account endorsement interviews
• Clinical Evaluation Report from CE Tech File (if relevant)
• Primary clinical abstracts and references
• Complete clinical papers (un-highlighted)
• Testing results: V&V, cadaveric, human cases, clinical trials

 

Device Operation

 

• IFU
• Procedure steps in condensed form
• List of contraindications, warnings and cautions
• Procedure slides (.pdf and .pp)
• Procedure video w/voiceover dub
• Multi-language video presentations

 

Company and Device Details

 

• List of key contact info: e-mail, phone, address for tech support, sales support, feedback, complaints
• List of reference accounts, SAB & MAB contributors
• Reimbursement information: codes, rates, contact info for reimbursement
• Order form
• Instrument and shipping specifications: weights and dimensions
• RMA procedure and contacts
• Post-market surveillance plan and requirements
• Feedback form
• Complaint handling procedure
• Authorized rep role and contact info (EU)
• Product sample log

 

Sales Training Materials

 

• Training questionnaires
• Cloud-based sales training module (including PP and .pdf slides)
• Corporate sales training manual
• Corporate sales “book”

 

Physician Materials

 

• Physician training module
• Physician procedure questionnaire
• Physician certification forms and materials (as appropriate)