Marketing - A Lot More Than Pretty Brochures
Mike Eriksen has over 30 years of experience in medical device marketing, and he shares his views on what makes a successful marketing executive. Mike is currently Senior Global Marketing Manager at Smith+Nephew, a leading medical device company. In this episode we discuss issues in marketing and Mike draws from his experiences at RTI Surgical, KCI Medical, Encore Medical, Carbomedics, Synthes, and Sulzer Orthopedics. He shares his views on upstream and downstream marketing, what to do when a product development project goes off the rails, how to work with others in the organization, why customer discovery is so important, and what he enjoys about working in the industry.
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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. Today we're going to discuss marketing. Quick little story. Several years back, I was director of marketing and had an opening for a product manager position. And I had an internal candidate who was an engineer from research and development. And during the interview, I was asking him a lot of different things. And one of the things I asked him is, what have you done to prepare yourself for a career in marketing? And he looked at me with this quizzical look on his face, and he's he said, it's just marketing. And I think that that's a really interesting comment, because a lot of people don't understand marketing or don't not understand the complexities or the importance of marketing. So today, we're going to have a discussion with somebody that I think is is really an excellent marketer. His name is Mike Erickson. And I've known Mike for over 20 years ever since he joined a marketing team that I was managing. And he reported to me at carbon medics, a heart valve company. Mike is really the consummate medical device marketer. He's got over 30 years of medical marketing experience. And I can tell you from firsthand he's excellent. Most of his career has been in in the implantable device space. And he's worked in both upstream and downstream marketing and we're going into that and explain what that's all about, and a little bit. Mike is currently senior Global Marketing Manager at Smith and Nephew, a global medical technology company with products and orthopedics, sports medicine, ear, nose and throat and advanced wound management. Mike is contributed to the success of companies like RTI surgical KCI medical, Encore Medical, CarboMedics Synthes, and Sulzer Orthopedics. Here's our conversation. Mike, welcome.
Mike Eriksen 02:32
Thank you for having me. Pat. Great to see you.
Patrick Kothe 02:35
Good to see you. Hey, Mike, we're going to discuss both upstream and downstream marketing. But let's get started with your entry into marketing. So when you were growing up, did you want to be a marketing executive, a football player or a lawyer or detective? How did you come to marketing?
Mike Eriksen 02:55
Okay. Actually, I started out wanting to be a veterinarian. And someone so somewhere along the way, told me I had to dissect a human cadaver to become a vet. that stuck with me. And ironically, I work on cadavers all the time now. But that turned me off. My dad and my brother are both engineers, so that I thought I wanted to be an engineer. And that's what I entered UT, in the electrical engineering program, just like my dad, but when physics isn't your strength, or calculus, you look elsewhere. And I investigated other programs and got into the business school, and ultimately landed in international business and marketing as my as my focus.
Patrick Kothe 03:42
So you've spent now 30 years, over 30 years in medical marketing,
Mike Eriksen 03:48
I had to bring that up.
Patrick Kothe 03:51
That's, that's some great experience that you've had. So what what has excited you about about marketing for 30 years?
Mike Eriksen 03:59
Well, specifically medical device marketing, it was something that I had thought about, I hadn't been educated on university, but I happened to see a job opening for a hip and knee company recon company, and interviewed and the rest is history. I would say that, that what most excites me is I'm proud to be in an industry where my role can have an impact on new technologies and new products, getting out into physicians hands and ultimately being used on you know, my mother and my father and so on, to help their lives to get better or to even save lives. So that's what gets me up, you know, quite honestly, in the morning, as far as working in this field.
Patrick Kothe 04:44
So when you first got in, I mean, did you have any idea what you are getting into?
Mike Eriksen 04:49
Not the first clue. The first time I heard about medical device marketing was when someone encouraged me to interview with a marketing assistant position with a small recon company. Any and everything I learned, up to that point happened during the interviews, I had no clue. You know, marketing was something that you did, it was very closely aligned in my mind from scrolling with sales, we developed tools, we developed advertising campaigns, and in marketing, we promoted the products. And we supported a sales force to be successful in selling those products, I did not understand upstream, downstream. And I certainly didn't understand medical devices, as I went in the role I would play in actually the development of the actual components. And working with surgeons, and being in operating rooms, being a very important part of my job in marketing, you know, I thought of marketing, like many people, when I tell them that I'm in marketing, they automatically go to sales. So they asked me, if I'm out in the field from calling on customers selling products, I always have to explain to them that it's, you know, it's a little more complicated and nuanced than that.
Patrick Kothe 06:02
And I think the other thing is, many companies behave differently. So you've been with what 7878 different medical device companies, some companies are engineering driven, some are sales driven, some are marketing driven. So I'm sure in your experience, you've you've had kind of all all types, what does that mean to be more of a sales organization or engineering organization? When you're in marketing?
Mike Eriksen 06:28
Well, those are those are two different animals. So from a company before Smith and Nephew, for example, was very sales focused. And very simply, it was much more about firefighting, you know, we need this product. And then three months later, we need this product, we need to satisfy this customer. It's all about what can we do to increase the revenue now? Or what can we do to address this very important customer now with less of a long term strategic view. So I've seen that in a couple organizations. And that's pretty consistent with an engineering lead organization. It's very inwardly focused, internally focused about the nuts and bolts, and about designing a product, you know, that works. And hopefully, it's a product that customers want. But the first priority is, as you would expect, the engineering part like design work, and manufacturing, and validation in things like voc and customer input, maybe don't always rise to the top and that type of organization.
