Why You Need to Embrace the New Go-To-Market Strategy
Scott Alexander is the CEO of iVelocity Marketing, and has been on the leading edge of identifying market shifts and building strategies and programs to embrace a new and improved go-to-market strategy. In this episode he shares what providers don’t understand about medical device companies, what we don’t understand about providers, the reasons why the old go-to-market strategy no longer works in medical device, the benefits of using a digital strategy, and why sales will love – and prosper – from embracing this change.
Links from this episode:
Mastering Medical Device:
Episode Transcript
This transcript was generated using an automated transcription service and is minimally edited. Please forgive the mistakes contained within it.
Patrick Kothe 00:31
Welcome! The go-to-market playbook for medical device has been pretty much the same for decades. Marketing provided awareness campaigns, educational programs, and sales aids. And sales did prospecting, one on one selling and support. Now even after the rest of the world embrace digital selling, we've hung on to some pretty old habits. Well, that's changing and fast. Scott Alexander, CEO of iVelocity Marketing is our guest today. And he's been on the leading edge of identifying market shifts, and building strategies and programs to embrace a new and improved go to market strategy. Scott entered medical device with Medtronic and Covidien then moved to the provider side, while he was at at Mercy. In our conversation, we discuss what providers don't understand about medical device companies. What we don't understand about providers, the reasons why the old go to market strategy no longer works in medical device, the benefits of using a digital strategy, and why sales will love and prosper from embracing this change. Here's our conversation. Scott, we're going to focus a lot of this discussion on go to market strategy. But you've had some really interesting experiences that I think have informed your view of of go to market strategy. So your background starts in medical device. And then you went to the other side of the table, so to speak. So if you could just tell us a little bit about how you got into the industry,
Scott Alexander 02:27
Like many people I grew up in medical family, my dad was a doctor and my mom was a nurse and just always knew I was going to be in healthcare. I got into it when I was in business school, I ended up working for a venture capital fund that was in medical devices. So they did an incubator of new technologies, and did venture capital investing. And then long story I ended up at Medtronic. Initially, my first role was in corporate innovation with trying to figure out where the technologies that we had in the vascular business could go to create new business lines. And so I did that, and then it was transferred down to diabetes to launch an insulin pump, which was a fantastic experience. And then my boss from up north in Santa Rosa, it with Medtronic vascular, moved to Colorado to Covidien and wanted to set up a similar group to what we were doing. And so we left Los Angeles to go to Colorado. And we started doing similar work. We had a technology, this is ligature, right, if you're familiar with that, coming out of Valley lab. So the idea was Where do you go? What's next, like what's the next in the future of surgery. And, again, fast forwarding very quickly through about three years of work. My team was working on a number of different projects, surgical robotics, we had some things around non invasive cancer treatments. And we were dabbling with trying to understand the commercial model, trying to understand how could you use technology to win more deals is really what it came down to was just early, early phases. And then we had a reorg. And my team, like folks that were working on robotics and that sort of thing ended up reporting into the sales organization. Very quickly went from okay, you're doing all these things to guess what you're doing. You're focusing on a commercial model help us figure out how to sell more stuff. I worked with some great folks there. Chris Barry's now running NuVasive Chris Wagner was later my boss who is truly one of the visionaries when it comes to commercial operations and how to sort of set up a sales organization well, but they gave us a lot of license, my team a lot of license to go and figure out the problems that we need to anticipate to be able to beat Ethicon right, because that's, that's the world that we're living in. It was like us surgical Valley lab versus Ethicon surgical division. One of the quotes that stuck with me is we've got 1000 sales reps going into knife fights every day. And I want to know that we're going to win before we show up in the parking lot And that was a fun challenge. Early in my career before I got into med tech, I was in sales. And so I got to bring that back and get to bring sort of the engineering technical side. And so we spent three and a half, four years going around visiting health systems understanding, what's the changing face of the go to market strategy for medical devices. There's some pretty big trends that were out there. So this was right when revtrax. And status blue and vendor mate were originally coming out. So rep, credentialing and access was something we were seeing trends around employment of Physicians and Surgeons by hospitals. We were seeing a professionalization of supply chain. So MBAs with finance degrees coming into supply chain. Again, GPO is already a thing, but again, can continue to see that grow. So there are a lot of trends that we are trying to understand. What years are we talking about 2010 to about 2014? Those are the things that we're looking at. And we were trying to figure out, how do you create an unfair advantage for your sales rep. So they win before you walk in? And again, we won't get into all the things that we did. But but that was the question. And we had some good success. Like, again, we can kind of talk through the model. But through that process, we touched many, many, many health systems. And one of the health systems that I personally really got to know and light was the good folks at Mercy in St. Louis, here in St. Louis. I ended up going and teaching, spending a day with their supply chain mercy ROI, as many folks will know, talking about how do you do innovation? And what does it look like inside a corporation. And at the end of that, Jean Kurtzer, who was running ROI at the time said, Hey, we want to do this. And we want you to come do this. For us. It was a really interesting change. I'd never thought about going from the device side, to the provider side, but just a fascinating opportunity. So I did, I switched over. And by the way, I went to my wife, Jodi. And I said, Hey, here's sweetheart. This is what I think we need to do. We're in Boulder, Colorado, where you want to you love and that sort of thing. I think we need to go to St. Louis. And I'm six feet tall. My wife is 411. She looked up at me with the intensity of the sun. And she said, I will move to St. Louis. But in exchange, I want a baby at a boat.
Patrick Kothe 07:34
Which one was more expensive?
