10 Perfect Customers.

The Targeted Approach Challenge

Consider this scenario: If your team could identify and engage with ten healthcare professionals perfectly aligned with your product's value proposition, how might that impact your commercial outcomes?

In today's complex healthcare environment, many innovative manufacturers continue to utilise broad-based sales approaches. While understandable given traditional industry practices, this approach often results in suboptimal resource allocation, with sales teams engaging across vast territories rather than focusing on the most promising opportunities.

After twenty years in healthcare leadership roles having worked across five continents, I've observed many organisations investing substantial resources in undirected sales approaches, experiencing frequent commercial team turnover, and implementing recurring training programs that fail to address fundamental strategic gaps.

The Healthcare Attention Reality

Let's be honest about today's healthcare environment:

• Healthcare professionals average just 12 minutes per day, four times a week, to engage with suppliers

• Clinicians routinely interact with 15-25 devices daily

• They're managing around 17 medications per patient daily

How do you ensure your innovation doesn't get lost in the noise in this crowded space?

Start With Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

Your success begins by clearly defining who actually needs what you're offering.

Looking at your total addressable market (TAM) and creating ideal customer personas within it means you can better find the right people for your business. It also prevents elongated sales processes and stops the frustrating cycle of customers who onboard and then off-board because expectations weren't met.

The Modern Approach to Demand Creation

And for those who say "it's a numbers game" – yes, it absolutely is, but not in the traditional sense. Once it was to knock on as many doors as possible. Now it's to find as many of your perfect customers as possible and target them through multiple approaches:

1. Creative Brand Strategy

Work out who your ICP is and what story they need to hear, how best to tell it and then how to find them and get their attention. This means some clever thought and planning and aligning your sales and marketing teams with playbooks.

2. Content Creation Process

Create a system to consistently produce content that is on message and targeted at your ICPs. The system needs to be capable of producing content formatted for multiple channels and have an streamlined internal sign off process. Content planning is essential.

3. Master One Channel at a Time

Online channel management involves managing multiple variables, and best practices not only take time to learn but also change often. Focus on delivering quality and then expanding.

Evolution, Not Revolution

Focusing on "modernisation" rather than transformation has real power. The phased change that modernisation implies makes everything easier when delivering change and ensures people, processes, and technology stay in sync.

This approach builds on the strengths of the past while expanding with today's tools and opportunities, significantly reducing the hurdle of change that often derails more dramatic transformation efforts.

What might we learn by examining the intersections between pharmaceutical and medical technology commercial approaches? Many healthcare organizations find value in adapting pharma's structured commercial methodologies while incorporating the agility often seen in medical technology companies.

This combined approach raises important questions: How might your organisation benefit from more systematic customer targeting? What opportunities exist to make your commercial processes more responsive to market feedback? And perhaps most importantly, how can we ensure these processes remain focused on human connections despite increasing technological capabilities?

Strategic Options for Commercial Evolution

Many healthcare manufacturing organisations face a decision point in their commercial strategy. One option is maintaining traditional broad-market approaches while addressing performance gaps through periodic team changes and supplemental training programs.

An alternative path involves strategically empowering commercial teams with better targeting data, supporting them with digital engagement tools, and evolving processes that connect marketing initiatives with sales execution.

Our experience suggests the latter approach yields more sustainable results while reducing the organisational disruption associated with frequent personnel changes.

Industry Examples Demonstrating Success

Several forward-thinking healthcare manufacturers have begun implementing elements of this modernized approach with promising results:

• Novartis has developed a specialised marketing team to identify target healthcare professionals and create engagement strategies that complement their field sales efforts. This integrated approach has improved their ability to introduce specialized therapies to the right clinicians.

• Philips Healthcare restructured its commercial approach for diagnostic imaging solutions by segmenting healthcare institutions based on alignment with their ideal customer profile. This resulted in shorter sales cycles and improved implementation experiences.

• Siemens Healthineers created a digital engagement platform that complemented its direct sales approach. The platform provided value-added resources to clinical teams while gathering valuable insights about usage patterns and preferences.

These organisations demonstrate that modernisation can be implemented in phases, allowing for adaptation to specific organisational needs while driving measurable improvements in commercial outcomes.

The Bottom Line

Med device and health-tech are finally catching up with pharma in modernising their commercial approach... and it's about time.

Companies that resist modernisation risk being left behind.

Your path forward is clear: identify your ICP, create strategies to communicate better with them through both your sales force and marketing teams, and watch as your targeted efforts create genuine demand.

If you're ready to move beyond outdated scattergun sales approaches, you can start your journey here...

https://www.agencybristol.com/sign-up

Michael Colling-Tuck is the Founder of AGENCY, which specialises in generating demand from healthcare professionals for medical innovations. With 20 years of experience across the pharmaceutical, medical device, and health-tech sectors, Michael helps companies evolve their commercial strategies to create sustainable growth.