Pivotal crm for medical device manufacturers

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ManufacturersGo to Market the Way You Innovate

Executive Summary

Medical device manufacturers need to get the right products into the hands of the right customers. Faced with opportunities to capitalize on high growth rates, new markets, and increasingly global alliances, forward-thinking organizations are intent on leading their markets by pursuing smarter, more disciplined development strategies. The goal is to get more profitable and innovative products to market—more cost-effectively—to out-run the competition. Effective and innovative product development is thus dominating the business agenda.

Pivotal CRM | Business Paper �

Go to Market the Way You InnovateMedical device manufacturers need to get the right products into the hands of the right customers. Faced with opportunities to capitalize on high growth rates, new markets, and increasingly global alliances, forward-thinking organizations are intent on leading their markets by pursuing smarter, more disciplined development strategies. The goal is to get more profitable and innovative products to market—more cost-effectively—to out-run the competition. Effective and innovative product development is thus dominating the business agenda.

At Pivotal CRM, we believe there’s an even greater opportunity for medical device manufacturers. You can realize further advantages by investing in technology solutions that inject critical market intelligence into the development process and engage your company in instant, two-way dialogues with customers. In fact, incorporating the voice of your customers into product and marketing strategies can transform your organization.

You’re already putting a lot of thought and effort into product innovation and development. At Pivotal CRM, we help you put the same thought and effort into the way you get your products to market. We provide you with the solutions you need to commercialize your products more quickly than the competition. Developing innovative sales and marketing processes can shave weeks—or even months—off the time it currently takes to get your products to your customers. The result? First-mover advantage. And first-mover profit.

Help Your Organization Present a Single Face to CustomersAs a medical device manufacturer, you likely sell a range of products to multiple organizations. For prospects to become your customers, you need to deliver a smooth buying and service experience with professional and well-informed personnel whose approach is tailored to meet each facility’s unique needs. When you present a consistent image to the market, you improve brand recognition and market profile, enhance the quality of customer interactions, and shorten sales cycles.

Share Information Effectively with Distributors and Partners Your organization may sell its products directly to customers, work with distributors, or both. When several parties are involved in the sales process, it’s essential to exchange the appropriate information. A system to manage distributors, the contracts you have with them, their volume commitments, and their pricing structures makes selling simpler. Your sales teams can better manage co-selling opportunities and ensure that the right distributors are involved.

Integrate Data from Multiple Organizations Smoothly Through Rapid GrowthWhen your organization grows through acquisition or consolidation, you often inherit fragmented technology systems and business processes. The challenge is to re-engineer, streamline, and improve as your enterprise evolves. A system designed to integrate new data and business processes helps you gain insight into corporate performance, which results in better planning. Your sales teams function more efficiently and sales cycles are shortened.

Overcome The Limitations of Legacy Systems and Hard-coded ApplicationsAs your industry changes, your organization changes with it. New regulations, new markets, and increasing competition drive new requirements all the time. Using generic technology systems or applications designed specifically for the pharmaceutical industry can constrain your ability to create and modify unique business processes. A system designed with the inevitability of change in mind enables you to adjust more readily, get products to market more quickly, and devote your resources to moving forward.


Avoid Paying the Price for Being LateResearch shows that, on average, every month a product is late to market decreases its gross profit potential by �0%. Automated sales and marketing capabilities can decrease the time it takes to get your products out the door. The impact on your business can be dramatic; you’ll capture market share by getting your products to customers before your competitors do.

Ensure You Have the Right Team Assigned to Each AccountAs a medical device manufacturer, you constantly look for ways to improve the sales process. You likely have numerous sales teams, each responsible for working within a particular geographic area. Some sales members may be qualified to sell more than one product line or to target more than one facility type. You may segment your sales force into distinct units based on expertise; you may segment further according to facility type, size, or account size.

When you segment your customers according to criteria beyond simple geographic boundaries, you refine the sales process. You can fine-tune the process further by monitoring and controlling the way sales members are assigned to accounts. When the appropriate personnel are in contact with an account, they generate more business and shorten the sales cycle.

Depending on the type of product being sold, you may need to include staff qualified for training, installation, or support with the information surrounding a particular account. Just as your sales teams may be segmented by role and geographic area, your support staff may be organized according to similar criteria. When you include all supporting staff in your approach to segmenting customers, you extend the efficiency of the sales process into implementation and support areas. When people are assigned to a team for a specific purpose, being associated with a defined role makes them more accountable.

Understand Complex Customer Inter-relationships to Target the Right InfluencersYour company’s sales teams need to understand the numerous relationships that exist at customer facilities. Not only do they sell to a facility’s purchasing department, they also need to interact with individual doctors and lab technicians. Being able to determine easily who the key influencers are at each facility, their departments, their specialty areas, and their level of influence on others helps your sales teams target the right people to close deals. Any insight that your non-sales employees have into customers can help, too.