Patrick Kothe 07:35
As someone who's experienced in marketing, and you've seen the Fallout, when you're going a sales lead organization, or engineering lead organization, you know, what the right way to do it is? How do you impact an organization to change from their bad habits.
Mike Eriksen 07:56
That's, that's a tough, tough one to ask. Thanks for throwing that hat my way. I'll tell you what I tried to do. And sometimes I've succeeded, and sometimes not so much, it's still an ongoing, even 30 years later, and ongoing process for me, because every organization is different. But as an example, with my last company, we had products that were launched, that had quality issues or design issues. So as a marketing person, and viewing myself as on the front line with customers, as their advocate, as patients advocate, you know, it's my job to, as I say, stand tall and stand strong, to address quality issues or design issues. And you have to work internally to convince others, that unplanned time unplanned resources, unplanned dollars are warranted to fix these issues. So you have to find your advocates, I mean, you have to work within your own marketing organization is far up the ladder as you can go to engage them and to get their buy in that you have something that needs to be addressed in order for the company to be successful. And then you have to engage individuals and quality in engineering. And you have to present facts stay away from emotion, like, this customer is having these problems and we've lost this much business. And we have the potential to lose all their business worth this much in a year. You engage the sales organization, because they often have a lot of impact. And like I said earlier, they're very immediately focused, their quotas are month to month, quarter to quarter. So those that I know are influent influential with an organization I will pull them in to put an exclamation point on things to wake people up sometimes. So there's a variety of tools that you have to use. Sometimes they work sometimes they don't. The point is that you can never give up. When you have to be persistent. And if something doesn't work, you you keep trying other other methods, other tools, utilize other people to try to influence change.
Patrick Kothe 10:00
That's really a great point, Mike, because sometimes you're not going to be able to make an impact because sometimes the president of your company may come from a sales background or from an engineering background. And that's, that's how they're oriented. Or, or sometimes it's a one product company, and it came up through engineering. And now they know. And they're going to drive to the next product, because that's how they how they did it previously. But we know that for the long term success of the business, the business has to be oriented from the market standpoint, not from the sales standpoint or somewhere else, because as you said, you're going to end up with some short term wins, but some long term losses. I think that that's that's kind of what you're saying. Absolutely. Mike, you've seen companies that are have done correctly, well, where they're utilizing a long term vision. Do you know why that is or what it is about the management of that company from overall and specifically the marketing leaders within the organization, it helps to maintain that that good focus,
Mike Eriksen 11:07
I can't I can give you a current example. So working with Smith and Nephew, Dennis Smith and Nephew for a little over a year minor same with talking with other colleagues that have been here for a while, is prior to I think, three years ago, it was a very engineering focused company. And Morley focused a little slower to get products to market. And once I got products to market, you know, having some shortfalls relative to competitors, like arthrex, which is our number one competitor brought in a new CEO, who was very customer, also market focus. So he divided the company and said marketing, you'd have regional marketing focus on specific areas like sports medicine, to be more closely connected and aligned with customers, the head of our sports medicine division actually came from a marketing background, that's how he cut his teeth and product management. So he understands that the patients and the customers were first. So what it's allowing me to do in my current role, is, you know, there's acceptance in doing significant amount of voc work voice, voice of customer, voice, voice of customer, thank you, Pat, and to invest in primary market research, which is not inexpensive, understanding that it takes a lot to understand our customers. And the classic example of assuming the experience you have within an organization suffices for speaking for the customer, it's not acceptable in our organization, there's an expectation that we reach out. And we talk to customers all over the globe, that we engage our regional marketing partners, that we utilize our sales force, which can be a great resource as well. That's what I'm seeing here, you know, in my tenure, thus far.
Patrick Kothe 12:56
And that's, that's a difficult job to do if you've got the ocean liner pointed in one direction, and you need to turn it around if the company is in a long established, successful company. But there's some changes that need to be made. That's going to take a while to work its way through the organization. I think you've mentioned two things there. One is structurally what's going on within the company and how its how its organized. And secondly, having the leadership to say this is how we're going to do it.
Mike Eriksen 13:25
And you hit the nail on the head. This wasn't this wasn't an overnight affair. This is an ongoing process. But that is the direction we're headed. And you can see that with some of our some of our product launches and products that we're working on right now.
Patrick Kothe 13:42
So Mike, can you tell our listeners a little bit more about Smith and Nephew kind of what what the company is all about?
Mike Eriksen 13:48
So Smith and Nephew was born in the late 1800s. In England, they are a British based company, they're publicly traded 2019 obviously 2020 was a tough year for many medical device companies. But 2019 was a record sales here for the organization hit about $5 billion in revenue. It's a global company, we're in large majority of countries around the world. We have three primary divisions, we have the wound care division, which is generally number two, overall in the wound care space. We have the Recon division, which is you know, hip knee and shoulder joint replacement implants. And then we have the sports medicine division, which which I'm part of Sports Medicine division overall, we're number two behind arthrex
Patrick Kothe 14:50
so within the sports medicine division that you're part of what types of products
Mike Eriksen 14:54
it's the whole gamut the you know, anything you would see used in a surgery from tables, to video, to resection devices. fixation devices mean everything that would go into performing an arthroscopic procedure, anywhere on the body from shoulder all the way down to the ankle,
Patrick Kothe 15:17
the marketing organization that you're part of what what does it encompass?