Scott Alexander 07:36
Yeah, I know exactly what the baby. So here's a true story. We got the baby and the boat in the same week. So my third child, my third daughter, or my second daughter, my third child, Karina was born. And my parents brought a boat up from lake house that they had just sold in South Carolina. So we got both of them in a week. And I'm, I was true to my word, which is a good thing. I'll speed up a little bit on the background. Because what we did was we took a lot of the same things we were doing at at Medtronic Covidien and we were applying them to Mercy ROI. So I ran the GPO there. So I got a really unique perspective, from that I was responsible for innovation for the supply chain, we grew that that mercy, the ROI business pretty substantially while I was there, and then did the same thing at the health system level, where we were standing up virtual medicine. So if anybody knows mercy, virtual, I was fortunate to be a part of that. We were looking at other business units to stand up to commercialize. And I just I had this moment where I was talking to a startup that had a better mousetrap, right, better technology for treating patients. And I just realized, like, I could continue to do this stuff with mercy for the rest of my career and probably be happy. But I love devices. I love the innovation that comes in from startups. So I left and we actually bought a marketing company that does direct to patient marketing. And we started this thing out that's really just been like a rocket called Jairus marketing. And what it does is it focuses the go to market strategy for innovators in healthcare. So a lot of times it startups I was just mentioning, we just signed a publicly traded company earlier today, to do things for them, but we help companies figure out how to go to market in this new world. You know, a lot of the things that were predicting back in 2010 are coming to fruition 2012 We're coming to close to reality. We're just in a place where we had to have a really short period of time right from 2020, march 16 of 2020 to now, right the world has changed in a big way. So it has the best practices for going to market.
Patrick Kothe 09:51
You move from industry into the other side of the table. How difficult was that move? Mentally? Is did that did that take could change in your in your attitude to make that move?
Scott Alexander 10:03
It did. Here's the biggest difference. Well, there's a lot of differences between the two. In fact, I would say they're they're totally different industries. I mean, we think about its health care, but it's really not. And that that was the biggest thing that that struck me was at Medtronic and Covidien it was very much people knew what the bottom line was that sort of thing. You go over to the provider. And there's this conversation about mission and margin, right. So it's much more mission oriented. And so sometimes decisions will be made that were not necessarily in the best interest of the financial bottom line. They weren't for the patients or for some other reason. But it was hard for me to say, to understand that there's more to the decisions being made on the provider side than we ever thought about, as it was, you know, as as I was sitting in in Medtronic,
Patrick Kothe 10:56
other people have told me that when they moved from the industry side into the provider side, that some people don't take them seriously that some people look, look at them as a little bit different. And not a true provider. Did you experience that at all?
Scott Alexander 11:13
I really didn't. In fact, I was looked at like I had the secret playbook for, like how industry thought. And so I get phone calls from people that were like, Hey, here's what's going on, what are they thinking? And I never had I never experienced that.
Patrick Kothe 11:31
Great. So the people who came to you that had blind spots in the industry, what were those blind spots? What did they want to know? What what what did you think that there was common knowledge within industry that providers I didn't know,
Scott Alexander 11:46
the mentality? Again, it's very, very different mentality. So if you take your typical, like, national accounts person, or someone calling on an IDN, they're very focused on what's winning look like? Right? It's about driving revenue, it's about procedure, volume, that sort of thing. And it's very, dollars and cents, very black and white. It's not that on the provider side. And so it's much more about Yeah, numbers, but we got to think about what's the patient who, what's going on here, what's our brand and that sort of thing. And it's so it's like you're speaking different languages, in terms of what's most important, the thing that I took away, like, if I could give a piece of advice, advice to the folks listening is to like, slow down, and just try and put yourself in the shoes of the provider. And that, to me is the biggest myths, providers tend to be much more about relationships. If you think about, right mercy, we had, at least at the time that I was there with 44 hospitals across four states. But we never we didn't talk about pharmacy at Rolla, which is one of our one of our hospitals, we would talk about the specific gentleman who ran pharmacy in Rolla, or we would do it in these various places. So, despite the size of the organization, it's fundamentally personal relationships that are driving it. And where I think a lot of folks go wrong, is they have those of the industry right on the med tech side, is they have those relationships with the doctors, but they haven't figured out that the finance people are the same way. The operations people are the same way. The supply chain people are the same way. So where I see a lot of companies coming in as they try and get the doctor, again, this is this is what we did, right, this was the playbook back in 2012, was get the doctor all riled up about product X and just shake him up and send them into the room to go like, beat everybody else down. And, and that's the wrong approach. Because what happens is you build up ill will. And I can tell you the number of conversations that I've had with colleagues of mine, at Mercy and at the other health systems are a part of our GPO, they look for ways to get back as you would too, right? So if you have somebody who's perpetually undermining you, and making you look stupid in front of your peers, what are you going to do? You're going to find ways to undermine them. And, and that's the thing that I think people need to understand is the development of things like value analysis committees, the professionalization of supply chain, right, the incorporation of other decision makers in the adoption of new technologies. It's not to make you and your life as a sales professional more difficult. It's to ensure the viability of the health system into the future average operating margins in med tech gross margins 70% average operating margins in the 20% 20 25%. What is it for a provider? It's 2.2%. When they're thinking about dollars and cents, they don't have 30% to play with. They've got two two and a half percent to play with. And they have to think about how do they become viable? So with that understanding that that's a net, that's a necessary piece of what it is to get a technology adopted, because otherwise the health system goes out of business. That should change your mentality. It should be much more about understanding how do I actually show value to you supply chain leader, operations leader, finance leader in a way that allows for adoption of the technology. And oh, by the way, there's not a lot of people doing this. And so now you're going in and becoming partners with folks. And your competitors are trying the old playbook, you see growth, and they don't. So that's, that's the thing that I think people need to think about is how we can go about creating partnerships instead of the sort of contentious relationships that that exists today.
Patrick Kothe 15:43
Well, Scott, the word provider is really an interesting word, you can say provider is the patient. One on one provider, the surgeon, the physician, the a PP Advanced Practice provider, that could be the provider, or the provider could be the hospital or their provider could be the IDN. I mean, there's there's a lot of different definitions you could use for provider. And it sounds like the learning that you went through and that you're telling people is provider you think about provider in the global sense not in the local sense, not in not in that first line person, this whole entity is a provider of health care, and leaving part of it out and go are going behind the back of part of it is not a good practice.
