Latest / Clinician to CEO : Export Your Medical Device With Confidence By Overcoming Go To Market Roadblocks For Medtech Growth / #220 | Why More Salespeople Won't Fix Your MedTech Commercialisation & Export Strategy (For Clinicians)

Transcript

#220 | Why More Salespeople Won't Fix Your MedTech Commercialisation & Export Strategy (For Clinicians) · Clinician to CEO : Export Your Medical Device With Confidence By Overcoming Go To Market Roadblocks For Medtech Growth

• 0:00
  The one thing that you're gonna learn on today's episode is why hiring more salespeople after a slower than expected product launch is not gonna fix that commercial issue, and more importantly, what you should do instead.
• 0:12
  Welcome to Clinician to CEO, the podcast helping clinicians simplify your go-to-market strategy so that you can stop guessing and turn your working prototypes into international MedTech businesses.
• 0:24
  I'm your host, Hakeem Aade.
• 0:26
  Let's get started.
• 0:28
  The three things that you're gonna discover today are, number one, why commercialization has to start months before your product launches if you want to be successful.
• 0:36
  Number two, why hiring more salespeople won't fix a market that isn't ready for your product.
• 0:42
  And number three, how to know whether your customers are actually ready to adopt your product before you spend thousands trying to sell it So I was recently interviewed by Craig Ingram on his podcast, Raw Lessons Revealed, and the
• 0:55
  title of the podcast was How Do You Know Your Company's Go-To-Market Strategy Will Survive Market Entry?
• 1:01
  And during the conversation, then he challenged one of the biggest assumptions that companies make about commercialization.
• 1:07
  So what I want you to do, take a listen and then I'm gonna come back and unpack that specific section
• 1:13
  Craig T: We've got 15 million in venture capital money, and, we're gonna go out and we're gonna hire about 15 sales reps."
• 1:18
  Craig T: And I was like, "Timeout.
• 1:20
  Craig T: Stop."
• 1:20
  Craig T: You haven't prepped your market, you haven't warmed your market.
• 1:23
  Craig T: It's not gonna be getting high levels of commercial adoption, because prepping that market needs to start 12 to 15 months prior.
• 1:31
  Craig T: I mean, am I wrong?
• 1:32
  Hakeem: No, you are 100% right,
• 1:33
  Regulatory consultants
• 1:35
  Hakeem: have done a massively impressive job to say, Well, you just need regulatory and patents, and then you're good to go."
• 1:41
  Hakeem: When actually- as we both know, you need, that time when you're spending your 100, 200, 300, a million pounds on that sort of stuff- Yeah you need to focus on your commercialization.
• 1:50
  Hakeem: And if you don't believe it, go to look at any big blue chip pharma company or even specialist biotech.
• 1:56
  Hakeem: They will employ a team of market liaison officer, or whatever they want to call them, non-promo people allegedly, to prepare the market 12, 18 months before there's even a sniff of the products on the market.
• 2:07
  Hakeem: 'Cause as you said, they wanna make sure that when they launch it, everybody knows what the problem
• 2:11
  actually is So back to today's podcast.
• 2:14
  Let's unpack what we've just listened to.
• 2:17
  The main takeaway, as far as I'm concerned from that conversation, was this: too many founders think that commercialization starts once they've got regulatory approval, and it doesn't.
• 2:25
  By the time you've got regulatory approval, your commercial strategy should already be well underway.
• 2:30
  Think about what the biggest pharmaceutical companies do.
• 2:32
  They don't wait until launch day before they start commercializing, because before that, months before that, years in some cases, they're educating clinicians, they're engaging key opinion leaders, they're building awareness, they're understanding objections, and they're identifying the hospitals which
• 2:47
  are most likely to adopt their product.
• 2:49
  And e-effectively, they're creating demand before the product is even available.
• 2:52
  That's exactly the point that we were discussing in the interview.
• 2:55
  But then when you look at smaller companies, they do the exact opposite.
• 2:59
  They spend years developing the product.
• 3:00
  They spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on regulatory.
• 3:02
  They then launch and then ask, Right, how do we sell this?"
• 3:06
  That's completely the wrong way around.
• 3:08
  So three key takeaways here.
• 3:10
  Takeaway number one, commercialization starts before launch.
• 3:13
  One of the biggest mindset shifts that founders have to make is understanding that commercialization isn't something that you just bolt on at the end.
• 3:20
  It should influence product design.
• 3:22
  It should influence clinical evidence, pricing, market access, distribution, absolutely everything.
• 3:28
  If you only start thinking about customers once your product is ready, you've already lost valuable time.
• 3:33
  Then takeaway number two is stop expecting salespeople to create demand.
• 3:37
  One thing that Craig said that really resonated with me is that companies often hire fifteen salespeople and then expect them to educate the market, create the demand, and then somehow close sales as well.
• 3:49
  That's really incredibly difficult, if you think about it, getting one person trying to do all that sort of stuff.
• 3:53
  Salespeople are brilliant at converting demand.
• 3:56
  They're much less effective when they're expected to create it from scratch.
• 4:00
  And if nobody understands the problem, and I'm talking about the customers, if nobody understands the problem that your product solves, then every sales conversation is starting from ground zero, and that's expensive, it's slow, and it's why so many
• 4:11
  launches lead to disappointing and subpar results.
• 4:14
  So takeaway number three, start with what keeps your customers awake at night.
• 4:19
  Whenever I work with a company, I ask one question before we talk about the product, and that is, What keeps your customer awake at night?"
• 4:25
  Not what keeps you awake at night, Not what features have you built, whether you're in business or not, whether you've got a product or not, whether you've got service or not, whether you've presented that to the customer, your
• 4:34
  customer already has objectives.
• 4:37
  They already have pressures.
• 4:38
  They already have problems that they're trying to solve.
• 4:40
  If your product helps them achieve those objectives better than they're doing today, they'll listen.
• 4:45
  If it doesn't, they won't.
• 4:46
  That's why understanding your customer is one of the most valuable commercial activities you can do, and focusing on what's keeping them up at night, what are the things that they need to solve is the way that you actually
• 4:58
  achieve and deliver a product that serves the customer.
• 5:01
  So now over to you, as always.
• 5:03
  the action I want you to take is before you spend any money on sales or any more money on sales, before you recruit another distributor, before you book another exhibition, yourself one question: Have you prepared your market, or
• 5:18
  are you expecting your product launch to do all the hard work?
• 5:21
  Because if the answer is that you haven't prepared your market, it doesn't matter how good your product is.
• 5:25
  So preparing the market isn't a nice-to-have.
• 5:28
  It's one of the biggest competitive advantages that you can actually create.
• 5:32
  And if you're preparing to commercialize or export a medical device, spending two or three months understanding your market now could save you years of trying to force adoption later.
• 5:41
  Because the companies that achieve the fastest adoption rarely have the best launch, they have the best preparation
• 5:47
  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.
• 5:56
  Hakeem: Or adoption.
• 5:57
  Hakeem: Do not guess.
• 5:59
  Hakeem: Book a healthcare export accelerator diagnostic Call with me.
• 6:02
  Hakeem: Use my link in the show notes.
• 6:04
  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.
• 6:13
  Hakeem: Thanks for tuning in.
• 6:15
  Hakeem: Until next time, thanks for listening.
• 6:17
  Hakeem: Keep challenging your assumptions and keep growing.