Mike Eriksen 15:22
So sports medicine is divided into two groups, we have the fixation team. And then we have advanced enabling technologies is referred to at the fixation as you know, it's pretty obvious what they do a T encompasses everything from ancillary tools, pumps, video tables, or resection tools. So that's under a tee. So the heads of those two organizations report up to a senior VP and general manager for all of sales and marketing. Now, our group is global. And we do both upstream and downstream. And by downstream, we're responsible for preparing the product for launch and getting everything needed to launch the product. But Smith and Nephew also has a downstream marketing that's regionally based. So we have an America's downstream marketing arm, we have one for a mayor, and different country marketing managers, and we have one for APAC. And that's the same they have country marketing managers as well to support downstream and once the product is launched and on the market,
Patrick Kothe 16:39
and the products that you're responsible for, can you just outline of some key products are in that segment,
Mike Eriksen 16:46
our product responsibilities lie with recall our coblation technology, which is the technical term is using bipolar radio frequency energy to resect tissue as well as to seal bleeders our third care, which was based in Austin, started, they started the business they started the franchise of using bipolar RF energy for arthroscopic procedures. So they they built that business. And Smith and Nephew purchased Arthur care.
Patrick Kothe 17:19
So Mike, we've mentioned upstream and downstream a little bit here. Can you help us to understand what upstream marketing is and what downstream marketing is?
Mike Eriksen 17:30
I mean, there's different ways to look at it, you can look at far upstream. So one company I was in, I described myself as far upstream. What I mean by that is I worked with engineering and research internal male scientists to help assess technologies at a lab level or animal study level. And part of that also involved doing a lot of primary market research, doing some immersion work, meaning being a fly on the wall, going out to customers, sites and observing what they did building business cases and going in front of leadership to advocate for technologies that we want to bring into the new product development process. So that's far upstream.
Patrick Kothe 18:16
So we're not we're not talking about product at that point, we're talking about identifying areas of need within clinical medicine, or identifying certain base technologies, that could end up being products.
Mike Eriksen 18:32
Correct. So you do that, but then you identify in those areas where we could develop some products, and then it was a responsibility to at least make the initial business case and say, This product has 100,000,005 year revenue potential. It fits strategically within the organization. Let's fund it. Okay, let's, let's put a small project team on it and explored further. But at Apple, I would I would let go of the product.
Patrick Kothe 19:02
So that's far upstream. So what's what's the rest of upstream
Mike Eriksen 19:06
in my role now, in addition to doing any other work for upstream, I also stay with the with a product throughout the development cycle. So every phase so I'm on the core team, at every phase of the project, all the way up to launch as far as guiding the team to make sure that we're meeting our customers needs that we're consistently and frequently doing voice of customer work. And we're engaging the right customers, and ultimately, that we're developing our product, you know that the end product is what our customers want, and what is aligned with what the company expects.
Patrick Kothe 19:46
So what we're talking was upstream is everything pre launch, downstream is everything post launch, and then there's this, there's gonna be a handoff and sometimes it's pre launch, sometimes the both of both upstream and downstream people are working at the same time to do that launch, and sometimes the downstream person takes over and does does the launch depends on the company depends on the product. Right?
Mike Eriksen 20:11
Exactly. So, at Smith and Nephew, I'm responsible for upstream and preparing the product for launch. And then the downstream regional marketing people take it from there. And then I'm in a Supporting Role heavily involved, the paid on the project for 369 months post launch. On my last company, I had responsibility both upstream and downstream. So the birth of the idea to you know, whenever it's time to retire the product,
Patrick Kothe 20:43
cradle to grave marketing, you've worked under both systems, many of us who've been in marketing has have transitioned either within a company where it's broken up broken apart that way or comes back together, or both. Why would a company move in in either direction? What What have you seen have been the benefits to doing upstream downstream? And then what are the downsides, my personal view, having
Mike Eriksen 21:09
worked in different settings with different philosophies is that Ideally, you should keep upstream and downstream together. The reason I say that is because my own personal observations is when you divide the two, you have an ownership issue, the upstream marketing person has full ownership up until the lodge, and you may try everything in your power to engage downstream marketing into the project early to gain their buy in, but their focus is downstream, all their goals are usually related to downstream and revenue now, so it's really hard to get full buy in. And so what I've seen is when you do the handoff, all of a sudden, they have to be fully engaged. They're like, wait, I don't I'm not signed up for that revenue number.
