Latest / Clinician to CEO : Export Your Medical Device With Confidence By Overcoming Go To Market Roadblocks For Medtech Growth / #213 | 5 Commercialisation Lessons Every MedTech Founder Should Know Before Launch (For Clinicians)

Transcript

#213 | 5 Commercialisation Lessons Every MedTech Founder Should Know Before Launch (For Clinicians) · Clinician to CEO : Export Your Medical Device With Confidence By Overcoming Go To Market Roadblocks For Medtech Growth

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  One thing you're gonna learn in today's episode is the five lessons that every med tech founder should know before launching a new product Welcome to Clinician to CEO, the podcast helping clinicians simplify your go-to-market strategy so that you
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  can stop guessing and turn your working prototypes into international MedTech businesses.
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  I'm your host, Hakeem Aade.
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  Let's get started.
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  the three things that you're gonna discover today is, number one, why clinical evidence alone doesn't create adoption.
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  Number two, how to move your product from nice to have to must have.
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  And then number three, why the most successful launches begin long before launch date.
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  So let's get straight into it.
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  Here are the five biggest lessons I took away from my conversation with Holly Miller.
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  Takeaway number one, adoption doesn't happen by accident.
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  One of the biggest messages from my episode with Holly was this: adoption isn't automatic.
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  It's actually engineered.
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  Too Many med tech companies believe that if they build a better product and generate strong clinical evidence, adoption will naturally follow.
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  Spoiler alert I'm afraid it won't.
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  You have to prepare the market before you ever ask it to change.
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  And the action that I want you to take here is to ask yourself, what are you doing today to prepare the market for adoption?
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  And with that in mind, I want you to spend thirty minutes listing everything that you're doing today to prepare the market to adopt your product.
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  Then once you finish that list, ask yourself which of those activities is actually changing behavior and which is simply making people more aware of your product.
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  Circle the activity that you believe will have the biggest impact on adoption, and then that's the next thing to improve Focus on that, and as I always say focus on that one thing.
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  Don't focus on five or ten things.
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  Takeaway number two: become a must have, not a nice to have.
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  And we discussed on the episode that every product ends up in one of three buckets; must have, nice to have, or they're just not interested.
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  Sadly, lots of med tech products end up as nice to haves, and people then think, "Oh, well, adoption is gonna naturally follow."
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  It doesn't happen like that.
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  Your job is to identify one specific problem for one specific audience that only your product can solve.
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  And to help you do that, the action I want you to take is go and take a blank piece of paper, we're gonna be doing a lot of this, and write your product at the top of that blank
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  sheet.
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  Then write down must have, nice to have, not interested.
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  And then I want you to be brutally honest.
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  Which box would your target customer put you in today?
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  And be honest, 'cause that's the only way that you're gonna move forward.
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  If it isn't must have, then write down the single biggest reason why, and then that's the problem that you need to solve next.
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  Takeaway number three, people don't change because of data.
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  And this is probably one of the biggest mindset shifts for me actually, because Holly said something that really challenges the way, not just clinicians, but the w- the way a lot of people in business think.
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  Data doesn't change behavior, emotion does.
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  People generally will use data to justify the decisions that they've already emotionally committed to.
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  And there's a subtle difference there, but it's a vital one.
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  So the action here is go to your homepage or your sales deck or your product brochure, and then highlight every statement that talks about features, technology, or clinical evidence.
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  Put that in orange, highlight in orange.
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  Then go and highlight everything that explains why your customer should care, and put that in green.
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  If most of your messaging is about your product rather than your customer problem, i.e., you've got more orange than you've got green, then what you need to do this week is rewrite your opening message, and actually start looking
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  at rewriting your homepage, so that it starts with the problem that you solve, not the product that you've built.
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  Takeaway number four, don't try and sell to everyone.
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  This is a, a common mistake that you just think "Oh, it's a massive market.
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  There's loads of people.
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  I'm gonna sell it 'cause everyone wants it."
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  One of the best examples that we discussed in the episode was the migraine device.
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  The technology already existed.
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  The challenge was not the product, it was finding the right audience.
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  So instead of trying to sell to everyone with migraines, they don't like to see their children in pain, and they don't really want to give them medication.
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  So that migraine device was perfectly positioned, and it's when they changed their target audience, when adoption started to increase.
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  So for you, I want you to take this action.
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  List every customer segment that could use your product or device, and then look at which group is most desperate for a solution, and therefore most likely to see your product as a must-have rather than a nice-to-have, and then
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  start there.
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  And for that group write down what keeps them awake at night, why would they change today?
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  Why are they more likely to adopt than everyone else?
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  That then confirms that's Probably the market that you should be targeting.
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  takeaway number five, launch day is too late.
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  And this is probably the most important lesson from the whole conversation.
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  This is what it was all framed around really.
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  a-and that lesson was this: If you're waiting until launch to create demand, you're already behind.
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  educating the market, changing beliefs, and building trust before asking people to adopt something new, and that's how products become standards of care.
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  So the action I want you to take here is write down the three biggest barriers stopping your product being adopted today, and then ask yourself, what could you have done six months ago to reduce each of these barriers?
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  Now, whatever you write down, start doing it now because you may be at launch, which is great, so you're ahead of the curve, and then you might have already launched, so you might be slightly behind the curve.
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  But the second best time to prepare the market if you've missed a launch is today.
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  So in closing, if there's one lesson that I took away from my conversation with Holly, it's this: clinical evidence gets you considered, but adoption gets you commercial success.
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  And the companies that win don't just build better products, they build belief, they prepare the market, they create trust, and by the time that they launch, the market is already ready to adopt.
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  And if you're still slightly skeptical, just have a think about any product that you use and that you've, you think is a must-have, and just think about the way that product was marketed, and you'll see they've gone through
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  these steps.
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  And Holly really said it so well, Adoption isn't won at launch, it's engineered months beforehand."
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  Hakeem: And if you're building a MedTech business and you're not sure whether your next move should be around evidence, market access, commercialization, distributor strategy.
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  Hakeem: Or adoption.
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  Hakeem: Do not guess.
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  Hakeem: Book a healthcare export accelerator diagnostic Call with me.
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  Hakeem: Use my link in the show notes.
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  Hakeem: And in that session I'll help you identify the specific constraints blocking your momentum and the commercial move most likely to unlock your progress.
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  Hakeem: Thanks for tuning in.
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  Hakeem: Until next time, thanks for listening.
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  Hakeem: Keep challenging your assumptions and keep growing.