Smart beds, diagnostic devices, blood pressure devices, ophthalmoscopes, ventilators and other such devices – there is hardly any medical technology that a US-based manufacturer of medical equipment, let’s call it Company A, cannot provide. Its solutions are designed for operating rooms, emergency departments, intensive care, physician’s offices, home care and beyond. But in the constantly evolving global healthcare landscape, Company A faced distinct sales challenges.

Company A’s diversity of products and services gave it access to a vast market. But this diversity also resulted in multiple inefficiencies. A fragmented customer experience. Disparate tools, platforms and formats used by sales teams to initiate customer interactions.

Incomplete or inaccurate quotes due to poor quality customer data and product matching, calling for multiple revisions. Manual data management because of which lead and customer data didn’t reach the right teams. No KPIs, no analytics, far too many variations in the quoting process in different departments.

Over time, however, Company A enhanced the customer experience, accelerated the sales cycle, and drove sustainable growth. How? Why, through sales and marketing automation, of course.

This isn’t the story of a single company in North America. It is the story of innumerable medical technology businesses around the world that have transformed their sales teams’ efficiency and productivity through automation.

In the growing medical device manufacturing ecosystem in New Zealand, too, sales and marketing automation can help you to access the right customers, domestic and international. It can help you to shorten your sales cycle, dramatically improve your customer experience, and ultimately, enhance your bottom line.

Globally, New Zealand is seen as a relatively small manufacturer of medical devices and technology. Over a decade ago, the island nation imported over 95% of its medical equipment and supplies. Moreover, at 2 to 5% of total health spend, the cost of medical devices to the healthcare system in New Zealand is fairly low.

But New Zealand is committed to delivering a high level of healthcare to its citizens. New Zealand boasts of the right resources in terms of raw materials, an educated workforce, sophisticated healthcare, a mature regulatory environment, and high-quality universities and research institutes. The country’s medical technology sector is growing and how, with manufacturers like Fisher and Paykel Healthcare leading the way.

Nevertheless, healthcare in New Zealand is provided via public and private providers, with no one-size-fits-all path for medical device manufacturers to access the market of healthcare providers. As a medical device manufacturer, you can choose to sell to any of the 20 District Health Boards (DHBs) in the country through the procurement system; the DHBs are responsible for funding or providing health and disability services to the public through primary care, aged care, public health services and non-governmental providers like Māori and Pacific health providers. Medical device suppliers like you can sell to government authorities like the drug-buying agency Pharmac or collaborations like HealthAlliance.

You can choose to sell to any of the 200+ public hospitals like Waitakere Hospital and Auckland City Hospital, the 35+ private surgical hospitals like MercyAscot and Wakefield Hospital, or to the dental industry, three-quarters of which comprises private practices.

You can also choose to look beyond your own shores and sell to the massive global medical device market, projected to be worth a whopping USD 886.8 billion by 2032.

Clearly, the market for medical technologies in New Zealand and beyond is massive. It is also dispersed and fragmented, with healthcare providers and patients seeking a wide range of products, each with different specifications. Targeting the right customers is a matter of deep research, human insight, strategic market segmentation, and tailored marketing strategies based on not only your product offerings but also the needs of your target audience.

In today’s increasingly digital world, targeting and converting the right customers effectively is a matter of deploying appropriate automation tools in service of a well-designed, fundamentally human marketing strategy.

Historically, medical device manufacturing companies have taken the in-person, manual route to sales. Face-to-face meetings, personal relationships and networks, re-orders placed over phone calls, and manually processed orders. Sales representatives for medical devices have physically carried products to healthcare providers during meetings, spending their time educating their customers about product features, configuration and use cases.

Today, in-person and product-centric sales processes have taken a backseat while digital and customer-centric experiences have taken precedence. If you are a medical device manufacturer today, you have no way to do it other than blending the human with the digital.

Additionally, more than manufacturers of any other products, you as a health product maker today need to shorten your sales cycles so that customers can access your products as quickly as possible. After all, medical device and health product sales can be volatile, seasonal and unpredictable, and you need to meet demand when and where it appears. Flu season, allergy season, outbreaks and national health policy changes.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, for instance, the demand for ventilators, personal protective equipment (PPE) kits, diagnostic tests and other lifesaving medical interventions saw an unprecedented spike. Hundreds of thousands of patients' lives were on the line. Digitalised sales and marketing mechanisms helped bridge the gap between urgent patient demands and available medical technology inventory.