Scott Alexander 16:33
It's a great way to to make enemies, I will tell you it, it brought me great pleasure, when I was running the GPO and heading up sourcing for mercy. I won't say the name of the company, but there was a company that was notorious for pitting us in supply chain against the doctors. So they would go and they go get the doctor all excited about a new product. He comes storming in, and then you know, the the supply chain would say, Hey, you can't have that, because it's three times more expensive or whatever. And I will tell you personally, it brought me great, great pleasure to do two things. Number one, we froze them out of a out of our facilities for a period of time, right, we're doing a conversion, and it was across the board, you know, conversion to another to a competitor. So we froze them out because we didn't want to blow up the conversion. Well guess what? Their revenue, or they have multiple lines of business, their revenue tanked. And I watched it, because I had been given a hard time by one of these people. The other thing that we did was that kind of situation, again, I'm not a vindictive guy, but I'm also not an idiot. And so I know when I know what's going on. It was a great conversation whenever Dr. Smith could come in and say, Hey, here's a new widget, I want it. I loved being able to say, Hey, did the rep talk to you about the financial impact of this? Because I guarantee you they didn't. And here's the reality, that product is 30% more than what you're already using today. Is it worth you? Increasing the cost of your case by 30%? Which by the way, is measured in exchange for this new product? And 100% of the time? The answer was no. It's not worth it. And I can tell you those conversations are happening across the country every day. And so that's that's the reason why I think it's so important to make sure that you're building friends there and understand their motivations. It's not that supply chain leader fundamentally dislikes dislikes innovation, it's that he's looking at that 2.2% Bottom line and saying, I have to hold the line to make sure that that doesn't go to zero because as SR Roku is one of the great leaders that mercy would say no margin admission. The it's true, right? If we can't make money as a provider, we can't be in business. So yeah, I definitely thought of myself as a provider. You don't want me putting hands on on people. I do have my first aid batch from from Boy Scouts, but that's about the end of my healthcare delivery capabilities. But But I did care about what we were doing to supply our physicians and others, other clinicians to deliver for the patients. So yeah, I consider myself a provider when I was there.
Patrick Kothe 19:19
What's interesting about your your example there when you said you know, has anybody talked to physicians about cost implications, every customer has got their own value proposition. So the physician, the cost is not, it's not going to cause them to get excited about it. The features of maybe better outcomes, better, a faster surgery, more convenience, more control, whatever those benefits are, that's what the sales rep is going to lead with, because that's the most important thing to them. But that's not what you're going to lead with when you're talking to somebody and supply chain a supply chain we that be the part ownership, the, you know, the the unknown, uninterrupted supply, the terms, the price, the cost, and kind of all of those things. And it may be different in when you talk to the nursing staff. So each one of those if you've got a different set. So you need to have your your value props set for each one of those those groups. But I also want to ask you about timing, because where do you go in, because you obviously don't want to upset anyone or not obviously, but you don't want to upset, upset somebody on that on that team. But you've got to get a champion to, you have to have somebody open up the door and start the conversation. So historically, what companies have not done as they've not gone into supply chain and say, Hey, let me tell you about this great new product and introduce me into your into your physician network, because supply chain can shut them down. And then if you go around them, well, now you're really dead. So what most people have done is they've gone to the physician and then followed up with supply chain. Talk to me a little bit a bit about the timing of those conversations and what what's optimal.
Scott Alexander 21:21
I think that's the right approach. So if you think about what it takes to get a technology adopted by an IDN. And again, I know we can we can be talking about ambulatory surgical centers in the doctor's offices. But what did you see IDN as an example, because it's the most complex piece, that to the point that you made, there are three points of consideration. It's clinical, its financial, and its operational. So CFO, we used to say, who's got the money inside the health system, it's the CFO. So clinical, financial, operational, different people care about those different things. If I, if I was to talk about where we saw very strong sales conversations, it's around the clinical piece. And it just makes sense. It's we do stuff that has clinical outcomes, where where I tend to see weakness is on the financial, the operational considerations. So what are you going to talk to supply chain about? What do you talk about the nursing staff about? And that's becoming even more important, as we think about where we stand today, where there's shortages and staffing and things like that. So just on the operational considerations of how do we make sure that we have a successful conversion. So number one, we need to have those, those pieces. The other thing that I would say is, the timing is appropriate that you described. So if we think about decision making inside a health system, you have to have a champion, right, there has to be an individual who says, this widget that I that I have in my hand is better, we need to adopt it. And typically speaking, that's going to be a clinical person. And that's just that's right. I mean, they're the ones interfacing with the patients. So that's true. The piece that we need to be mindful of is we need to have our ducks in a row to have the conversations on the financial and operational aspects when the time comes, right, because most health systems today will have a value analysis committee, there'll be certain things that they want to see certain expectations that they have. And what I can tell you is the big companies, right, that that we all know, their names are massive, massive businesses, they had it dialed in, they had value analysis, presentations, they had thought through the financial implications, they understood operationally what it looked like to convert and to maintain. And so they came in with a presentation that was crisp, clear, informative, concise, and it made sense. And that's where I find that a lot of smaller companies just don't have those, they don't have that in the toolkit. So then you get an opportunity at St somewhere. And now you're having a struggle to put together what that presentation is, as opposed to doing that offline, and then making sure it's really nice, and then bringing that in every time.
Patrick Kothe 24:06
So let's let's kind of focus on that on that go to market piece. Go to Market is critical for any company, whether you're a startup and you're going to market for first time or a product and you've got to go to market go to market strategy for it. So can you give us a little bit of understanding of what go to market strategy is what are the components within it?
