Letting The Marketing Cat Out Of The Medtech Bag
Call me naive, but until recently I thought marketers and salespeople loved each other.
Then MedTech podcaster and MedTech Advocates consultant Omar M. I saw a LinkedIn post about how wrong you were, Katib. In the post, Khatib said that Medtech representatives hate marketing.
"Most medtech marketing isn't really marketing," Khatib says. "Marketers 'sell big' by taking existing market demand and translating it into a product or service."
He admits that most medtech marketers specialize in product management, KOL development, and events.
But they have never carried a bag, let alone sold anything in their lives.
Marketers continue to complain that they lack the ability to learn and understand what it takes to sell and how to use marketing to improve processes.
"They don't know anything about streaming speed, turning meetings into demos, changing rates, or optimizing the sales process," he says. Worse yet, they didn't know.
And here, I think the marketing and sales teams have the same goal of helping the company succeed. I am funny.
Khatib admits that many of the medtech representatives don't understand the situation because they don't understand the parameters.
“You want to focus on closing the deal and view the sale as an event, not a process,” Khatib said. "Until these issues are resolved, this negative dynamic will continue."
I am not a marketer myself and I don't have a horse in this race because I don't know how to "carry the bag". But a simple solution (or at least a step in the right direction) seems to be parallel. Why not invite your marketing partner to spend a few days in the field with you? I've heard medtech CEOs talk about this when they go into a new company to see the pain points of their reps and customers. Couldn't the same strategy reduce the tension between sales and marketing?
"I'm so glad you spoke up... because I'm so mad," Sherry Van Os, Hyperfin's marketing manager, said in a comment on the post. "When I got into marketing, I swore I wasn't going to be a salesperson who lived in the clouds and couldn't disconnect from boots on the ground."
Lisa Sullivan, a training manager for a medtech sales force studying new technologies, agrees with Catib that there's a big gap between marketing and sales.
"Sales can take a piece of marketing content and create valuable pieces for every level or stakeholder, but few are willing to put the time into it," he says. "Marketing can do the same thing, but from a sales standpoint they don't know how to simplify it and how to apply it. Marketing is like a picture book when it sells a version of a PhD."
Khatib suggests that income should start at the market. In other words, the marketing team thinks that if the share is sold, they should share the loss.
Mark Copeland said he agrees with many of Khatib's points, noting that medical technology lacks branding compared to other industries.
"Don't you think they need to do more research and analysis on actual customers or end users? If you ask Ford who bought the new Mustang, they'll tell you who those buyers are, what they drink, etc." "There's Copeland. Some bullshit, but mostly real market research."
All these interesting points make me think that the problems described by Katib are widespread in medical technology and perhaps in other industries as well. And while I can't speak from experience on either side of this debate, I'll reiterate what I said earlier about job shadowing. It turns out that reps and marketers can collect a lot of information to stretch each other's wallets.
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