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What Are the Fundamentals of Go-To-Market Strategy in Medical Devices?

Getting the fundamentals right in go-to-market strategy, especially for disruptive products, is critical to success

Maria Shepherd, President and Founder, Medi-Vantage07.19.22

In our fiercely competitive market where bare knuckles fighting is almost acceptable, getting the fundamentals right in go-to-market strategy, especially for disruptive products, is critical to success. Entrepreneurs need to understand the journey of the device decision maker, but also all the other stakeholders that influence the decision to use a medical device. Go-to-market strategy is very different in Europe and the APAC countries, so this article will focus on the U.S. market. The fundamentals, however, remain the same all over the world. They are:

Understand your audience (all of them, not just the doctor).
Understand the unmet need.
Build a go-to-market strategy that meets the needs of the end users and relevant stakeholders along the buyer’s journey.
Create messaging about the value to the customer.
Digital marketing is a crucial tool. Use it wisely.
Build trust with every tool you can and be consistent in your communications strategy.

Why this is important

In a 2018 Forbes article, Small Business Administration (SBA) data indicated approximately 80% of small businesses survived their first year. After 10 years, however, only one-third lived to tell their tale.¹ Although similar data for the medtech industries is not available, the trends are most likely the same (Table 1).

Table 1: U.S. small business national survival statistics¹

Why Small Businesses Fail and How to Avoid the Same Fate

The Forbes article lists the most frequently cited reasons for small business failure.

Not meeting an unmet need—Why is this still an issue? The first and most important obstacle, according to Forbes, is no market need. In medtech, this means while most entrepreneurs may have identified an unmet need, they did not develop a device their end-users valued and used. Don’t let this happen to you! Test market specifications against the needs of end users before developing your products. The market specification is a critical first step to creating a technical specification. Identifying market specifications is tedious because there are so many, and the subject is the source of contention in a medical device company. My rule of thumb? It is better to rely on data from your customers than the opinions of your colleagues.
Insufficient funding—In a nationwide SBA survey from 2017 (n=1,633), respondents were asked, “If capital availability is a problem for your business, what is the impact on your operations?” While 57% said it was not a problem, plenty offered an assortment of responses (Table 2).²
Wrong Team—Some entrepreneurs said they needed (and did not have) a partner to balance them, while others said their founding teams were unable to build the minimum viable product needed to bring the launch to the commercial stage.
Competition—Another reason customer data is so critical to ongoing success in the medical device industry is it provides a balanced perspective to compare the entrepreneur’s product to those of leading competitors. Telling an entrepreneur they are missing the mark as compared to the competition is not for the faint-hearted, but data can do this job effectively.
Price strategy—Price is one of the most critical of the four Ps in the medical device industry. A product that is truly disruptive commands a price premium, but hospital administrators are much more sophisticated now and medtech startups need to be able to show through budgetary impact models and other sales tools why a price premium is justified.

Table 2: Impact of insufficient funding on small business operation²

Data to Develop a Go-To-Market Strategy

First, identify the primary end user(s) and ensure a good market map has been developed to understand the clinical and economic workflow for them. Map all of your customers’ needs in all of the environments in which they work. Voice of the Customer (VOC) is a great tool for building the market map and understanding the clinical and economic workflow of end users. Although many claim to have invented VOC, most attribute it to Abbie Griffin and John Hauser in an article called The Voice of the Customer in Marketing Science in 1993.³

Hauser has been the head of the MIT Marketing Group, head of the Management Science Area, research director of the Center for Innovation in Product Development, and co-director of the International Center for Research on the Management of Technology. He has co-authored two textbooks, is a former editor of Marketing Science, and has published over 100 scientific papers.⁴ These credentials are sufficient reason to take out the old VOC training manual, review it, and get fresh perceptions on how to use VOC processes to gain better insights into customer needs.

Leveraging VOC Data

VOC isn’t just for product development anymore. Smart marketers and developers use VOC-derived data to advise marketing plans focused on competitive analysis, customer experience, brand management, and product development. According to Gartner, the top three VOC survey capture methods are direct feedback, indirect feedback, and inferred feedback.⁵

Direct feedback is when the end user knows a member of the corporation will review the data provided through market research, panels, surveys, or complaints. When using indirect feedback, the customer is speaking about the business but not necessarily to a person at the company. This could include text analytics used in customer interactions such as chat bots, review sites (e.g., Yelp), and other forms of social listening. Inferred feedback brings marketers into the realm of digitization by analyzing data associated with customer experience such as number of clicks, purchase history, or other forms of digital contact.

The Medi-Vantage Perspective

According to Research and Markets, the worldwide medical device market was valued in 2021 at $434.2 billion and is projected to grow to $625.3 billion by 2027 (Table 3).⁶ While some of that $191.1 billion rise will be the result of commodity product growth due to the aging population, a significant percentage will be due to the introduction of disruptive products that were discovered by VOC and brought to market by a well-executed go-to-market strategy. Be the company that executes flawlessly, bringing your new device to market in record time at a price premium that is credible to economic and clinical buyers.

Table 3: Global medical device market value⁶

References

Maria Shepherd has more than 20 years of leadership experience in medical device/life-science marketing in small startups and top-tier companies. Medi-Vantage provides marketing and business strategy and innovation research for the medical device industry. Shepherd can be reached at mshepherd@medi-vantage.com. Visit her website at www.medi-vantage.com.