How, What and Who: Does the medtech sales model need a rethink?

Oli Hudson, content director at Wilmington Healthcare, looks at challenges in the current medtech sales model – and a possible route through them.

Many clients are coming to Wilmington Healthcare with the same set of issues – restricted access, time poor staff, an inability to carry out demonstrations and evaluations in the same way as pre-pandemic times.

The reasons for this are hardly opaque; the NHS is currently suffering from four deep-seated challenges; dealing with the care backlog; a workforce crisis; changing the structure and delivery of healthcare via integrated care models; and responding to a new efficiency drivewhich gives an overall annual savings target 2.2% this year – up from 1.1% in the previous one - to deliver an annual saving of £4.75 billion.

This means clinicians are taken up with the caseload before them with little time to evaluate or gain evidence for innovation; procurement departments are trying to find in-year savings; and the process of contracting varies from system to system. 

Theoretically, new procurement models as mandated by NHS England should pave the way for aggregate purchasing, greater spending power and longer term investment, a recent article by my colleagues at HSJ has shown that these are in the forming stage. 

At system and local level, there is a mixed picture on leadership in terms of procurement. While much more collaboration is happening, individual trusts still act independently upon their own protocols and there is still no ‘one way’ of seeing the purchasing and procurement process. 

Also, a new paradigm of working digitally, and a general digital first trend in terms of preferred engagement routes for stakeholders, and medtech is left with some big questions on what to do next.

How and what: Omnichannel and tailored content

Some medtech companies are adopting a different approach – one that is both hybrid face-to-face/digital and tailored.

Rather than relying on just call volume and field work, content and comms are taking a more central place. Omnichannel marketing – involving companies accelerating their digital approach and adding self-service portals, webinars, microsites, and social-media content— is supporting remote interactions with both HCPs and nonclinical stakeholders.

Omnichannel is becoming the preferred engagement technique. And, most companies are equipping their reps with virtual-communication tools and digital content and training them in remote selling.

But at its heart it demands tight customer segmentation and compelling content to suit - and in this, medtech is still developing its approach.

On the first point, it will be important to vary content and comms to suit audiences at strategic/system or place level, and by customer type, for example clinical, commissioner, or procurement.  

A series of articles by my colleague Simon Grime – written with pharma in mind but just as applicable to medtech - covers this in more depth. 

He says: “The goal needs to be a genuine and continually enriched 360-degree view of each individual customer, covering their stage of engagement, their preferences, their previous behaviours, and touchpoints online and their engagement with different content types. It requires comprehensive and fully integrated data which paints a picture of the customer as an individual and responds to them as such.”

This research should include analysis of local demographic data – especially health inequalities, the local population health picture, and how new techniques and products can address them. 

On content, compelling patient stories are also becoming more popular and Wilmington Healthcare has been involved in the production of these, in one case helping to move a minimally invasive heart valve replacement technique into the mainstream by using illustrative narrative.

Who: Stakeholder management

So, if omnichannel and hybrid F2F/digital working represents the how – and compelling exchange of value and relevant content the what – where does that leave the who? Here, research into the marketplace is equally necessary. 

New NHS policy is keen to stress is the centrality of clinicians in the decision-making process – in changes to pathways, setting, technique and procurement. The GIRFT (Getting It Right First Time) programme is proving influential as a clinician-led, bottom-up approach to reducing variation and improving standards of care – as well as accelerating innovation adoption. 

Put baldly it is clinicians that are most important to convince and empower. Research is also needed into how clinicians are grouping themselves – into clinical networks for example, or into hub-and-spoke models – and are taking amendments to pathways forward.

Another group of stakeholders charged with assisting industry are the AHSNs, who should be able to assist clinicians develop business cases and overcome obstacles to adoption. The 15 AHSNs should be on the radar for innovation, particularly for NICE approved products that have already earned their place in therapy via clinical and cost-effectiveness and to enhance the evidence base. 

Finally, each system and place will throw up clinical champions for therapy areas and surgical techniques. Somewhere in the overlapping networks of clinical influence and accountability, there will be those most capable of enacting change with access to genuine transformative power. It is these such individuals that medtech must hunt down and engage.

For information on Wilmington Healthcare, including our approach to engagement, omnichannel marketing and commercial optimisation for medtech, visit www.wilmingtonhealthcare.com