Facilities such as hospitals often have committees responsible for making decisions about large purchases. Sales reps who do not have access to this information may spend too much time trying to uncover details or working with the wrong contacts, which reduces their productivity and lengthens the sales process. When you map out existing relationships between contacts, your sales representatives can target the most influential contacts at a facility and sell more effectively. They spend less time chasing the wrong people, and they gain insight into which relationships have the most potential. Over time, strengthening these relationships with influencers can help close deals faster and increase revenue per sale.

Beyond the inter-relationships within a customer facility, your sales teams benefit from understanding the relationships your customers have with other organizations, such as Group Purchasing Organizations (GPOs), distributors, and industry associations. In some cases, groups of facilities form Integrated Delivery Networks (IDNs); understanding the relationships between members is often extremely important. Sales representatives should also know which facilities comprise each IDN; selling to one facility in an IDN may lead to opportunities with other facilities in the IDN.

Understanding and taking advantage of the relationships between facilities gives your sales representatives insight into channels of influence and new sales opportunities that may exist outside of an individual customer facility. In many cases, understanding these relationships ensures accurate pricing and can lead to your products being purchased by other facilities in a network.

CHALLENGE ONE: When your competitors get their products to market before you lose market share. You may even have to wait out the lifespan of competitor contracts before regaining entry into the market.


Monitor Contracts for Their Duration to Ensure that Volume Commitments are Fulfilled, Expirations are Tracked, and Renewals are Processed On TimeOnce a quote has been approved and accepted by a customer, it has to be converted to a contract that reflects the details defined in the quote. This ensures that the pricing offered when fulfilling orders is correct. Contract details must always be monitored for volume commitments and expiration dates. Volume commitments, in particular, often dictate pricing structures, so keeping track of customers’ progress along these lines is essential to maintaining the margins calculated for a given contract.

When you give your sales representatives tools to keep track of numerous contracts and the details they contain, the entire quote-to-contract process is streamlined to increase efficiency and minimize costly errors. They can track competitor and contract expirations to ensure that existing contracts are renewed and that competitor contracts are replaced. You maintain market share and can even gain market share by overtaking your competitors.

Create Effective, High-impact Marketing Campaigns to Generate Leads and Drive Additional RevenueYour organization likely devotes considerable resources to advertising and promotions at tradeshows. For many medical device manufacturers, tradeshows are an excellent forum for announcing new products and getting face-to-face feedback from customers.

It’s important that all prospects and customers know about your company’s presentations well in advance. Marketing automation systems enable you to deliver targeted information to specific groups, whether your goal is to announce an upcoming tradeshow, create effective Continuing Medical Education (CME) events to promote products, or distribute clinical research studies and journal articles. Your marketing teams can profile customers and prospects, target them with highly personalized and relevant messages, deliver each message at the right time via the right channel, and ensure consistent and effective follow-up. Disseminating information to target lists is faster and more efficient than having sales reps send out information to one customer at a time.

Automatically Assign the Right Leads to the Right People Quickly and ConsistentlyOnce a marketing campaign is in progress, leads are generated from your target prospects or customer base. The question is what to do with them. You don’t want to let hot leads just sit there getting cold. Forwarding them to the right sales reps immediately keeps up a campaign’s momentum. Taking advantage of marketing automation enables you to assign leads to sales representatives according to the way customers are segmented and prioritized. After every campaign, your sales team can analyze and track leads throughout the sales cycle. From geography to product of interest to customer characteristics, you can ensure that the right sales representative receives every qualified lead—every time.


Don’t allow profit margins—or your revenue potential— to get squeezed. Increased profit margins and revenue potential is more than a matter of product quality or effectiveness. Centralize the way you manage opportunities to improve the way quotes are handled. Relate essential quoting functions to the goals of your organization. Develop realistic and appropriate performance standards. Educate and develop opportunities to sustain, improve or build on employee performance.

Ensure Appropriate Pricing for Every Customer to Minimize Fluctuations in RevenueAs a routine part of the sales process, sales teams must provide price quotes for the products customers are most interested in. Pricing is based on a number of factors, so sales representatives need to understand all of the relevant relationships involved to be sure that they are providing accurate and appropriate prices. Limited knowledge about these relationships can lead to incorrectly priced quotes, which has a direct effect on sales revenue.

Without fully understanding existing relationships with GPOs and distributors, the likelihood of misquoting a price is tremendous. This is complicated further when a facility wants to purchase a large quantity of products that justifies an appropriate pricing break. Add to this the dimension of purchase versus lease, and the pricing options multiply dramatically.

