3. How much value can you
actually bring to your customers
with that solution, and how do
you quantify it? Increasingly, the
threshold for success is much
higher than “how does this
solution actually help me?” So
just saying that your product or
solution is going to help reduce
hospital-acquired infections isn’t
good enough. You have to be
able to show, the specific types
of infections that the solution
will address, the frequency by
which those infections will be
reduced, and the cost of those
infections. Being very clear
about the value that the med
tech company is bringing to the
customers has become much more
critical to hospital customers and
administrators, to support the
strong economic argument which
is needed to justify any sort of
significant change or any solution
that’s priced at a premium.
4. What’s the best way to
communicate and deliver on that
value proposition? What types
of documentation or evidence
and tools can help the med tech
company focus and clarify the
value proposition to the right
stakeholders? In many instances,
the stakeholders who might
benefit from a solution can be in
multiple departments and have
very different needs and kind of
perspectives. For example, helping
reduce medication errors can
help administrators reduce cost
associated with those hospital-
acquired infections (HAIs), it can
help the risk management people
within the administration, and
obviously it can help the clinicians
as well. (Not to mention the
patients!) So many stakeholders
will benefit, but actually being
able to put together kind of a
clear set of documentation and
tools that appropriately focus the
right message to each of those
stakeholder groups in their terms
is something med tech should be
thinking about.
So how do we take what we’ve
learned and communicate that
effectively? By answering the four
questions with four strategies.
1. Developing a deep
understanding of customer needs,
which is just Marketing 101. The
problem is that a lot of med techs
have historically spent less time
understanding customers’ needs
than in trying to figure out ways
to incrementally improve products
or to add additional features and
functions, often independent of
understanding how those might fit
to customers’ needs. Understand,
too, that hospitals don’t all have
the same needs. In fact, there’s
such huge variation that one of the
things that we find a lot of our med
tech clients asking for these days
is what is the right way to think
about the universe of hospitals
out there so that you’re not giving
the same solution or the same
messaging to a small-rural hospital
as you are to a Mayo Clinic.
A lot of med techs have
historically spent less time
understanding customers’ needs
than in trying to figure out ways
to incrementally improve products
or to add additional features and
functions, often independent of
understanding how those might fit
customers’ needs.
2. Providing optimal solutions
and integrated portfolios. This
necessarily includes services that
help make those products come
to life more. But you don’t have to
have all of the components yourself
as a med tech. You might partner
with a healthcare IT company or
partner with a service-focused
company to help provide that, but