Patrick Kothe 22:00
Or I don't believe in that, in that feature that you
Mike Eriksen 22:04
Yeah, why did you do that, you know, what word customers don't need that are. So you can do your very best and communication and engaging them early. But it's, you have two different sets of goals. And that's usually what drives what people do. When you have them together. As the upstream person, you know, I'm gonna own this baby, you know, post launch. And so people are going to be looking at me, as to Hey, you developed, I mean, you guided the development, you did the customer inputs, you approve this, what's up, the Salesforce is gonna be looked at, I mean, magic was gonna be looking at me if I don't, if I don't succeed, but the reason organizations, I think divide the two is because they see that there might be value in being more focused, so not having divided loyalties, right. So if you're if you have both, you know, you get pulled downstream, a lot of downstream work can be unpredictable, you know, it can change daily as to how much time you need to spend on it. So if you get stuck here and downstream, you're not available to support upstream, and you could slow down a project or not supported adequately, and vice versa. So on paper, it makes a lot of sense to maybe divide and conquer. But in my experience, in reality, it's fraught with issues. Very importantly, related to the ultimate success of the product.
Patrick Kothe 23:22
Regardless of whether you have two people doing upstream downstream, there's two functional activities upstream and downstream. So let's just focus on the downstream for a second, and we'll get to the upstream. And we'll focus a little bit on downstream and now we'll get get to upstream. So downstream, would it be safe to say that a lot of the activities are sales support activities,
Mike Eriksen 23:45
so there's early downstream and further downstream, so early downstream is making sure you have you've got all the tools to help the product be a success, I mean, those tools, it varies on the size of the project and the market, you're going into the typical range of you know, social media and brochures and technique guides, videos and animations, and then targeting, putting together targeting plan, you know how you're going to launch a product, you're going to give it to first second third, executing on that there are some there's a pricing component as far as monitoring that monitoring your your sales performance post launch. So a lot of that's internally focused, not necessarily sales, if you will, sales rep support the first 369 months depending on how significant the launches the product is, and still very internally focused process. Because a lot of times you haven't, you're still catching up on some of the sales tools. Once you're moving along and having some momentum then it becomes very field support, focus, you know, phone calls from the field. I need this tool. I'm in the O R. I have some questions. It comes to light that we could use some other tools quick reference guides cheat sheet So you're you're developing new tools on the fly by surgeons having a problem, you know, can we set up a call with them complaint handling could be a big part of it, because you're on the front line, you hear about them first. So the expectation is you're going to dig and try to learn more about it. So it's a whole variety. And then next time with that is sales training, you know, ongoing training in the sales force, whether that be virtual, or, you know, in person more on the strategic side to how does marketing play into post approval clinical trials, where we should be drivers. Because the only reason you should be doing clinical work is one, it's required for your approvals, whether you know, us or outside, and then that will be more regulatory and clinically driven, with strong support from marketing, because you want certain claims to support the success of the product. The other side of it is post launch clinical data can obviously help you develop claims that perhaps your competitors will not be able to provide, and give you a leg up on them. Or if you have a new technology, there might be an expectation from customers, even though it's a 510 k product, let's say in the US that they want. And there's a lot of doubting Thomases out there, and they want more clinical data to support that. So marketing should be the driver, and what the what the outputs need to be from the clinical data and then work with clinical to see how it's, you know, to make sure it's executed properly.
Patrick Kothe 26:31
When you're dealing with the downstream Who are you interfacing with who are who are your internal customers.
Mike Eriksen 26:40
Customer service is definitely an internal customer sales management, often you're interfacing, if you want to view them as internal customers frequent interaction with directors, Field Sales from a sales rep standpoint. Now there's two views internally, a lot of times, you know, from my viewpoint, sales reps from customers, whether they're direct sales reps are a distributed Salesforce, but internally, that's interesting kind of debate that happens is sales reps are often not viewed as a customer, sometimes viewed as the enemy. So that's part of your job in marketing, Product Management, is to reframe that conversation internally with you know, understand that sales reps are a customer, if you can't satisfy them, then they're not going to be successful selling the product, or they may not even put your product in front of customers to begin with.
Patrick Kothe 27:36
Yeah, and that's that whole sales marketing thing is garbage.
Mike Eriksen 27:42
It's It's interesting, but it's a it's a consistent theme everywhere I've most places I've been it's been a consistent kind
Patrick Kothe 27:50
of battle. So Mike, how do you establish relationships with those internal customers? Well, frequent
Mike Eriksen 27:55
communication, number one, when they need something, being very responsive, and reliable, so they know they can go to you. And if you're helping them, then at some point, you're going to need their help and, and they're more likely to help you, you know, if you're inside more FaceTime, like with customer service, if we're in the same office, and said, picking up the phone going down and and talking to people in an organization, sometimes I view customers a little differently. So 5am addressing a quality issue or design issues, and all sudden quality people are my customers, meaning I need them more than they need me for the way I view it, I have to engage with them through one on one conversation, not through email. And same for r&d. So that's building relationships where you can face to face and second to that is on the phone. video calling is great nowadays to make that personal connection. So it's all about regular communication. And it's also about realizing it's a two way street that, you know, you need to help other people if you want them to help you.
Patrick Kothe 29:03
So we know that the listeners of this podcast are from all all different functional areas. And one of the objectives that we've got here is to expose people to what other people do that so what what do you what do you wish that they would know about marketing that they they might not know or that you think they don't know?