When your sales teams have access to every pricing option, they can provide quotes that accurately reflect their knowledge of the customer relationship and the products that the customer relies on. Sales productivity rises and the revenue fluctuations due to inconsistent quoting are minimized.

Know the Primary Vendor for Each Facility to Ensure Valid Price QuotesSales representatives also need to know who the primary vendor is for each facility so they can appropriately channel their sales approach and provide appropriate price quotes. Similarly, the representatives’ lack of insight into which distributors the facility works with could result in quotes that are incorrect, which increases customer dissatisfaction and affects your company’s credibility when obtaining future business.

Gain Management’s Approval on Pricing Before Sending Quotes to Customers and Minimize the Revisions that Can Disrupt a Potential SaleBased on the relationships your sales representatives have with customers, some proposed discounts or pricing breaks may exceed acceptable limits or margins. If sales managers are notified each time a quote is below a suggested price, they can investigate the quote further and propose a new amount consistent with established ranges. In these cases, following an approval-process workflow prior to sharing a quote with a customer can prevent over-discounting.

When sales managers have a way to review inappropriate quotes before they are sent to customers, they can intervene if necessary. The entire process becomes more efficient because you minimize excessive discounting, and customers receive quotes that do not have to be revised.

Products Are Your Lifeblood; Track Essential Details for Each and Every One to Increase Up-Sell RevenueYour sales teams need to know which required components must be sold along with a product, as well as the optional components that are available, in order to take advantage of cross-selling and up-selling opportunities. The most effective way to keep everyone informed is through a comprehensive product catalog.

But creating a catalog is only a first step; keeping it updated with new product information is often more complicated. Not only does the catalog need to include comprehensive product details, it must often be used to track the way product information changes over time. Furthermore, you must ensure that your company frequently updates important regulatory and coding and coverage information, enabling sales teams to discuss product details and counter objections during the sales cycle.

Tracking product details helps your organization understand the relationship between the profitability of products and the sales activities associated with them. Ultimately, streamlining these relationships saves time and leads to increases in revenue.

CHALLENGE TWO: When your sales representatives misquote or lose track of contract details, they lose opportunities to cross-sell, up-sell, renew existing contracts, and capitalize on your competitors‘ contract expirations.


Keep track of distributor relationships—and capitalize on them—to boost revenues for the long term. In dealing with your distributors, it’s essential to be flexible. Collaborate with your distributors during the selling process, and build a methodology for managing partners.

Associate Distributors With the Appropriate Sales Team to Streamline the Sales ProcessYou may be working with one or more distributors who have exclusive rights to sell one of your company’s products; in some cases these distributors may even co-sell a product with your own sales team. In these situations, it is important to make sure that the appropriate distributor is connected with your sales team so that a sales member working on that account knows which distributor should be involved, in what capacity, and for which products.

Associating relevant third parties with your sales teams extends the efficiency of the sales process beyond your organization—to complement the processes of outside partners involved with a given customer account. Your organization benefits further by extending process efficiency to everyone involved with an account, both inside and outside your company. You also improve your ability to identify potential distributor deals and co-selling opportunities.

Monitor and Manage Distributor Volume Commitments, and Gain Insight Into Relationships Between GPOS, IDNS, and Individual Facilities It is often difficult to track the complex relationships between distributors, GPOs, IDNs and individual facilities. For a start, you can monitor the way your distributors fulfill their contracts to ensure that they price products accurately when giving volume discounts. Non-performing distributors can be charged penalties and you’ll have a way to evaluate each distributor for future contracts.

A system that can track all of these inter-relationships minimizes the chance of pricing your products inappropriately; you understand the agreements that are already in place. Furthermore, your company may create GPO- and distributor-specific pricing based on contracts that you have with each individual GPO or distributor. These pricing options may be made to match the effective period of the contract. Your company needs to be able to place timeframes around individual pricing options to ensure compliance with contracts, and also to allow for promotional time periods. Incorrect quoting can lead to rebates for frustrated customers, which damages the credibility of your company.

CHALLENGE THREE: When you have trouble managing distributors, their pipelines, and their contracts, your bottom line suffers.


Ensure That Managers Have Tools to Measure the Effectiveness of Sales Teams and DistributorsWhen you take advantage of tools that provide insight into the quality of generated leads and their progress through your sales process, you give your account managers and executives a complete picture of the sales activities and revenue potential. Managers can monitor each sales representatives‘ call reports, interaction history with customers, and price quotes; they can also monitor contracts and competitor contract expirations at each facility. With a comprehensive view of sales forecasts and pipelines, your managers can plan and allocate resources to increase sales efficiency.

