COMMENT
Dan Wetherill
Associate
Principal
ZS
Dan is a leader
in global
sales and
marketing firm
ZS’s analytics services group.
He has more than 15 years of
experience helping clients in the
pharmaceutical and healthcare
industries develop their marketing
and sales analytics capabilities
to drive cost efficiency and
commercial effectiveness.
Ganesh
Vedarajan
Managing
Principal
ZS
Ganesh
Vedarajan is
a managing
principal
on ZS’s
executive team and the leader of
the firm’s global medical products
and services practice. Ganesh
advises clients across a range of
issues, including brand marketing,
marketing execution effectiveness,
managed care marketing and
contracting, sales strategy
and commercial analytics and
operations.
WHY ANALYTICS SHOULD BE A CORE
BUSINESS CAPABILITY IN MEDTECH
Ganesh Vedarajan, ZS Managing Principal
Data-driven decision-making is fast becoming the norm
for most industries, in an effort to drive efficiencies,
reduce costs, assess and predict customer behavior,
improve customer service, increase personalization and
accurately plan for the future. For medical device manufacturers, that analytics-led evolution now has yet another impetus, thanks to the Affordable Care Act’s charge
to accelerate hospitals’ focus on improving patient outcomes. Medtech firms need data-driven insights to better
position themselves as hospitals’ partners in that effort—
and to sell and cross-sell more effectively via compellingly bundled product and service offerings.
THREE BARRIERS
There are three main barriers that these companies need
to overcome. The first is that the value of analytics has to
become clear in the organization, and proving that ROI to
senior management is a challenge. There’s still resistance
and skepticism among some executives that analytics can
create value. They continue to try to operate in a world
where sales reps have a lot of power, and think that they
can win through one-to-one selling.
The second barrier is related to change management
and embedding analytics systematically into the existing
business model, in areas such as customer profiling and
targeting, sales force design and marketing effectiveness.
Once leadership buys in, the rest of the company must
buy in, as well. There is a lot of inertia to continue with
the status quo. We must be clever in how we embed analytics into the business model and force analytics into the
existing processes, involving stakeholders as early in the
process as possible to garner their buy-in.
The third barrier is to build a world-class analytics capability, one that achieves scale efficiencies and allows
companies to use the latest data sources available. The
good news is that many medtech companies have already
made some good investments in technology, so they’re in
a better place to add to the IT stack than they were just a
few years ago. Back then, they didn’t have a good understanding of many customer-facing activities because
they didn’t have a solid CRM system. Now they do. Some
companies have been frustrated that these investments
haven’t paid off, but using analytics to improve customer
intelligence is one way to increase the ROI.