Scott Alexander 24:30
In its simplest form? It's how are your sales team, your downstream marketing team and your sales operations teams working together to drive revenue for the company? At the end of the day, it's it's that historically, it's not the it's not been great like if you go back and you look at me, there are certain examples of things like if you go back and look at most companies, I joke about like the scenario where marketing is developing all these leads and then sales number follows up with them, right. And we've all kind of experienced that either on one side or the other. And the reality is, that's because we don't have alignment between those organizations. We have a silo and a wall between the two. And there's some some reasons why these things happen. But But when we think about redefining the go to market strategy, it's thinking about how do you make sure that the efforts that you're aligning towards the revenue targets that you have and the growth goals that you have, are set up for success versus setup for conflict? And so, you know, in that the kinds of things you want to think about are how are you creating opportunities? Like what does opportunity creation look like? Lead Generation, right, that sort of thing? How you nurturing opportunities, how were you sort of bringing them through maturation, as you're thinking about, you're now talking to multiple people, and you're you're bringing in constituents, you may hit pause, or a health system may hit pause on your product. So what do you do then, like that sort of piece? And then you want to think about opportunity capture? How do you convert that prospect st somewhere, from talking about using your product to actually using your product and adopting it and growing share of wallet and that sort of thing? So those are really sort of three big things that we think about little thing called COVID came through. And if you guys, you've heard of that, right, so right, march 16 2020, was was the big day when it shut down most of United States. And the reality is, it basically sped up a lot of things that were going on in the first place, loss of rep access, right professionalization or employment of physicians and that sort of thing that we talked about. And so what what it means to redefine your go to market strategy is you need to figure out as a company, what do you do? How do you how do you acknowledge the reality that we're in? And then how do you set yourself up for success? And some of the things are really pretty straightforward. You know, I see a lot more companies today, with SDR groups and inside sales than I ever did back in 2019, and 2020, and sort of early COVID times, SDR, SDR sales development reps. So think inside sales, typically, these your younger folks younger, their career, that sort of thing. We're seeing a, an acknowledgment of the value of things like digital marketing. We've historically, as an industry, looked at that and said, like, doctors don't buy stuff online. Anybody who's follow the trends of the industry can see very clear that that's not true. In fact, one of the things that we had back at Medtronic and I feel kind of dumb, saying this, but I was asked early on in this commercialization, engineering type process. What is what are some big learnings that you've had, and I was in the boardroom, in Boulder, and I said, doctors are people too. It sounds stupid to say, but it's true. And we assume that people graduate from medical school, and all of a sudden, like they lose, or they get doctor in the first name, they lose their first name, they become robots. Like that's not true. And so acknowledging that and acknowledging that they have a life outside of surgery, and they're also always interested in things is a tremendous advantage. They want to learn about what you have, they just don't want to do it when they're scrubbing in for a case, because they're thinking about that 53 year old woman who's got got to have a hysterectomy because of uterine cancer, that's the wrong time to be talking to somebody. But there are other avenues to do it. So things like digital, and just in general, thinking through the more complex buying process, like those are the things that that a new go to market strategy looks like it looks at who do we need to talk to? In what order? What assets? Do we need to do that? And then how do we execute in a scalable, predictable fashion to drive revenue.
Patrick Kothe 28:48
So you kind of described, you know, the way it has been done, and it's been in many instances, sales or marketing has been sales support and hasn't been strategic marketing. It's just been, you know, give me another pretty brochure, give me another PowerPoint deck, you know, give me some some sales aids, because it's one on one selling. And it's we've relied, we have relied on sales representatives to do everything from the prospecting to the qualification to the leads to the presentations to the closing kind of group to kind of the whole thing and from doing it from the frontline clinician, as well as the C suite and the supply chain. Sales Rep has been the focal point for the one on one selling for all of this, all of this activity. So you mentioned something earlier, and that's the buyers journey, kind of what what is the buyers journey, and that's an interesting concept when you've got a multi headed sales situation because the buyer define who the buyer is, is the provider as we talked in the global sense are we talking about each one is an individual component within there. So let's talk a little bit about the buyers journey when it comes to medical devices,
Scott Alexander 30:12
it's a great way to think about it. So if we think about the adoption path of, I'm going to describe this from the seller's journey, and then we can look at the buying portion of it, right. So the way that things are, are sold inside healthcare is I go, let's say that I have a product that's used by cardiologists, for monitoring cardiac patients in an outpatient setting. Our first step is we're going after we're finding a cardiologist who says, I want to learn more about this product, then what we're going to do is we're going to talk to that cardiologist about features and benefits, how's this going to impact your patients, right? Hey, by the way, we can, you know, maybe help with reimbursement, he's gonna say, Yeah, that's great, whatever, but tell me about the value of the product. So that's our first step. Our next step is we enter this complex web of understanding how does a health system how to sit somewhere, actually, by what we're doing. And that's where we start to see these multiple people coming in the process in terms of the steps may be different. But ultimately, it's the same things that you're doing, and may just be in a different order. I've always heard like the same, like, if you've seen one idea, and you've seen one idea, and that's true. And there's a lot of similarities between them, you know, you're gonna have to go through supply chain, you know, you're gonna have to think about what the operational considerations are, you know, that they're going to check against GPO contracts, you know, all these things. And so what you're doing as a salesperson is you're thinking about, Okay, what's the right order for me to talk to supply chain, and then the nursing staff, and so on, and so forth. What that looks like, is to build out almost a Gantt chart of these are the things for us to be able to drive the adoption of my product in your in your health system. One of the things that really surprised me about your question before was when I was at Mercy, we decided that we were going to convert from one saline manufacturer to another saline manufacturer. So we signed the agreement and that sort of thing. And then they looked at us and they said, okay, good luck with the conversion, which, to me is mind blowing. It's your revenue. And this is a, this is a well regarded company, this is your revenue. And you're telling me that I'm the one responsible for figuring out how to get all these products converted like that, that is absolutely absurd. And I'll tell you, Pat, that happen way more often than you would think. And so when I talked about the buyers turn into sellers journey, that's a key component of it. So we need to think about, what does that entire timeframe look like? You brought up sort of what historically downstream marketing was doing, which is like sales support, that sort of thing? I don't think that that goes away, in that there still needs to be assets and things built to support the one on one selling. What's new, is, and the shift is kind of twofold. Number one, sales professionals are paid way too much money to be out there, prospecting, right? That's a low value added activity. It's super expensive if you think about what that looks like. So that's kind of one thing. The other thing is, if we were to change industries, and go over the automotive industry, and we said, hey, the only way that BMW or Ford is going to sell a car is they're going to have a rep show up to my house, we would say, that's absolutely absurd. Like, that's just, that's the craziest thing ever. The reality is me as a potential buyer, I'm going to go online, I'm going to do research, I'm going to educate myself. And then I'm going to show up, and I'm going to buy my Ford F 150. And that's the end of it. That's an extreme version of what the sales and marketing mix looks like. But we on in medical devices are the exact opposite. It's like marketing doesn't do anything except for supporting the reps. And what I'm advocating for. And what we're seeing to be successful in this new world of Go to Market is a blend of that a mix of that our salespeople should be focused on super high value activities, closing qualification, right, the education of key folks were having that one to one or one to a small group aspect is valuable. And then we need to have we need to empower the marketing organization to be doing broader market education, to be doing prospecting at scale to be doing early qualification and we haven't talked about that, but maybe we should. But they have a role that takes them further into the sales funnel than we're used to. And and the sales team needs to really focus in on bottom of the funnel activities that really are what's going to move the needle from a revenue perspective.
