Highly regulated industries have things tough for a reason.
Take the medical devices industry for example.
According to a 2022 Medical Device Network article, the challenges facing medical device equipment manufacturers are arguably compounding as costs and quality requirements increase. For instance:
- Medical device companies have to face rigorous regulatory reviews when manufacturing high-risk medical devices.
- Quality-related issues are costing the medical device industry anywhere between $2.5 billion to $5 billion a year.
- Global supply chain disruptions are causing stock shortages.
- Moreover, business growth gets stunted due to inaccurate sales forecasting as well as due to a lack of real-time visibility into territory sales or equipment data.
All these challenges and more definitely put a spanner in the works when it comes to medical device sales.
Which is why medical device manufacturers should look to intelligent CRM solutions like Salesforce Health Cloud to help lower costs to sell and serve, build stronger pipelines, unveil market insights, and optimise sales and territory management.
In this blog, we will dive into the robust benefits Salesforce Health Cloud offers to medical device companies and explore how it can help boost medical device sales and customer engagement in the long run.
What Is Salesforce Health Cloud?
Salesforce Health Cloud is a premier patient and provider relationship platform that combines the security of the cloud with Salesforce’s CRM technology to deliver a 360° view of patients and their needs. This MedTech CRM attempts to bring product, patient, and provider data in one place to help healthcare and life sciences professionals deliver effective and personalised care to their customers.
Since Salesforce Health Cloud comes with a multi-layered security approach, it enables healthcare providers, pharma companies, and medical device manufacturers to proactively ensure data privacy and protect confidential data against unauthorised access. As it has been built on the world’s No.1 AI CRM, Salesforce Health Cloud helps the healthcare industry collaborate efficiently, access real-time data, and automate day-to-day sales and operations.
Why Does the Medical Device Industry Need A CRM?
The primary function of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is to improve business relationships by offering a centralised platform to collect, organise, automate, and synchronise customer, supplier, and product data.
Adopting a CRM platform can revolutionise medical device operations by leaps and bounds. For example:
- Medical device companies can effectively manage customer interactions, track sales leads, and nurture relationships with healthcare providers, distributors, and hospitals.
- A CRM helps users organise and access critical data securely while putting necessary user restrictions in place.
- It enables key stakeholders to manage sales, marketing, customer relations, and business development functions from a central location.
- To top it all, a CRM enables medical device companies to adapt quickly in today’s digitally advanced landscape, understand market trends, and tailor their offerings to meet the specific needs of healthcare professionals and patients, thus majorly improving their bottom line.
As the world’s leading CRM, Salesforce can help you sell more intelligently and efficiently. Read more in our blog linked below!
5 Reasons Why Medical Device Companies Should Choose Salesforce Health Cloud CRM
In the dynamic landscape of healthcare and life sciences, medical device sellers need more than just a persuasive pitch—they need to establish a holistic approach that integrates technology with their vast data to provide personalised customer experiences.
This is where a comprehensive CRM like Salesforce Health Cloud comes in. Unlike most CRM providers in the market, Salesforce Health Cloud offers specific benefits tailored to the life sciences industry that allow for a more patient-centric approach to healthcare and medical device service providers. Let’s explore its five key benefits.
1. Enhanced Sales and Marketing Productivity
Medical device manufacturers often lack comprehensive tools for effective sales and territory management. Their sales and field teams tend to struggle with traditional selling methods, such as in-person visits, manual orders, and resupplies, which consume more effort and time.
Salesforce Health Cloud offers robust sales enablement, territory management, and revenue intelligence features that ensure optimal product positioning and enhanced sales efficiency. This includes a 360° view of every provider with details like affiliations, specialties, and credentials.
The CRM helps you accelerate medical device sales with real-time performance tracking, targeted physician outreach campaigns, and optimised field rep deployment. More features like pipeline visualisation, automated workflows, and sales activity tracking ensure a clear view of the sales cycle, leading to faster deal closures.
Salesforce Health Cloud also empowers your team to manage leads and opportunities efficiently with targeted marketing campaigns. The MedTech CRM helps you leverage patient demographics, physician preferences, and past interactions to personalise campaign messaging and maximise campaign effectiveness.
Moreover, Salesforce Health Cloud fosters seamless collaboration among customer-facing teams. It equips sales representatives, marketing professionals, and customer service agents to access the same data that’s been updated and synchronised in real time, thus enabling sellers to confidently push more deals.
Did you know that Salesforce enables you to harness the power of AI to help boost sales efficiency? Learn how you can also accelerate revenue growth for your business in our blog linked below!
2. Better Product and Inventory Management
According to a 2021 Supply Chain Resilience Survey, supply chain disruptions (or the ‘bullwhip effect’!) have resulted in 59% higher operating costs, a 54% dip in revenue, and 44% missed customer deadlines. A disconnected supply chain affects live sales and was found to be the root cause behind slow supply chain processes. Many medical device manufacturers also struggle with inventory accuracy and lack of real-time visibility into inventory stock.
Salesforce Health Cloud can help you optimise inventory and equipment management by enabling real-time inventory visibility—including consigned, product shortfall, expired product, purchased, and trunk stock.
You can also track product lifecycles, monitor inventory levels in real time, and manage device recalls efficiently. This not only enhances the efficiency of your supply chain operations but also helps your warehouse team reduce time spent on manual processes. The MedTech CRM thus helps you address medical inventory inaccuracies and inefficiencies.