At the end of the day, sales automation solutions are for both companies and customers. During health emergencies, healthcare providers don’t have weeks for multiple calls and back-and-forth with sales reps from medical device companies. On the other hand, with the right tools to lighten their burden of manual tasks, your medical device sales reps can add more value to their customer interactions, predicting demand and devoting time to strategic initiatives for growth.

Marketing and sales automation in the medical device manufacturing industry is a win-win for all parties involved.

As a medical device manufacturer in New Zealand, you share certain marketing challenges with businesses across industries and geographies. Challenges that sales and marketing automation tools can address.

But you also face some industry-specific hurdles. Most notable is the challenge of complex pricing models for biopharmaceuticals and other health products. Given the highly specific nature and mode of action of health products, the pricing of medical devices is highly segmented based on unique product characteristics, patient needs, the competitive landscape, and the cost of compliance with local regulations.

Moreover, as a medical device manufacturer, you may adopt a B2B, B2G, B2C, D2C, or combination model. You may supply your products to customers via subscription-based models, rentals or outright sales. Your customers may make the most of volume-based or indication-specific pricing. These differences make quotations and negotiations particularly tricky. They also stretch out the sales cycle and increase your chances of errors.

With health products, customers’ lives and health are at stake. This is why health products also have to meet stringent regulatory requirements which vary with the type of product, risk to the patient or user, therapeutic area, and the local and regional authority. In New Zealand, medical device suppliers are subject to multiple legislations including the Commerce Act of 1986, the Fair Trading Act of 1986, the Consumer Guarantees Act of 1994, and the Privacy Act of 1993 among others. Medical device manufacturers in New Zealand must also enter their details into a database under the Medicines (Database of Medical Devices) Regulations 2003 within 30 days of initiating supply or export.

Similarly, every country that you market your products in has different regulatory demands. To sell your medical devices in Europe, for instance, they must have a CE mark. In the US, you need to apply for an Establishment Registration, get classified by the FDA, and meet requirements laid out by the US Quality System Regulation, among other steps for compliance.

While the medical industry in New Zealand has been largely self-regulated for many years, as manufacturers from the country have sought to grow in the global market, New Zealand has encouraged manufacturers to benefit from regulatory harmonisation initiatives like the Global Harmonisation Task Force (GHTF) to enjoy lower regulatory barriers, better-facilitated trade and improved access to new technologies.

Nonetheless, for every market you want to target, you have to ensure that you comply with the relevant regulations, making entry into new markets a complex, resource-intensive process.

Beyond these industry-specific challenges, if you rely on conventional marketing and sales, you will be held back by some problems that plague other industries as well. Traditional sales and marketing teams for medical devices struggle with manual lead assignments. They suffer from poor pipeline visibility which often lets leads slip through the cracks and prevents executive team members from effectively diagnosing and solving sales-related problems.

Traditional sales and marketing give company representatives no real-time insight into lead behaviours, activities, needs and product knowledge. And whatever data is generated about leads and customers gets gathered and managed disparately – if you’ve not yet invested in automating your sales and marketing, you know all too well how much time is wasted in manually compiling data into spreadsheets and how inefficient updating and accessing this information can be.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

According to Salesforce, medical device buyers and patients both prefer digital experiences, with 84% of consumers – B2B buyers included – interested in buying healthcare products directly online. Even among physicians who preferred in-person visits pre-pandemic, 47% now strongly prefer virtual engagements.

Beyond the clear benefit to your customers, there are some strong business reasons for you to automate your sales and marketing if you’re a medical device manufacturer.

Create a tailored dashboard.
Your business model and products are certainly different from those of the other medical device manufacturers in New Zealand. That’s why the best sales automation setups offer dashboards with custom fields, tailored to suit your business needs and product specifications. This means that you can monitor your pipeline effectively, using the jargon and standard operating procedures of your own business. No generic industry terms; only those that you want and need to see.

For instance, your dashboard can store product information for you – an activity that is extremely important when your product catalog is diverse, with different product versions having different specifications, use cases or target audiences. It can also store and help you effectively access data about the companies you are pursuing, the individuals in these companies involved in the sales process, active deals, the perfect products for the company based on their firmographics, and field activities like sales meetings or product demos that they have been taken through.

In other words, your tailored dashboard can be your one-stop shop for any and all data you need about a lead or customer.

Automate emails.
Automation tools can significantly shorten your sales cycle. Regardless of the duration of your sales cycle, you need to effectively nurture your leads every step of the way. As you go digital, one of the most fundamental ways in which you can do this is by automating emails to your customers based on their demographic, psychographic, firmographic or activity data.

