How to leverage data to optimize sales account targeting for your medical device

Medical device manufacturers seeking market distribution are facing a road fraught with speed bumps. Organizations looking to innovate existing products must provide exceptional clinical evidence that demonstrates their devices' superiority and cost-effectiveness. For devices involved with new procedures or standards of care, the pathway is even more challenging, as training even one physician or care team on these novel diagnostic paradigms, procedural workflows, and patient selection processes can take months.

To put it simply, medical device sales can be tough for any organization. To get ahead, savvy medtech organizations leverage real-world data to make planning more efficient and target their marketing efforts.

The importance of sales account targeting in medtech

According to McKinsey and reported by Forbes, organizations that use data to drive their targeting are 23 times more likely to acquire customers, six times as likely to retain customers, and 19 times as likely to be profitable.

Using data to shape your medtech sales strategy allows you to be consultative-when you provide data points that are specific to a healthcare professional (HCP) or healthcare organization (HCO), you come across as a potential partner who understands their interests, rather than just another company hawking a product.

Targeted outreach is almost always more effective than a generic, scattershot approach, regardless of the industry or organization in question. But tailoring your sales pitch to your unique audience is even more important in a highly technical field like medtech, where users and stakeholders seek solutions that deliver measurable clinical benefits as well as enhanced ROI.

What types of data should you leverage for medtech sales targeting?

Whether you're targeting an HCP or HCO, you should leverage a variety of data sources to better understand your audience and customize your sales approach to their needs. Using intelligence from public and private sources like medical claims clearinghouses, government agencies, self-reported facility data, and datasets from third-party vendors, you can home in on or filter out HCPs and HCOs based on data points like:

• Patient population
• Estimated revenue opportunity
• Specialty
• Job title
• Diagnostic codes
• Affiliations
• Procedures
• GPO bid awards
• Facility type
• Site of care

While there are many different categories of intelligence worth using, these are the kinds you'll likely be working with most often:

1. Reference and affiliation data contains information about HCPs, including their specialties and affiliations with healthcare facilities and their networks. You can use it to map and prioritize potential sales opportunities based on relevance, network connections, or relation to your competition.
2. Internal sales data maps your current market penetration by geography and account based on sales volume, revenue from specific products or services, and customer demographics.
3. External sales data contains utilization insights like procedure volumes, prescription trends, and patient demographics, helping you uncover opportunities and anticipate growth.

Common data applications in sales account targeting

The medtech sector has fierce competition and market dynamics can change quickly, so having a bespoke data strategy that leverages your internal strengths and aligns with your market approach is crucial for maximizing medtech sales efficiency, maintaining a competitive advantage, and driving sustainable growth.

Your market approach and chosen activities will determine which data you need and how to use it. Here are a few common applications for data that may be relevant to your sales strategy:

Understand references and affiliations

Using reference and affiliations data to chart the connection between physicians, hospitals, and other healthcare facilities, medtech companies can identify key influencers, understand referral patterns, and uncover new avenues for product adoption and sales growth. This is a foundational layer for strategic planning that allows companies to maximize their reach and target more effectively.

Identify areas of strength and weakness

Analyzing internal sales data gives companies a clear picture of where they stand in terms of market penetration across different regions and accounts. Understanding your current footprint can help you identify areas of strength to fortify and areas of weakness in need of additional focus.

Map the market

Data specific to different facilities can also prove helpful for targeted marketing. For instance, knowing a hospital's statistics highlights where their weaknesses lie and can prompt a conversation about their processes and procedures, education programs, and broader patient outcome improvement initiatives. Using this information, you can determine how your device may improve any of these areas.

Narrow your prospects

To find the highest value targets, you need to narrow the scope of your search.

For instance, start by filtering out your pool-whether patients, buyers, target accounts, influencers, or users-based on applicable diagnoses or procedures, excluding those who don't meet the target criteria. Then, infuse in some segmentation, such as GPO affiliation, IBN affiliation, physician specialty, physician group-whatever is relevant to your business. Continue to narrow it down by adding other inclusion or exclusion criteria until you have a highly curated list of target healthcare professionals and facilities that diagnose or treat your patient population.

For example, you might start with patients diagnosed with glaucoma, then narrow down based on the following specifications:

• Only those who received laser treatment
• Just patients who received this procedure for implantation of a glaucoma stent
• Only patients who experienced complications within 90 days of the procedure

In the end, you will have a list of eligible patients for the device's procedure, HCPs who determine eligibility, HCPs who treat the patient or perform the procedure, and facilities where the procedure is being performed.

Learn more

Getting the data you need to power a medtech sales account targeting strategy can take a lot of time and effort. Not only do you need to research reliable data sources, pull and compile the data, then cleanse and organize it to meet your needs, you'll also need to keep it up to date if you plan on tracking performance over time.

Want a simpler solution? Our healthcare commercial intelligence combines data from numerous sources with AI-enhanced analytics and deep industry expertise to help you navigate your market and discover commercial success. Sign up for a free trial of the Definitive Healthcare platform today and see how we can support your medtech sales goals.

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