When In-Person Selling is Out
Remote E-detailing Tips for Med Device Marketers
When COVID-19 hit, the repercussions were felt throughout the medical device marketing world. Trade shows cancelled. Product launches delayed. Reps struggling to make contact with customers, let alone make sales.
Interactive digital tools, also known as e-detailing in the pharma world, are helping to fill the gap. Even better news: they offer opportunities for enhanced sales experiences. And pandemic or not, they’re the way of the future.
Here are a few ways to make your e-detailing tools most effective.
Tell an engaging story.
It should be obvious, but it’s important, so let’s drive it home: your talk track must to be relevant to your audience. Solve their needs and that will sell your product.
One way to help assure relevance in your tool is to start with pain points. Do some desktop research to unearth current trends in your audience’s field. Better yet, conduct a survey of your own customers. Share the results, then ask if they track with what your audience is personally seeing or feeling. Find out specifically what keeps them up at night. With that knowledge, you can tailor your solution story for greater impact and interest.
Make it interactive.
When presenting remotely, interactivity is not as simple as letting someone swipe through screens on your iPad or click to start a video. (By the way, videos and animations are great tools — but with video conferencing lag-time and bandwidth issues, it’s better to share them via an email link.)
Instead, involve your audience by building in validation questions as well as interactive tools such as ROI calculators and polls. Engaging in this kind of dialogue means that your audience will help guide the direction of the conversation to what is most meaningful to them, which leads to the next point.
Create a fluid structure.
Be prepared to not go through your content in a linear fashion. The flow of information, in fact, should fit the specific conversation — which may even mean skipping whole sections.
Make sure your tool allows for easy navigation so you can customize as you go. Build in “chapters” that address clinical and economic needs, for example, so you’re ready to talk with practitioners and business managers. And make room for any substantiating documentation. Practitioners, in particular, will want to see the study abstracts.
Be mindful of photography.
Healthcare practitioners should be pictured with the proper PPE, especially while using your products or treating patients. So, your existing library of images may need updating.
In some instances, the magic of Photoshop (and a really good photo retoucher) can resolve the issue. Now may be the time, though, to shoot new photography that depicts current infection prevention protocols. Be even more careful than usual with stock images; every company is pulling from the same limited pool of masked healthcare workers, so the image used in your tool might also be in a competitor’s.
Turn this lemon into relationship lemonade.
You can agonize over the limitations of remote sales calls. Or, you can look at them as an opportunity. While traditional PowerPoint presentations are mostly about talking at a prospect, robust e-detailing tools can spark a two-way dialogue — and your audience’s imagination.