Integrate Sales Teams and Territories in Advance Of Consolidation to Minimize Transition HeadachesIf your organization is growing through acquisition or consolidation, you’re likely faced with the challenge of merging customer databases, sales teams, and other employees to make sure that the right resources are assigned to the right accounts. Depending on the circumstances of consolidation, you may be hiring new employees or aligning people with similar expertise to work on teams. You may also be aligning people to work with additional distribution channels. When you add new staff to the appropriate teams in advance of organizational changes, you ensure that the right people are added to or removed from relevant account teams to make territory alignment less time-consuming.

Maintain a History of Every Sales Rep’s Activities and Gather Knowledge About Your Customers Over TimeOver the lifetime of an account, many employees or distributors may interact with a customer. In cases where new sales representatives are assigned to long-term customers, you may need to tap into the experiences of other employees who are, or were, responsible for the account to learn as much as possible about it. You may also want to track which sales representatives have been involved with customers over time to better understand these relationships.

When you store the collective knowledge gained through numerous relationships that change over time, your organization retains valuable information on every customer, developing a “corporate memory” that transcends individual employees and supports lasting relationships. When new sales representatives are assigned to long-term accounts, they can take advantage of the knowledge gained by others to maintain existing customer relationships, which minimizes disruptions.

Track and Measure the Effectiveness of Marketing Campaigns to Minimize Guesswork—and CostsYour marketing department always needs to do more with less. Campaign budgets are tight and it’s difficult to determine where to invest unless you understand the performance and return on investment of previous campaigns. With marketing automation tools, you can run “nurturing” campaigns for your prospects and customers. You learn which campaigns have been most effective by asking your prospects what they have heard about your company and products. You can reduce marketing costs by determining what works and refining successful techniques. And you will generate more high-quality leads by testing marketing messages and improving them over time.

Track Which Invitees Attend Your Events and the Costs You Incur for Each OneWhen your sales team organizes Continuing Medical Education (CME) events to launch or promote your company’s products, there is always a cost attached. For every event, your organization needs to track which sales representatives are involved, which speakers are employed to help promote products, and which literature or product sample is given away. And as you well know, your organization is federally regulated to monitor the amount of money you spend on each physician every year.

Systems that track event information to ensure that you are not over-spending enable you to automate and monitor each event so that your sales representatives spend less time managing lists and tracking attendance records, and they spend more time selling. Your representatives can create CME events that are more effective, using luminaries as speakers, inviting target prospects, and sharing clinical research studies, journal articles, product literature, and samples.

CHALLENGE FOUR: When your sales managers can’t keep track of their sales representatives‘ activities, opportunities, and price quotes, the effectiveness of your entire sales force and marketing efforts is compromised.


Pivotal Medical DevicesWhen you plan your customer relationship strategy, it is important to select a CRM solution that is designed specifically to accommodate the distinct characteristics of your industry: complex distribution channels, influential relationships, and complicated contracts and pricing structures.

Based on years of experience implementing and deploying solutions for medical device manufacturers, Pivotal CRM for Medical Device Manufacturers is designed to address the key business drivers and challenges you face every day. The Pivotal CRM solution currently includes capabilities for territory and role management, relationship management, quoting and contract management, event management, and marketing automation.

Pivotal Medical Devices includes ��% of the functionality typically needed by medical device manufacturers—out of the box. We also understand that every business is unique; your organization can take full advantage of the flexibility of the Pivotal CRM toolkit to customize your CRM solution to adapt to the way you do business. The combination of industry-tailored and custom components, along with the inherent flexibility of the Pivotal CRM platform, leads to a lower total cost of ownership and a competitive edge for your company.

Take the Pivotal StepAt Pivotal CRM, we work in partnership with medical device manufacturers and their peers to build technology solutions that help you commercialize your products more quickly. Our solutions are designed specifically for your industry—to work the way you work.

We understand your challenges because we listen. We draw upon the shared knowledge and experience of our user base to continue improving our products over time. As we gain feedback, we respond, we refine, and we seek additional input.

With every new customer, our knowledge of medical device manufacturing grows. All of our customers can take advantage of the collective industry knowledge built into our technology. After all, you’re the experts. That’s why we apply to our technology what we learn from customers like you every day.

For more information, contact us today to learn more about Pivotal CRM for Medical Device Manufacturers. Visit http://www.pivotal.com or call +� 8��-PIVOTAL (+� 8��-��8-�8��).

Pivotal CRM for Medical Device Manufacturers—go to market the way you innovate.

For more information or a complete list of our worldwide offices, please visit www.pivotal.com.

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Pivotal crm for medical device manufacturers