Patrick Kothe 34:52
Marketing has, as I said, historically, they've kind of done two things. One is a sales support thing and the other is QA customer awareness and customer awareness being advertising is back and back in the day better journals or online stuff now, or going to trade shows flying the flag, flying a company flag. And that is a valuable thing. But when we're talking about this customer buying journey now and the new marketing, it's to take over some of the sales function on the front end of that buying process. So how has sales, embrace that idea of marketing encroaching on their territory? And what are the benefits to doing it that way?
Scott Alexander 35:41
I would ask any sales professional that was concerned about that? Do you like cold calling? Like you hate it, nobody likes cold calling. It's just what a what a miserable use of your time. I would say that it's not as much about encroaching on someone's territory, and more about how do we make sure that you as a, an intelligent, capable, good looking sales professional? How do we focus you on things that are high value activities? How do we help you make it easier to hit your quota? How do we help you drive more revenue for the company and make more money for yourself? That's what we're talking about. It's not having you do less, because somebody's doing the things that you want to do. It's figuring out how to use technology and other people that can operate at scale, to do the things that you don't want to do in the first place. That That, to me is the biggest transition. And so we get this question a lot is like, well, hold on now, like, how does this actually work? And the reality is, it comes down to, if you talk to any sales professional, worth their salt, they're gonna say, the best deal is when I get a phone call, and someone says, I have a check written here for you tell me how many zeros you need to put it in and ready to buy something. That's what you want. So if that's what you want, if that's if that's a good day for you, what we're talking about is how do we build an organization and more importantly, the structures and the technology to increase the likelihood that we have that kind of an event happening, or more likely to get people closer to that day, with less time and effort from you. That's what we need to be thinking about in terms of what this new, what this new go to market effort looks like. Let's talk about trade shows. Right? And we talked about earlier, this idea of better focus and use of marketing resources and that sort of thing, and not wasting, most importantly, not wasting sales reps time. Every single one of us has gone to a trade show and stood in a booth and had our feet ache, and only had conversations with people that are not good qualified prospects, right? When we get these leads, in that we send them over to the reps that we turned out that turns out that that that doctor from Georgia was from the country of Georgia, not from the state of Georgia. Right. That's that's kind of what what trade shows are. And so one of the things that's most important to acknowledge when we're thinking about selling and driving adoption of innovative medical technologies, is there is a very small number of people that can actually say yes, to any given company for whatever vertical they're calling on, you're calling a cardiologist or 30,000. In the United States, calling on urologist, there's what 10,000, the traditional approach of kind of putting a whole lot of stuff up there and just seeing whatever happens. And then any lead that comes in and gets sent on to sales is a recipe for disaster. And that's that's how we get that scenario that we're talking about where you get Mike, the marketing guy throws a lead over to Steve, the sales guy, and Steve doesn't do anything with it, because he knows that it's not good, right? And then you get this bashing of like we're doing so much you're not listening to us, you don't know what we're trying to do. That's why we're running into this problem is we have this wide open net. What we need to do instead is we need to qualify the prospects ahead of time. What that means is if we're calling on cardiologists, let's say that we've got stents, we should literally build a list of who are all the cardiologists who may be able to buy our product, name, email, phone number, and then that's the world of who we want to be talking to. Because if you don't have Dr. Smith, the cardiologist on board with your technology, you're not going to get any money from supply chain evolved. Nursing is not going to be interested. Like it's just it's a non starter. So the focus needs to be on kind of like we've historically been used to, we need to get Dr. Smith involved in interested in what what we're talking about. We don't want to do that by prospecting and cold calling Dr. Smith. What we want to do is we want to figure out how do we deliver messaging to him and monitor through technology to see who's going to be interested in our latest product right now we have a more hydrophilic coating on our guide wire catheter. So now it gets to the better places easier, whatever the whatever the thing is, We want to be advertising that to the marketplace, and then see who's interested. And then once that happens, then we can nurture them with email communication with you know retargeting and things like that. So that we're they're seeing us everywhere. And then as we do that, then we can hand it off to the salesperson, and actually have a conversation about that. So, you know, Steve, as a sales guy, here's where we are. Dr. Smith wants to talk to you. Are we at that point? If so, yes, go call him? If no, then what do we do? We put them in a nurture sequence? Do we invite them to a webinar series that we're doing? What do we do to keep that relationship going, and keep the education going without burning a lot of cycles of Steve's time. And so then, once Dr. Smith gets to a point where Steve is saying, Yeah, I should be talking to this guy, then he engages. But you don't want Steve to have to do all that work, because he's got other people that are closer to buying the product. And so that's where that's where this technology piece comes in. And to me, that's one of the biggest shifts is pre qualification, having the systems in place to nurture and then really focusing someone like your sales professional in on the later stage efforts, giving you visibility, but having a focus on the things where he's really most valuable.
Patrick Kothe 41:12
Well, that really makes sense. Provided that you're able to gather that interest level, early on, you've got to have the right tools. It's not like, we're going to put a billboard up on whatever social media site or radio, we're going to, we're going to put something out there. And it's a commercial for your product. Content is as important as targeting and content has been evolving to and what we've referred to as content. So what are some good practices for people who are who are trying to do this, in terms of delivering things that will interest clinicians,
Scott Alexander 41:52
the best way to figure out what's going to interest someone is to ask them, assuming that we're not a brand new company who's trying to build, we're building a product for the first time, assuming that's not the scenario that we're in, we should be able to go to our customers and understand, just spend a little bit of time ask them some questions about hey, why do you like our product? What were you doing before? What don't you like about a product? What are the value propositions that you see? How does it fit into your practice? And what you'll find is, they'll tell you the answers. And these are people that already know who you are, what you're about that sort of thing, you've got some Kol that you're working with that can give you a great perspective of that. If we think about what the life of a provider is of a physician or a mid level advanced provider, is they're busy folks. And they're by nature curious, right? They have chosen a profession that they dedicate themselves to it, they want to be up to speed on what's on what's going on. What we want to think about is what are the pieces of information that are relevant to them that lead them to our product, getting too heavy handed and being like, buy my product right now? Because I got to I got to make President's Club. But that's the wrong answer. But the right answer is let's think about what are the things that they're thinking about on a daily basis? How does my technology or my solution fit into that, and let's write about that. The way you do it is you need to have someone in your team that is the designated writer, you don't want to ask for sales reps to spend time sitting down and writing the stuff. But the people on the frontlines have the idea. So here's what you do is you have your writer, interview, the reps that are down in the field about what's going on, or interview the Kol or interview the provider to understand what's going on and then write an article about it doesn't need to be long, 500 words, 1000 words. But that's what your content is to put out there. This is an easy process. You can do this. Every couple of weeks, you can be putting out new content just to keep people engaged and it works.