Mike Eriksen 29:26
Well, first of all, it's it's a multi faceted profession, especially specific to medical devices. It's very different than say marketing and say tech or marketing, consumer products. It is both very technical, you need to be fully engaged in helping to develop a product so there's almost like an engineering component to marketing on the upstream side. On the downstream side. It is very intense. And save on the sales management and sales rep engagement because, you know, we're not marketing typically directly to consumers or the, you know, specifically the patients. And even with surgeons, we're relying on sales reps to market for us. That's often that's more often the case the night. So when you look at medical device marketing, it's, you know, you could say it's very technical focused. And then it's very, you know, marketing to sales organization focused.
Patrick Kothe 30:32
We have frustrations, sometimes that boil up with other people within the organization and some some flashpoints. And I'm sure that you've, you've experienced that. And in your career, what do you think that's due to,
Mike Eriksen 30:46
it comes down to whether you're, you know, customer focused, as an organization or not? So
Patrick Kothe 30:54
are you talking to external customer, internal customer,
Mike Eriksen 30:57
I'm talking about, you know, say, in my case, surgeons and their patients, as an example, previous previous organization, you know, we had a series of quality issues or design related issues, I spent an inordinate amount of time advocating on behalf of those customers, those surgeons and their patients, to try to convince the organization to address those concerns. Why does it boil up, because those issues are not planned for, they're not budgeted for, they're not resourced. And they throw a monkey wrench into everyone's plans. And nobody has a crystal ball. So you're always stuck in this argument of, if we don't do this, this will happen. And a lot of people don't have the ability to look forward. And that's our job to help people look forward that if we don't do something, things are going to break. So it's, it's a little bit of that, and a little bit of people don't want to hear it, because they've moved on, like you said, from an engineering standpoint, here's your product, watch it, I've got to move on to the next project. And because of that, they don't want to hear about problems that pull them if you will, two steps back.
Patrick Kothe 32:18
So Mike, what do you what do you really like about downstream marketing? Let's look what's the fun part A downstream,
Mike Eriksen 32:24
fun part of downstream is seeing the, you know, the outputs of your all your work upstream, because your work upstream could be 234 years. And my last job at a product that was built, put into bite sized pieces, multi phase project that literally was eight years long. So satisfaction for me is all that work that went in and seeing the product out there and customers hands, and hopefully, they're happy. And you know, the sales revenues are, are exceeding expectations. You know, that's, you know, that's ultimately what gives me, you know, gives me the most pleasure.
Patrick Kothe 33:04
So let's let's move upstream. Let's let's do a little swimming upstream a little bit. And let's let's talk about that. Let's start off by saying who do you interface with, in upstream marketing?
Mike Eriksen 33:15
Well, initially, when you're looking at what opportunities might be out there, those of you might interface with, if you have a market research department, and some places have had that others I have not, you would engage with them looking at a market research strategy, which could be everything from online surveys to focus groups to one on one interviews and so on. Sometimes you interface with your r&d folks and scientists, because they may have some ideas that come out of a Greenfield process that they just brainstorm and sketched out some preliminary ideas. So there may be some engagement there. On the Salesforce, you know, understand market trends, you know, what they're saying competitively, and what pain points they're hearing from their customers, and then engaging directly with your customers. informally, or, formally, there's a lot of potential data that you could gather together to determine which ideas go into the hopper and which don't. And then the ones that go in lopper, then you've become a little more internally focused on trying to understand you know, what the business opportunity is, with your building your assumptions, and such working with engineering to see what the design might look like, or the product might look like or, you know, what, what the scope of the project might look like.
Patrick Kothe 34:36
So that's kind of the early upstream and then you've got the rest of the upstream. describe a little bit about what that looks like and who you're interfacing with. At that point.
Mike Eriksen 34:46
You know, marketing is always on what they call what they refer to as core teams. Another core team changes over time, but marketing does not. So let's say Product technology has been approved by management to do go through, you know, early design work, maybe some cadaver labs. In our case, we call it the ideation phase. There's a small group of people and that group of people includes only engineering and marketing. Once we if we successfully exit out of that phase and go into a more detailed call the definition phase, some engineering folks in the previous phase may drop off, but you as a marketing representative stay on it. And then the the group gets larger. And you start pulling in, in our case, software engineers and design engineers and operations, people and regulatory and quality. So the group becomes larger. But marketing you're you're constantly in that core group. And then as you go through the different phases, people come in and out of that core core team, depending on where you are and what the focus of the project is. But once again, marketing is there all the way from the beginning, all the way to the end.
Patrick Kothe 36:03
At what point are you looking at things like regulatory pathway reimbursement, the manufacturability of a product? Where are you looking at those things?
Mike Eriksen 36:13
Well, hopefully all those you're doing early. So when you're when you're assessing an opportunity or a technology, you should be asking questions about how difficult, challenging or easy a regulatory pathway is going to be, because that should weigh into the level of risks that the project may have for the organization, reimburse bereavement, there are plenty of companies that have made a mistake and not looked at that till too late. And then there's nobody to pay for it or want to pay for it. So that has to be early on.
