A Digital Marketer’s Secret to Boost Your Medical Devices Sales Process

The difficulties of selling medical devices to healthcare institutions are well known.

Hospitals and clinics take procurement very seriously, and often B2B medical device sellers have to account for entire buying committees — not just one decision maker.

On top of having to deal with multiple cooks in the kitchen, B2B healthcare sales are notoriously long, with only 43% of sales closing within the first six months — with some sales taking upwards of two years.

Keeping stakeholders engaged throughout this whole process is a sales nightmare.

But I don’t have to tell you that.

Part of the difficulty comes from the fact that your buyers are becoming more sensitive to hard pitches, and have access to way more information prior to signing the dotted line.

After all, more than 72% of potential medical buyers start with a search, and by the time they’re ready to reach out to a vendor, they’re already 60% to 90% down the sales funnel.

As a medical B2B company, you have to stay ahead of the trend — lest you lose more market share to digitally savvy competitors.

But what can you do about eternal sales-cycles, endless back-and-forths with 10 different decision makers, and growing skepticism from stakeholders?

Account-based marketing, that’s what.

What is Account Based Marketing?

At its core, account based marketing (ABM) is a B2B digital marketing tactic that combines the efforts of both, marketing and sales, to target your ideal buyers as quickly as possible with the least amount of effort.

So, rather than an all-encompassing approach that targets the largest possible customer-base, ABM is hyper-focused on the highest value, most sales-ready leads.

While ABM as a tactic is still in its infancy, B2B marketers are reporting incredible results: 91% say that using ABM has resulted in closing larger deal sizes. 30.5% say that ABM gets them 21% to 50% larger deals per lead.

How Does ABM Impact Traditional Sales Methods for Medical Devices?

ABM is the silver bullet your sales team has been looking for.

While there are many benefits — in fact, we’ve put together a list of nearly 50 ABM tactics — below, we dive into two ways ABM can immediately impact your medical devices sales process.

Marketing Automation to Hyperboost Your Prospecting

Like we established above, medical device purchasing cycles are lengthy processes, with only 43% of B2B healthcare sales made within the first six months and some deals taking as long as two years to close.

(Source: Colony Health)

And that’s why marketing automation is a necessity.

You’re already collecting vast amounts of data about the leads you are pulling in — i.e., their region, job title, company, etc. And that’s just the data you’re aware of.

Your website (assuming you have Google Analytics and proper tracking setup) is also collecting behavioural data about your leads:

• Pages they’ve visited
• How long they spent on each page
• Which forms they’ve filled out
• Which links they’ve clicked

You have an incredibly detailed psychometric profile of every lead that’s visited your website — and you probably don’t know it yet.

What you’re also most likely not aware of, is that you can leverage every bit of that data in your marketing automation efforts.

Think about this for a moment.

How does someone from your sales team decide whether or not someone is a good lead?

Well, there’s the high-level qualifiers, like:

• Is this person in one of our sales regions?
• Does this person work in the industry/company we want to target?
• Is this person a decision maker we want to spend our time on?

But once the sales process begins, the questions get a lot more granular:

• What types of pain points is this lead trying to address?
• Which product/service would they most benefit from?
• How far along in their decision-making process are they?

And as it stands, most of your salespeople have to get answers to these questions themselves. They’ll manually scrub your CRM for quality leads, and then follow up with time-consuming, soul-crushing phone-calls (wasting most of their time on leads who aren’t ready to convert yet).

But what if you could automate this entire process, and have your sales team focus only on high-ticket, sales-ready leads?

Well, that’s exactly what marketing automation can do.

By leveraging lead-scoring, you can automatically prioritize leads that fit specific criteria like firmographics (company, job, etc.), location, and even behaviour (to determine how ready they are to convert).

But that’s not all.

You can also automate most of the initial engagement.

By creating nurture-tracks (automated rulesets that serve your leads specific content at a specific time), you can automatically share your most useful articles at the most useful time — growing your authority and building a relationship with your leads.

This way, your sales team can focus not only on leads that meet a specific set of criteria, but who have also been nurtured and engaged for weeks, months, or even years with useful content from your brand.

However, Be Mindful of Compliance Regulations

Within any ABM strategy designed for the medical space, you must be acutely aware of potential regulatory challenges.

The information that you put in front of your buyer personas — i.e., doctors, hospital admins, CFOs, MSOs, etc. — is limited by the regulations of your country/state. For instance, you’ll need to be careful with the claims that you make about your product.

Whether it be HIPAA, AKS, or any other of the number of B2B healthcare marketing regulations, failure to comply leaves you open to fines of up to $50,000.

Enhance Your Trade Show Presence

Medical device sales teams have traditionally relied on trade shows to generate new leads, and that’s not about to change anytime soon.

ABM is a perfect opportunity to enhance your sales team’s presence on a show floor.

An ABM trade-show strategy can help you identify high-value attendees, and to start engaging and nurturing them before you even hit the show floor.

Here are a few tips for how you can enhance your company’s presence at industry events:

• Do your research beforehand. Identify and monitor the key attendees at the event. Prepare insights for your sales team — like names, company details, and any relevant offers. Additionally, set alerts and follow social channels around the event to monitor engagement.
• Prepare a variety of content. After identifying key attendees and trends around an event, prepare material that can be posted beforehand and during the event. Whether it be blogs, tech sheets, videos, or any kind of content, your sales teams will be equipped no matter their in-person interactions.
• Target specific keywords. Identify what keywords attendees of the event would be searching ({event name} schedule, {event name} location, etc.). This is a great way to put high-impact content right in front of attendees using highly targeted keywords with a PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaign.
• Set-up meetings beforehand. With all this research prepared, your sales teams can accurately reach out to potential buyers with offers prepared that will entice them to seek out your booth.

Read More About B2B Medical Marketing and ABM:

• 3 Ways to Improve Your B2B Healthcare Marketing Strategy
• The Complete Collection of B2B Healthcare Marketing Statistics, Trends, and Campaign Examples (2019)
• 6 Keys to a Successful B2B Marketing Strategy for Medical Devices

Leverage ABM in your Medical Devices Sales Process

The benefits of adopting ABM in your medical devices marketing are abundant, but it’s clear that this is no simple task.

After all, we’ve identified nearly 50 tactics that can be used to create your unique strategy.

To start generating leads with ABM as quickly as possible, consider hiring a digital marketing agency with proven experience. This way, you’ll get a team complete with ABM, content, and SEO specialists that can begin automating your lead generation and prospecting systems.

Jumpfactor is a full-service digital marketing agency specializing in helping B2B businesses such as healthcare solutions and medical device providers increase their revenue. By leveraging strategies like ABM, we’ve enabled companies to boost revenue by up to 5X faster than their competitors. Contact us today to get started!