Patrick Kothe 43:49
Where does that content go? What what is what is the channel that you're using to disseminate it? email, text messages? Facebook, LinkedIn? Where's it going?
Scott Alexander 44:04
Do you know who Kim Kardashian is?
Patrick Kothe 44:07
I think I've heard of her.
Scott Alexander 44:09
Right? I have to. I'm a 43 year old guy living in St. Louis, Missouri. There's no reason that I shouldn't know who Kim Kardashian is. But I do and you do. And everybody listen on the podcast as my dad knows who Kim Kardashian is, right? And the reality is we do because we see her everywhere. We go right? We go to the grocery store, she's on People Magazine, we get online on Yahoo, and we see that she and Pete Davidson are breaking up. We know that we know things about this woman that I don't really care to know but we do because of the frequency of touch. So you ask where it goes. My answer is yes. If you think about okay, so you've got 30,000 people that you're marketing to for your cardiac stent, right. What you want to do is think about how how do you surround them with messaging? We've got names email phone number because we built the list. So then can we send them email? Can we post things on LinkedIn? Can we follow them and create a relationship? Can we start a communication through a DM? Can we reach out on Facebook? We had a company, right? When right? May of 2020. So we're in the throes of still wiping our grocery bags down. Right? We didn't know what the heck was going on. We had a company that had a remote EKG, it was a non US company coming United States was one guy in the United States. It was a sales leader. And they didn't have a marketing team. And we got brought in as their marketing team. So in the conversation, we're talking to the CEO, who is who is Israeli that has a very Israeli focus. And they said, We need to go after the heads of cardiology departments at academic medical centers, because that's who bought this product in Israel, and in the other countries that we're in. And so that's what we're going to do. I have a lot respect for the CEO. And I said, politely with my best, you know, middle child manners, I said, Hey, we can do that. And can you just humor us to be more expansive than that? We have this list. We know a bunch of cardiologist, we can target them on platforms like LinkedIn, but we can also target them on platforms like Facebook, and Instagram, and Twitter, and this and that the other thing, and so we're going to create this surround sound piece. Would you let us run that for 60 days? And then we'll evaluate it at the end? You know, where I'm going with this, because I'm telling the story. We were right. What we found was, there were cardiologists who were buying remote EKG products, off of seeing ads on Facebook, they would see an ad, they would say, I want to learn more, their sales professional, right, the head of sales for them, for this company, would call them and close the deal. The reason why that's important is number one, physician doctors, right providers are always providers, right? They're all they always have that piece on. And they're people too. And so yeah, your doctors are probably on LinkedIn, they're probably on Facebook, they're probably on Instagram, they're probably on tick tock, right? And so why would we not reach them at points where they're more open to a conversation, or at least learn a little bit more about our product. And oh, by the way, Facebook was the best marketing platform for this company across all the platforms that we use. And it's because you could find these folks and you know how to do it, there's a way to do it, I would not recommend to anybody listening right now just to throw up ads about your knee implant on on Facebook and hope for the best because that's a terrible idea. But there are ways that you can train these algorithms to find your audience, and to only mark it to them. And when they show up to show that you show up. So that's the key to being able to use these things and do it in surround sound, so that they're seeing you when they walk in multiple places, and build up that Kim Kardashian level product awareness.
Patrick Kothe 48:00
So you said there's ways ways to do this, give me some examples of what are the ways
Scott Alexander 48:07
you're going to build an audience. And you can train the algorithms, again, this is this is part of the back end for LinkedIn, I can go through those talking about LinkedIn, because a lot of people are going to be on that, I can go on the backend of LinkedIn. And I can take your information from your LinkedIn profile. And I can feed it into the system. And I can make sure that whenever somebody who fits my profile shows up, that they're going to see an advertisement from Jairus marketing.
Patrick Kothe 48:35
And that's, that's on LinkedIn that's not your own proprietary software is doing it's a LinkedIn function.
Scott Alexander 48:42
That's right, we do some stuff on the back end to make it more effective. It's part of what LinkedIn as a as a capability has. And the same exact the same capability happens on the backend of Facebook and Tik Tok and every other social channel. Google can do that YouTube, so so you can you can target these audiences, if you know how to train the algorithms. And that's, that's one of the keys to success is training the algorithms. And then the other thing that we didn't talk about was you can actually again, this is kind of advanced stuff, but you can set up a these algorithms to look for activity on different platforms. So it's called retargeting, right? So I can have somebody let's say that you're one of my prospects, Pat, your cardiologist and I've got my, my stent, I can basically have LinkedIn, monitor what you're doing on the activities that I have going on Facebook. So you click on an ad on Facebook, I can instantly start marketing you on LinkedIn, even if I don't know who you are. When you think about creating this surround sound, right? You're gonna have 30,000 people you're trying to market to, what you want to do is you want to be able to say alright, as soon as I get a first touch, and I get some interest from Pat, about my stand, I want to make sure that he starts to see me more and more and more and more to build up that brand awareness. And I want to put these white papers and blogs we're talking about in front of them at a higher frequency to hope that he downloads one. So he can start to think of me as a thought leader in my space. And then eventually he's like, man, what is this step and it keeps seeing everything about. And he's going to click on a on an ad and say, yeah, like demo this thing. So that's what the process looks like in totality. And all the while you're sending them emails and try to try to reach them wherever they are, you're just doing that digitally at scale, as opposed to having to have Steve, the sales guy do that 100% of the time.