Furthermore, Salesforce Health Cloud integrates seamlessly with various third-party applications, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), warehouse management, and inventory management systems. This eliminates data silos, fosters a unified view of your supply chain operations, and ensures that your sales team gets accurate equipment data at hand during customer conversations.
3. Personalised Patient and Physician Engagement
While attempting to engage with physicians and patients can be a challenge in itself, it can be difficult to converse effectively if medical device sellers lack a holistic view of their customers.
Salesforce Health Cloud facilitates better physician and patient engagement through personalised communication features that let you view the customer’s order history, product preferences, and account information in one single dashboard (instead of the data lying in disparate spreadsheets!)
The CRM also enables you to manage service requests, track medical device performance, and offer remote troubleshooting within a centralised platform, thus improving patient and physician interactions and helping medical device sales reps foster stronger relationships with hospitals, clinics, and healthcare providers.
Additionally, Salesforce Health Cloud allows you to provide exceptional customer support by enabling remote monitoring and proactive maintenance of implanted devices as well as timely intervention for equipment issues.
By empowering you to develop targeted communication strategies by tracking physician interactions, clinical preferences, and prescribing habits, this MedTech CRM enables personalised patient and physician interactions and helps you build more effective engagement with providers, thus facilitating upselling opportunities.
4. Advanced Analytics and Accurate Forecasting
In today’s digitally advanced business landscape, it has become a given that companies that embrace data analytics and business intelligence tools stay ahead of the competition.
Salesforce Health Cloud helps medical device companies grow revenue, achieve cost savings, and accelerate operational efficiency by generating actionable insights from sales data and accurately forecasting future trends. The CRM’s Intelligent Sales mobile and desktop app allows for efficient planning and execution of surgical case visits and cycle counts, providing invaluable insights into field inventory and impacted revenue.
Meanwhile, Salesforce Einstein, the CRM’s built-in AI engine, helps medical device organisations create a single view of each patient and surface the right insights. Its Tableau Pulse for Health feature uses generative AI to derive insights, metrics, and predictions that help sales teams make better decisions. The AI also provides powerful insights into customer behaviour and helps medical device sales reps identify sales trends and predict future outcomes, thus enabling data-driven decision-making.
Find out how Corptec can help you optimise your sales efforts and propel your medical device business to new heights! Explore our Salesforce-powered MedTech CRM solutions today!
5. Simplified Compliance Management and Reporting
The medical device industry operates within a heavily regulated environment.
According to the Medical Device Network, the risks to patient safety associated with medical devices have led this industry to be one of the most tightly regulated. Medical device manufacturers are expected to maintain production standards and conduct post-market surveillance regularly across the product’s lifetime. Moreover, depending on where a medical device company intends to market its product, there may be multiple different standards that its products must comply with.
Salesforce Health Cloud aids medical device organisations in Australia and New Zealand by ensuring compliance with rigorous local regulations (such as those enforced by the TGA and MedSafe). It offers tools for accurate record-keeping, serialised inventory tracking, and product safety management—including recalls and expiration control.
The CRM integrates necessary legal standards, such as the Australian Privacy Principles (APP) and New Zealand’s Health Information Privacy Code, thus helping medical device providers streamline compliance and improve operational efficiency.
For global organisations, Salesforce Health Cloud offers tools to ensure compliance with HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and other relevant regulations. The MedTech CRM enables you to track data access, manage user permissions, streamline clinical trial processes, and implement audit trails for a robust compliance framework.
Furthermore, you can ensure adherence to complex regulations by managing documentation and participant data, tracking audits and regulatory approvals, automating compliance workflows, and facilitating communication with investigators.
How Can Medical Device Companies Get Started with Salesforce Health Cloud
In spite of the numerous benefits your medical device business can gain from Salesforce’s Health Cloud CRM, it can be daunting to know where to start—especially since Salesforce offers a wide variety of solutions specific to departments and industries.
Take the guesswork out of adopting the right CRM with Corptec Technology Partners!
As a trusted Salesforce Consulting Partner since 2019, Corptec Technology Partners has designed customer journeys for organisations across Australia by helping them maximise the potential of this leading CRM platform. We specialise in developing CRM solutions tailored to enhance data management and customer relations in the Medical Devices industry. We also help streamline medical supply chain operations and implement self-service portals to improve provider and patient engagement and support.
Our Salesforce experts can help you build a customised MedTech CRM solution on the Salesforce platform, designed to specifically address challenges in the medical device industry. The CRM will act as a centralised hub to help you empower your sales and marketing teams, streamline supply chain processes, create personalised patient support programs and more, within a secure and scalable environment. Corptec’s comprehensive medical devices digital offerings help you:
- Accelerate medical device sales with real-time performance tracking, targeted physician outreach campaigns, and optimised field rep deployment.
- Streamline your medical device supply chain operations and improve inventory accuracy by enhancing coordination and responsiveness across your distribution network.
- Achieve a connected customer portal that gives you a 360° view of your clients and is integrated seamlessly with your sales, service, and order management systems.
- Improve physician and patient engagement by leveraging detailed insights and personalised communication tools tailored to their needs.
- Integrate EHR/EMR data seamlessly and securely, while respecting regulatory standards and upholding patient confidentiality.
Discover how Salesforce Health Cloud can help you adopt intelligent sales practices, create a patient-centric experience, and help you achieve faster time to market!