Patrick Kothe 36:46
Is it is it a marketing issue? of are you dealing with that from a marketing standpoint? Or is it a different area of the company that looks at that
Mike Eriksen 36:53
marketing should be initiating the conversation and being engaged with if you happen to have a reimbursement department, you should be engaging? You know, with that department kci wincor comm they work with they had a they had a full reimbursement department. And so that's how you would go to to understand, you know, understand what that reimbursement opportunities are. Or if it falls within the device world, you need to understand, okay, how much does the hospital receive? What's the bag of money, they received a dual procedure, you know, your product, are you replacing an existing product? are you adding cost to that procedure, which will cause the product to be have a higher degree of visibility with with a facility as far as whether they are acquired or not?
Patrick Kothe 37:39
If you've got different project management systems, I'm sure you've you've you've worked in his project management, responsibility and marketing. Is that r&d, is there a separate department? Have you may have seen different models? What do you what do you consider to be a good model for that?
Mike Eriksen 37:55
I've seen the whole gamut. I've been a project manager before have been responsible for creating timelines, in addition to my marketing role, but in most organizations, now they've had kind of a combined r&d project management role. So even the engineer that did some design work, but also manage the project manage the timeline called the meetings together at Smith and Nephew, they have a project management office, they call the meetings, they they determine who they need to bring in and off the project at different points. They drive the timeline, they ultimately are viewed as the ones who, you know, either hit the timeline or miss the timeline, what I would say, I think the jury's still out. But I say I prefer what we have now, which is a separate project management office so that engineering and other functions can solely focus on what they're, you know what they're best
Patrick Kothe 38:55
at. And the Office of project management is doing the technical Gantt charts and doing doing all of the all of the planning documents. Somebody else's is doing the work, but they're doing the formal reporting. And formal planning of the project is a kind of
Mike Eriksen 39:12
how to run correct and they're they're driving the presentations, the different phases to exit a phase, the presentations that you make to leadership to get approval to move to the next phase.
Patrick Kothe 39:25
So let's talk about that a little bit. Because projects, you know, you start off and you've got a timeline. And that timeline is always changing, depending on on the technical side of things, or if the engineer gets pulled off and the engineering team gets pulled off to fix a project like he's, like we were talking about earlier, or marketing comes in and says you know what, things have changed. So how do you manage a project to a timeline when you've got all of those things going on?
Mike Eriksen 39:55
Last one scope creep?
39:57
Yeah. Management inject a
Mike Eriksen 40:00
great, greatest, greatest fear. And they hate that worse than anything. And you know, I can understand why. How do you manage it? Wow. You know, to be honest with you, I'm not sure that I've ever, ever seen it managed well, I think that the issue that comes in is that nobody ever wants to plan for the unknown. Even though we all know from experience, the boogeyman is out there waiting for you. And they won't come out of the closet, at one point or, or more often, leadership doesn't want to see timelines that incorporate that often. So as a result, you have compressed timelines that ultimately will not meet the mark. It's been a consistent challenge everywhere I've been and I just haven't seen it, I haven't seen a fix for it, if you will.
Patrick Kothe 40:51
So what happens when a timeline is is changing, or the, or the priority of the project has changed, or from a marketing standpoint, you see, either a change in the marketplace, or the product isn't, is not going to fulfill the need that you thought it was going to originally,
Mike Eriksen 41:11
a lot of that depends on the organization you're in, like you asked early on, if you're an engineering lead organization. And marketing comes and says, Hey, this doesn't fit where the markets headed, and you have plenty of good data, you have voice of customer, you have trend data, it's a it's a tough sell, to say, well, they, you know, often get what you already approved this. And we're well done line. And, and we're doing this,
Patrick Kothe 41:39
we're gonna throw good money after
Mike Eriksen 41:40
Ben and you just as a bargain. First, you're gonna be in a situation where you have to do the best you can with it. And then try to manage expectations on the financial model piece of it far as you know, expectations on revenue. If you're a marketing lead organization, and more strategic than there's usually a more of an openness to hit the pause button of change course, or even put a put a project on hold in favor of working on another project. So it's it's completely driven by what kind of organization organization you have, is that
Patrick Kothe 42:13
looked at at different different stages of the product development cycle?
Mike Eriksen 42:18
It is. So every phase, everywhere that I've been you have to do updated, if you will business case, where you adjust assumptions based on what you've learned, in the last phase, whether it's engineering assumptions, or market assumptions. Everybody talks about the net present value, that's what everybody looks at, what's your what's your net present value? What was it the last financials, you know, if it went down, especially that you get ad gets attention? Why did it go down, we did look at the value proposition to see if it's still there. from the previous phase, and the value of the organization, the value of the customer, I will tell you, as you get further down project, you know, the ball going downhill becomes larger and harder to stop. And so those conversations of the markets changed, we need to put this on pause me now to go in a different direction become much more difficult. And even in a market led organization, it's it's very challenging to get people to to listen. So my point there is still a lot of voc work early, often. And don't stop once and repeat, rinse and repeat on that. Because you need to figure out market acceptability and opportunity, you know, the reality of the opportunities need to understand that earlier in the project.