Patrick Kothe 50:35
So LinkedIn, Facebook, they've got private groups, sometimes there's physician groups, or there's different groups that are that are private, and they've got conversations going on. And people in industry may not know about. But using this type of strategy, if they're posting a lot on knee implants, or they're in that group, and whatever, whatever they're talking about, that will feed into the algorithm, and then they will see the information that would be important to get in front of them.
Scott Alexander 51:03
And to go one step further, if you said, I know the groups that I want to, I want to find I again, would stick with LinkedIn, because it's it's probably most familiar to folks, you can get through on Sales Navigator and pull out a list create a list of all the people that belong to the orthopedic biologics society. So that's a group, there's a couple 1000 people that are involved in regenerative medicine, you can get that list, you can pull that list off of Sales Navigator in about 15 minutes. And so now what you've done as you created your targeting, you're not just casting a broad net to the however many 1000 orthopedic surgeons for your PRP device or for your knee implant or whatever you've got, now you know, people who are going to be interested in what you have, you're making your your effort more effective. So you take that list. And by the way, you can target that list on a platform like LinkedIn, you tied into other platforms like Facebook and Twitter. So now whenever somebody initially clicks on something on LinkedIn, now Facebook and Twitter kick on as well, you could do the same thing with banner ads, so then they go to ESPN, and they're gonna start seeing advertisements for Alexander medical. That's what this process looks like to create this awareness and ultimately drive people towards saying, hey, I need to know more about this. Just like, I need to know that Kim Kardashian and Pete Davidson broke up right, like that's, that's what we're doing. And then to go back to the sales professional, you can keep them informed Dr. Smith down to this white paper, right? Here's your the campaigns that he's in, here's what he's seeing. And Steve's the sales professional can make the decision of when he wants to actually engage to either via a phone call or a personalized email, or whatever the case might be to try and get into the office.
Patrick Kothe 52:41
And that information comes in through your customer relationship management system, your CRM, your Salesforce, HubSpot, whatever.
Scott Alexander 52:49
Yep, exactly, yeah. So then you have one source of truth, to be able to say, here's what's going on. This is my territory. Here, my, my current opportunities, here's what's going on in the ether. And I can decide when I want to engage in when I don't. The other thing if I can kind of paint a picture. So Skylar from NetScout, has been on with you. So if we take it one step further, now you've got data from a platform like med Scout, where you can see procedural volumes, you can understand what the opportunity is, for these people that are right in front of you, and the people that are out in the ether. So all this is called lead scoring, right? If you're if you're coming from another industry, you could look at somebody and say, Hey, they've shown some interest. They're doing a truckload of procedures, I want to talk to them early to get to know them. And you move forward. One of the things on this, that was just a really interesting anecdote. When we were doing this Israeli EKG company, one of the things that was most interesting is, we were getting qualified sales opportunities from cardiologists that were not an academic medical centers that were buying multiple devices that were doing exactly what the company wanted, in terms of customers, but nobody would have ever called on them. Because they were in private practice. out in the suburbs. They're like third tier from your, from your reps call schedule. But they see a technology and say, I want it. So we were selling to people that were buying stuff that wouldn't be wouldn't even know about the product for six months or a year. And now they're buying products day one. So that's, that's the other benefit of being able to take this approach.
Patrick Kothe 54:24
One other piece there, you're getting the interest from people on these different platforms. How do they express their interest? Does it come in to a microsite? Or how does that how does that piece work?
Scott Alexander 54:38
Yeah, great question. So typically, what you want to do is you have different types of marketing campaigns to do different things. To get a lead. We talked about this opportunity creation thing is brand awareness. People need to know you exist. Thought Leadership, people need to think of you when I have problem X, I go to person y for solution Z. That's what the definition of thought leadership does. And then the final piece is lead gen ration. So we're running campaigns for this EKG company or stent company. Typically, what we're going to do is we're going to try and drive them towards a microsite. It may be something related to, you know, it's going to be related to the campaign. So if we're talking about the deliverability of our stent, we're gonna want to take them to a microsite that has a lot of information about the value of it, that educates them. So that they're, they're not just throwing their name down the road. But they actually are interested in what's going on. From there, we're going to have a form fill, typically, they're going to fill out on Dr. John Smith and my cardiologist at such location, so on and so forth. And then that will get routed to two places or a couple of places. So one place would be, you can get routed to the sales professional. So Steve is going to get a lead because it's in his territory, right. So John Smith, who's in the outskirts of town just filled out this download of this white paper or asked for a demo. Right, that will be a lead generation campaign. So that's one place. The other place is it will get automatically stored in your CRM. So maybe you're running HubSpot, or you've got Salesforce, but you're going to store that data, John Smith did this. And then the third place that it's going to get stored is in what's called a pixel for these various platforms. So John Smith downloaded a white paper, we're now going to say, Hey, anybody who's downloaded a white paper, we want to see these ads, we only want them to see, and once they download white paper, we want them to see these ads on these platforms. And you can set that up, so it automatically happens. And so what you do is you're gonna have sort of your lead magnet. So things that are really interesting, these downloads, and that becomes that's like a, we call that a cold ad campaign. So you're putting that out to everybody. And then once they download something, or they show some interaction, ideally, you're going to turn on a what it's called a retargeting campaign, but a pier campaign, you're gonna have your K LLS shoot a video talking about why they liked your stamp, right? Or why they like your widget, whatever that whatever that thing is. And you turn that on once they've shown interest. So the reason why you do that is because clinicians, again, we're talking about this, this lead is object creation piece, they want to have, they want to know what's best for their patients, they also don't want to get too far out in front of their skis to adopt technologies that are potentially risky technologies. So they download this white paper, they asked for the demo, now they're gonna start seeing ads from peers saying, Hey, this is the best thing ever, here's how it influenced my practice, so on and so forth. So you're giving them some peace of mind, in the time when the sales rep is gonna be reaching out to schedule that call or, or follow up or whatever the case might be. And you can cascade these things throughout, so that you can also turn on an email campaign and a letter or an email from the CEO of the company and all these things, just because John Smith, downloaded one white paper, and you can create all these other pieces out of it.
