Guided Selling in Medical Products Manufacturing: Lessons from Market Leaders
Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems
Creating and sustaining selling strategies for medical products often involves taking into account the treatment strategies and long-range plans of hospitals, medical centers, and clinics. Each of these healthcare providers has completely different needs for medical products and equipment.
From GE Medical Systems with heart monitoring and EKG machines to the defining of state-of-the-art x-ray systems that need to be designed in many cases to fit into smaller and more compact spaces, medical products manufacturing is engineer-to-order in many cases.
Evolving Best Practices in Guided Selling for Medical Products Manufacturing
The use of guided selling systems to deliver insights into how best to design and install complex medical products is an area that is getting increasing attention. Factors that are taken into account in these best practices include but are not limited to the following:
- Greater focus on data integration of one device to another. State-of-the-art medical devices often have IP addresses in them so they can report back the status of a patient if they are monitoring vital signs. These devices can also sync up x-rays, medical tests, and results with patient information systems and electronic health records as well.
- Greater need for accuracy in manufacturing as margins are squeezed. As the U.S. healthcare cost structure is disproportionately higher than many other nations in the world, costs for medical products equipment are often managed very closely. Margins or profits for medical products manufacturers are entirely dependent on how efficient their production systems and processes are. The use of guided selling to get the most accurate quote, and from the quote, an order, is critical in the medical products market.
- The majority of medical products are ordered via quote further underscoring how critical it is to have excellent guided selling strategies in place. Nearly all medical products are ordered through quotes, which translates into the need for absolutely clarity and accuracy in the quote-to-cash process. The use of product catalogs and knowledge bases to support guided selling strategies further ensures the accuracy of orders.
Bottom line: Guided selling in medical products manufacturing drastically reduces errors and increases profitability, and is essential for an industry highly dependent on order validation and precise definition to healthcare providers’ needs.
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Filed Under: Louis Columbus' Blog • guided selling • product configuration
About the Author: Louis Columbus is Senior Manager, Enterprise Systems at Cincom Systems, concentrating on assisting clients with their channel management, sales and product configuration system strategies. Pricing and revenue management strategies enabled through Cincom Acquire are also his key areas of focus. Louis is a former senior analyst with AMR Research where he served both companies adopting enterprise software and vendors with their product and go-to-market strategies. He has worked with enterprise clients on defining solutions to their channel management, order management and service lifecycle management strategies. He is the author of fifteen books on technology and two books on analyst relations. His book, Getting Results from your Analyst Relations Strategies, can be downloaded for free (http://bit.ly/yDKWs). Mr. Columbus also teaches graduate-level international business and marketing courses at Webster-Loyola Marymount University, Webster University and University of California, Irvine.