Patrick Kothe 43:41
So a lot of people talk about voice of customer, and a lot of people don't do it justice and don't do it correctly. Let's dig into voice of customer a little bit and how you've seen it done well, and what it means when it's not done well. So what is what is voice as a customer in that upstream, upstream development type
Mike Eriksen 44:03
of voice of customers. First of all, identify who your customers are, who's going to drive the success or the failure of your product. Being in devices, surgeons are always an obvious one. But then not everybody thinks about pain on the product and the interface with a product by satellite supporters if you will, like our circulators people that have to pay for the product that are held accountable to the hospital's bottom line, sales reps, they don't like the product, they don't believe in it, they don't have faith in it. They just won't even show it to their customers. So you have to first of all, figure out who all the customers are. And then you need to put together a strategy on how best to to gather their voices. In some cases, you may already have a lot of force of customer information and others you have to start from scratch and when you have to start from scratch. Depending on the budget available, you want to look at all the tools available to you focus groups and face to face interviews and online surveys and and alike sounds very project if it's a brand new technology new to the organization, we don't have a lot of a lot of knowledge about it. It's a it's a more expansive approach. If it's a adding a product to an existing portfolio and you already know a lot of market, then some of the voice customer becomes a lot more focused.
Patrick Kothe 45:21
How do you stay objective, and getting feedback from different different customers, and not enter your own biases into it?
Mike Eriksen 45:32
I'm glad you asked that, because I'm in a situation now where I've never worked in the sports medicine field. And I've seen it I've worked in orthopedics for a number of years. So I saw it from kind of from the outside. And, and so I'm largely ignorant about the business and working a lot on the upstream side, since I got here, it has opened my eyes to what I thought I always did, which is ignore what you know, or what you think, you know, and rely heavily on what your customers know, and what they're telling you. In this case, I haven't had a choice but to do that. So I've asked a lot of questions of a lot of people perform surveys, done one on one interviews. I've been forced to do that. But I'll admit in past lives when I knew more. When I thought I was the knowledgeable one. Perhaps I didn't ask as many questions of as many people as I should have. On so my recommendation is to check your ego at the door, pretend like you don't know anything, you need to have some credibility as far as understanding the legal lingo for sure if you're going to talk to customers, but you need to come prepared with a lot of open ended questions and lean heavily on your customers to provide their own insights. And you're likely will be surprised by some of what you learn.
Patrick Kothe 46:54
Have you had experiences where you either didn't do adequate voice a customer or you were using your own bias to support something that you thought was true, and then the product died or flopped? And then on an autopsy, you say Geez, we we missed the mark in the voice of the customer,
Mike Eriksen 47:16
there's gonna be a one to one product we launched, what I learned is that we overdid it. Like we focus more on what the competitors had. And marketing always like, give me everything. And that's another joke between engineering and marketing. We overdid it. Like we asked for too much. We didn't need as expansive product as we thought we did.
Patrick Kothe 47:42
I'm sorry, are you saying marketing asked for too much, or the customers asked for too much on
Mike Eriksen 47:46
marketing. So you're talking about where where I've made a mistake relative to what the customers want.
Patrick Kothe 47:55
So for the customer didn't necessarily ask first tell you that you would do interjected yourself into the customer. Okay,
Mike Eriksen 48:03
I allow the the competitive field to drive what I asked our engineering group to do and the scope we asked them to work with on the project after launch. You see, we're not even selling this SKU or that, you know, this this part number, or this device, it took a lot of energy to design that, you know, we wasted company resources. And we were offering a product that nobody's selling and very few customers need or want and had limited impact on the success of the product. So that's a case where I use competitive data and internal assumptions that were overly expansive as to what the customer actually needed. So
Patrick Kothe 48:46
even someone with as much marketing experience that you have sometimes does things that are not quite right. So how do you continue to learn and build your knowledge and do things the right way?
Mike Eriksen 49:02
Well, you admit your failures, okay. You constantly examine what you do on my own worst critics. So I'm always looking for the things that I could be doing better, and how I can improve upon them. I am mindful of how my decisions or recommendations might be impacting others internally or externally. So I am sensitized to that. And I recommend that people do that do not become insular and just focus on what you need to do what helps your career or your image gives you the most spotlight. I feel like I have a lot more to learn than what I know today. And that's
Patrick Kothe 49:41
probably different than it was 20 years ago, when you're when you're 10 years into your career, you think you got it mastered. And the next 20 years. You figure out Jeez, I don't know as much as I want, I thought,
Mike Eriksen 49:51
right and actually, as you as you got more experienced people expect you to know more. And that's a common trap that people fall in. They think oh, I've been doing this for 30 years. I already know everything. And if you've been doing it for a long time, you need to step back. And just once again, it's better that you act like you don't know a lot, especially when you're engaging with customers. And you're guiding an organization on what they need to do, and build your case from the ground up. And if it aligns with your experience, great, then you can be more confident that what you're doing or what you're recommending is the right path. But do not just rely on your experience, no matter how much your longevity.
Patrick Kothe 50:36
You've worked in large companies, you've worked in small companies, is it different how much people take for granted, but what they know about the market based on market are based on company size, or how many products are they've got in the market, or what their market share is
Mike Eriksen 50:52
absolutely your market share. If you're a big player, generally speaking, you're going to think you know, the organization is going to think they know more than they do, and use their own experience to drive decisions on products that they develop. If you're smaller, you're hungrier, you can't afford to swing and miss, you've got to try to hit at least get a double every time you launch a product and you can't hit the restart button. Because otherwise you'll be done, you know, the goodness successful companies will will be more focused and tuned. Plus, they're going to be closer to the customer. Because they don't have as many layers between themselves and the customer. Those are generalizations. But you know, I've seen large organizations that are more more customer focused, and smaller organizations, obviously, that rely on their limited internal knowledge to make important decisions. So I've seen I've seen the gamut. Generally speaking, the larger the organization, the further removed you are from the customer, the higher the risk, that you're going to develop products, or solutions that your customers don't want or don't need.