Patrick Kothe 57:57
Large companies have a lot of resources, and they could develop these things. In house. Smaller companies don't have as much resources. So tell me about telling me about your company, and what you're and what you're doing and the types of types of services that you can provide to the under resource, the company,
Scott Alexander 58:18
this is what we do is we build these kinds of structures and provide this kind of capability to small and mid sized medical device companies. If you look at Medtronic, you look at Edwards, the guy that does a lot of this stuff at Edwards is a good friend of mine, and just a brilliant guy. They have capabilities that are really fantastic. And it's unfair. I mean, frankly, it's unfair. So this is what we do, we basically get brought on as a fractional marketing team. Right? Imagine you're hiring a marketing department that has graphic designers and content writers and Facebook media specialists and website developers anything that you might need, we have, we have people that build trade show booths, and everything, like we can do anything from a marketing perspective that one would need. But we get brought in to provide these capabilities in the setup these functions for organizations, let's say your vice president sales or vice versa, marketing CEO of a company say Hey, I gotta figure out how to compete in this new world. We would come in and we'd sit down and we think through the three aspects that we described, opportunity creation, how are you generating leads, like, what does that look like? How are you creating demand for your product and differentiation from others that you're that you're competing against? We talk about opportunity, nurturing, how are you actually going about taking somebody who shows one point of interest and magnifying that into an IDM potentially interested or you know, someone who may be shut out in the future? And then opportunity capture, how are you doing the sales support and capabilities that to help Steve when he's in that sales opportunity to win? And so we cover all three of those and every company is a little different. What we do is different for everybody, but At the end of the day, there are some commonalities that allow us to get some some good wins. And in pretty short order, we've been printing that out for the past several years,
Patrick Kothe 1:00:11
just in my world, what I would think is product awareness, that's, that's one part of part of what you're doing is you're doing product awareness. And the other part is you're delivering qualified leads those, if I'm inside, it's, there's two things. So So you're doing some function of what marketing does, and product awareness, and you're, and you're pulling some function away from sales, or some work away from sales, to give them qualified leads. So you're gonna take that. So I don't want you to give me $1 figure, but scope me a little bit. How does the business work? Is it a product, you work by project? Do you work by monthly fees? How do you work?
Scott Alexander 1:00:51
Imagine you're hiring an employee. So that's how you got to think about what it is to bring us on board, I built this company for me. So if I wasn't doing this, I would be at a med tech company, trying to do exactly what our listeners are doing, get great technology in the hands of great providers to take care of people in need. So this is entirely built for a company that needs the support, but can't go out and hire a team of 15 people. If you look at it, most of our clients, they have their two numbers to think about. So one is the salary of the employee. And that's completely dependent upon what are we doing? Are we an entire marketing department, which we are in for some of our clients? Are we just providing a slice of what we're doing? That's gonna vary, call it six to 10k a month is kind of what you're talking about. For the salary of the team, we have some that are higher, but but that's kind of most people for what they need. And then you have an ad budget. And that's going to vary pretty significantly based on what you're trying to do what the goals look like caught three to 5k a month is what most companies would need to be able to get good quality opportunities coming their way and in a relatively short period of time.
Patrick Kothe 1:02:02
To wrap it up here, we've started off talking about the way old medical device marking go to market strategy is, and we talked about kind of the new way of doing it. Where do you think the industry stands today? And what do we need to do differently to become the future,
Scott Alexander 1:02:24
I think we have to invest in what is a capabilities that allow our prospective customers to educate themselves towards the sale, I think that's the biggest thing. If I was to forecast where we're going to be in three years, and where we're going to be in five years, the trends that are in place are going to be more solidified, there'll be less access for sales professionals. And in a one on one physical sense, we will see greater employment of clinicians by health systems, so they're going to be less likely to advocate for something just because it's cool. We're gonna see greater voice for finance, supply chain operations, all the other voices that are in there. And so I think what we have to do is we have to think about how do we go about maximizing the investment that we're making, in our sales professionals in our in our go to market efforts, right, and that's where using things like digital using things like automation, are going to be really critical. And then we need to think about how do we build out the assets, so that when we get those shots on goal, we're scoring as often as possible. And I think that's what it looks like, I don't think we're gonna go to an environment where it's just, you know, it's all marketing, and people are gonna get online and buy stents. I don't see that. I but I do think that there's an opportunity for innovative companies to redefine how they go about educating people towards the sale, that will make them much more efficient, and allow them to outpace their competitors.
Patrick Kothe 1:04:00
Scott discussed two very important topics today, his view from inside a medical device company, and then his view as a provider, and also how our go to market strategy needs to kept catch up with the rest of the world. Both of these topics are extremely important. And I really want to thank Scott for sharing his thoughts, a few of my takeaways. First, we need to think of provider as our customers do. We just always think about the physician, but the provider is really the whole system and all the people within that system. So what Scott said is slow down, try to put yourself in the shoes of the provider. And that includes not only the clinician but Supply Chain Finance and operation leaders and everyone else that that works within that within that system. And what he said is personal relationships, drive change. The second thing that we do discussed at length is the new go to market strategy. And some of the things that he said within that discussion is your doctors are people too. And we all buy things differently. Now, why should a physician be any different and and as far as the platform go to where your customers are, if your customers are our tick tock and Instagram, that's where you should be, that's where the conversation should, should occur. But the other thing is content is important. Don't just make it a commercial, but get involved in the conversation. The last thing that that really stuck out to me was the cost of implementation. Basically, the cost of a program like this is roughly the cost of one sales rep. And when you think about that, if you free up a sales rep, and they don't have to do the time consuming part of their job, which is the prospecting side of things, and it's also not the most fun job, it frees them up to do the high value part of the job the sales part and and the education and the support. And that's not only the high value part, but it's fun for them and it's most profitable part of their job. The other thing is if that's the the benefit on the sales side, on the marketing side, you're also you're getting benefits too. And that's you're strengthening the marketing strategy of building company and product awareness by implementing some something like this. So you're getting a twofer on here, lessening the cost of the sales side, and and then less than cost on the marketing side as well. Thank you for listening. Make sure you get episodes downloaded to your device automatically by liking or subscribing to the mastering medical device podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Also, please spread the word and tell a friend or two to listen to the mastery medical device podcast as interviews like today's can help you become a more effective medical device leader. Work hard. Be kind
