There’s no doubting the impact the COVID-19 pandemic has had – both in healthcare and our everyday lives. Telehealth and telemedicine are here to stay, and we are only just beginning to see the ripple effects of their wake. Medtech sales organizations, in particular, have experienced seismic shifts.
Has the golden era of the medical sales representative passed by? In what feels like a bygone era, sales reps were once the friendly faces clinicians could count on to act as the bridge between acute care and the broader industry. They would politely buy lunch, answer questions about products, and even scrub-in to support difficult cases with their provider counterparts. Building these lifelong relationships has always been the true strength of any successful product launch or marketing campaign. Though many senior salespeople still have the relationships they’ve built up from decades past, the younger generation must contend with new obstacles.
These days, there is no shortage of hurdles that young medical sales reps must overcome to get the job done. Vendor credentialing, more expansive territories, higher travel costs, and resource restrictions are only a few of the challenges they must contend with to hit their numbers. Considering the supply chain shortages plaguing the industry in early 2022, most sales directors found success by reinvesting in their previous relationships and cross-selling to their existing clientele. But the pandemic has had significant impacts on marketing as well. Increasingly, clinicians from all backgrounds and modalities are flooded with a virtual torrent of ongoing marketing campaigns. Social media and email have become a sea of white noise and targeting ads. Many marketers are alarmed by the drop in reading and reply rates for email campaigns, while participation in webinars has also declined. The Clinician eXchange posits this question – how do sales and marketing teams across the medtech industry evolve with the times?
Our solution: If patients can see their care providers virtually, why can’t medical device reps do the same? To bridge the disconnect between industry and care, we’ve decided to connect our clinicians through a new service – Virtual Clinician aXess (VCX). The concept is simple – a virtual sales and marketing solution that allows for direct communication between key clinical decision makers and innovators of new technologies. This knocks out two birds with one stone – sales teams get the opportunity to build new relationships while marketing teams gets to test new strategies and collect voice of customer data. These clinicians possess the voice and ability to impact change in their facilities and thereby set the course for the adoption of new innovations across their health systems.
At The Clinician eXchange, we strive to be the organization that changes the face of healthcare by bridging the gap between the greatest minds in industry with those providers in need of enhanced technology. The pandemic and the ensuing supply chain disruptions have severely hampered medtech’s ability to have meaningful connections with these providers. The days of roaming the halls and “scrub-sink” discussions are challenged, and medtech must adapt to these challenges by adopting new means of communication. Virtual is here to stay, so at a time when circumstances continue to produce lemons for medtech, VCX is the lemonade!
UPCOMING VCX EVENTS:
JANUARY 12, 2023: INTERVENTIONAL RADIOLOGY / VASCULAR SURGERY - Click here to register
FEBRUARY 28, 2023: SPINAL SURGEONS
MARCH 2023: CHIEF NURSING OFFICERS
JULY 2023: OR MANAGERS