Patrick Kothe 52:02
So what you're saying is Be humble. Recognize, if you're in that large, large organization, be humble, recognize that, that you may have a bias that you know everything and go out to the marketplace and check it and check it and check it
Mike Eriksen 52:16
correct. And you know, from a larger organization standpoint, when they're in Smith and Nephew has done is you know, they they used to four years ago, they used to have regional leads that were responsible for every franchise, you know, wound care, recon and sports medicine. And there's that's a lot to keep up with. When CEO came out a few years ago, he blew that up. And he made a sports medicine franchise with a president of their franchise, you know, wound care, recon, same things. And then down to the regional levels. They had regional marketing folks that were focused on sports medicine, let's say, as a larger organization, if you take that approach, you're more likely to not lose touch, you know, with your end user, I mean, the risk is still there being a large organization, but there's, there's a greater chance that you'll stay in tuned with with your customers needs. My biggest advice is talk to your customers early, often and continuously. That is the biggest pitfall that companies face is not talking to customers enough. And having the assumption they don't have time to talk to customers. So there are a lot of quick, easy, inexpensive ways to engage with your customers, there's plenty of opportunities for you to do so. So don't fall into the trap of we have everything we need to know inside the organization. There's always insights you can glean, talk to your customers all the time. It'll help you as you make those arguments internally as to why an organization should go in one direction versus the other. So it's it's simple. But it's complex. Mike, thanks.
Patrick Kothe 54:03
Thanks so much. This has been a really, really interesting discussion. The last thing I'd like to ask you is you've had a very successful career over the past 30 years in medical device marketing, and it's been a passion of yours. What have you gotten out of working in the industry? And would you do it all over again?
Mike Eriksen 54:26
First of all, yes, I would do it all over again. I have not strayed from this industry. my entire career. I haven't looked to move into a different industry. What I've gotten out of it was a lot of knowledge. I still have a lot to learn. I enjoy the technical aspects a lot. So I guess there's a little bit of my brothers and my father's engineering in me. So I like the nitty gritty of helping to develop products that ultimately get into into surgeon's hands and patients. That's where I get you know, the most excited makes me proud. It's an industry that I can be proud to work in. There's ups and downs, like we've talked about different organizations do things better than others. But overall, I wouldn't go back in time and, and change the direction I went, I wouldn't, I don't wish that I was Yvette. Let's put it that way. I don't wish I could start over and get a vet school. So I enjoy this industry. And it continues to challenge me, and stretch my brain. And there's always a lot to learn.
Patrick Kothe 55:32
I hope you enjoyed that. And learn that marketing is a lot more than pretty brochures and add a few of my takeaways. First, we spent a lot of time talking about structure of a marketing department. And I think it's important that everyone understand this, because what we discuss as we discussed activities and fire upstream launch early downstream and downstream. So it's important if you're in a marketing department, did you understand each one of these nuanced changes in activities depending on where you are with projects, and where you are with launch and product? responsibilities. If you're a marketing leader, you've got these different ways of structuring your department. And you really need to understand is it the right time for you to do something different? Is it the right time for the organization to make a change? And where are you in the lifecycle of your product portfolio? Does it make sense to do something different? If you're working with marketing, it's also important that you understand the people that you're working with, and what they are responsible for. Sometimes they're going to be focused on something completely different than what you're focused on. You need to understand why their activities are going in one direction or the other, in order for you to figure out the best way for you to work together with that person to get to the objectives that you're trying to accomplish. So really have a good understanding of what that other person is doing and what their responsibilities are at this particular time. And if they can help you, or you need to help them. Second, we discussed that momentum is not always your friend. And what we're talking about there is product development. The momentum that's established on a on a project that's already funded, and it's going is substantial. But at certain times, you're going to have to really take a hard look and say is this project product or this project, still valid? Does it still have the main things that it needs in order to continue to progress to become a product? that's a that's a really a difficult thing, because we all know that the longer that project goes on, the harder it is to kill. But we really need to build in business justification checks at each of the gates to assure that people are asking the hard, hard questions, and making the hard decisions if they need to be made. So that is really something that I think that we need to recognize that momentum. In many ways. It's a good thing, but sometimes it can be a bad thing. Finally, stand tall and stand strong. I absolutely loved hear Mike say that. I call it management courage. It's really when someone is speaking truth to power. It's difficult from a marketing standpoint, but everyone that's listening here today knows that it's difficult, it's a difficult thing to do, but you have to do it. You really have to do it. If you are really taking responsibility for whatever area that you are responsible for. The good ones the good people really know how to do it. It's not done best by standing up in the middle of a meeting and and blasting it out. You have to build consensus and Mike talked about building consensus one person at a time, making sure to get with the most influential people. Thank you for listening. Please spread the word and tell a friend or two to listen to mastering medical device podcast, as interviews like today's can help you to become a more effective medical device leader. Work hard. Be kind
