Repertoire: What two or three things do you offer your distributor rep partners to enhance their sales?
Mike Webb: Clinical expertise, teamwork and understanding of the customer’s perspective.
Distributor reps are looking for someone who can bring value to their customer. My role as the product expert allows me to give advice, provide options and answer any clinical questions the customer may have. If I can work with the distributor in an efficient way and provide the customer with clinical expertise, it will strengthen the distributor’s relationship in the account. That enables all of us to be successful.
Prepare as a team: Is there a competitor that may bypass the distributor and go direct? Are they a threat, and how do we prepare for that? These are all questions that we can work on together during the planning phases of an opportunity. Let’s examine our clinical position, price point and our relationship with the decision-makers. Which one of those are strengths and which ones are weaknesses?
Understanding the customer’s perspective: Why does the customer want to make a change? Clinical reasons? Pricing reasons? Contract compliance? How do we make the decision-makers look good? Maintaining the customer’s needs first will always serve you well, and usually results in a win-win-win for customer, distributor and manufacturer.
Repertoire: Name two or three ways your distributor rep partners help you add value to your accounts.
Webb: Staying in front of the customer and asking the right questions. Distribution partners are in constant contact with the customer and oftentimes are the ones alerting me of a customer’s question or issue that needs to be dealt with. Many of my valued distributor reps know my products so well, they can make basic recommendations to the customer to get them what they need when they need it. If the distributor is asking the customer the right questions, it places the distributor in a consultative role, which becomes invaluable to the customer. This approach builds trust in business partners and helps me entrench my position and my products in the account.
Repertoire: What is the biggest change you anticipate in medical product sales in the next five years?
Webb: Technology, government regulations and consolidation will make healthcare look very different in five years.
Big Data is driving the technology train, and healthcare has many data points to be collected, sorted and sold to research companies, who can greatly benefit from this information. Med-tech companies will flourish, and those doctors and health systems that participate will be rewarded.
(My responses are pre-election, so obviously) “healthcare reform” will maintain the same path, fall apart completely or will be completely overhauled and replaced with a new plan. We already see changes in reimbursements and how that is directly tied to the patient’s overall experience.
In my business, I only have a handful of true competitors, and consolidation is always on our radar. [Recently], one of them was bought, partially spun off and bought by another competitor. We will have to be forward-thinking so we can anticipate these changes and prepare for them before they happen. The organizations that simply try to react to changing technology, government and market consolidation will, unfortunately, be left behind.