If one of the leads you have generated through your website is from a cardiac specialty hospital, you can use this information to share with them your products related to heart health… ECG machines, pacemakers, stents, and more. If they demonstrate interest in a particular subset of these products by clicking on a link in the email, you’ve further refined your understanding of what they’re looking for. This data can help you nurture the lead via automated emailing until they’re ready for a product demo, in-person meeting or a purchase.

Deliver content dynamically.
As you gather data about your leads using tools like HubSpot, you can tailor the content that they see, and not just via email. Based on a lead’s interactions with your emails, website pages or social media ads, you can deliver to them a customised experience across digital channels. Let’s say a lead is particularly interested in diagnostic technologies, as you’ve gathered from their activity data – the next time they visit your website, you can give them a personalised experience, showing them product catalogs and case studies of the diagnostic devices that you make.

Manage leads.
As you move your marketing online and increase your share of inbound leads, you will gather lead data from website visitors via form submissions, your social media ad campaigns and other digital channels in addition to the in-person leads you get through in-person sales rep meetings, trade shows or word-of-mouth.

Using your automation tool, you can collate all your lead data into a central database. Using a rule-based system, the tool can route leads to the relevant salesperson. As the lead moves through the sales cycle and eventually becomes a customer, the appropriate sales, marketing, compliance and product teams can access lead data, ensuring full visibility for everyone in your organisation who needs it!

Track sales in real time.
With traditional manual marketing data management, it’s hard for you, as a business owner or executive leader, to get a comprehensive view of how your sales teams are performing at any point in time. This lack of immediate visibility can hamper or delay strategic decision-making, something that is crucial and time-sensitive in situations of demand fluctuations due to outbreaks, policy changes, or the like.

By using an automation tool, you can monitor your organisation’s sales performance in real time. You can get immediate insights into the state of your pipeline, conversion rates, average deal size, sales cycle duration and more. In the long run, you can also get data on the key factors that predict sales success for you, be it lead engagement, certain referral sources, order volumes, specific products, time of year, and more.

As you assess your team’s strengths and weaknesses, you can also use this data to gauge individual performance and your overall sales organisation’s health.

Simplify quoting and approvals.
As we saw earlier, medical device quoting can be a complex, time-intensive process if done manually. But automation tools can create rule-based quotations fairly quickly. This automates your workflow, gets you quick approvals, and easily manages different formats of quotations. Your sales reps can devote the time that they gain by streamlining this task to engage in more strategic discussions to drive growth for your company.

Ensure compliance.
Depending on the market you are manufacturing a medical device for and the specifics of the device in question, you will have a distinct set of standards and procedures to comply with for every order. Your automation tool can help you ensure that you are meeting all the required standards and regulatory requirements. No more fuss about entering diverse markets; set up an automation tool to do the job so that you can focus on delivering high-quality products.

Enhance customer support.
Whether it’s categorizing queries or addressing them swiftly, your automation tool can help your customers raise tickets and get support from the appropriate representative at your company. Such a system ensures that no support request goes unanswered. It also gives you enhanced visibility into your customers’ experiences with your product. This data can help you set in place a feedback loop, with customer queries and reviews being forwarded to the product, sales or compliance team, as appropriate.

If one thing is clear, it is that marketing and sales automation can transform your day-to-day operations, your customers’ experiences, and ultimately your bottom line by not only nurturing high-quality leads but also highlighting the right opportunities for upselling and cross-selling your products.

Selecting the right automation tools is certainly a step in the right direction. But your automation efforts must be combined with a thoughtful marketing strategy, rooted deeply in an understanding of your consumers. That’s what we pride ourselves on at Purple Turtle.

We design and deliver engaging digital strategies for your brand, be it young or established, as you embark on a journey of transformation. Strategies which deliver the outcomes your business deserves. We use data, we talk to your customers, we learn everything there is to learn about your business and we set SMART goals. We then design a blueprint for you to achieve those goals. Opportunities for quick winds, short-terms goals, long-term ones, activities and tactics that will get you tangible, measurable outcomes. And we constantly refine our approach based on the data we collect to measure your success.

Give us charge of your digital footprint – centred around your own piece of internet real estate: your website, while you focus on running and growing your business.

At Turtle, we connect the dots from brand to customer experience to performance at every digital touchpoint on the customer journey. Because no matter when and where your customers interact with you, we want you to be recognised for the purple cow that you are in a field of brown.