The Medical Devices Regulation (MDR) comes with a host of business challenges for organisations in the medical device industry, as outlined in our recent blog post.
Regulatory compliance is only one piece of the puzzle – your organization must also reassure potential buyers and current customers, as well as equip customer-facing employees with the tools and training necessary to demonstrate compliance to buyers and enforcing bodies alike.
Fortunately, doing so is made much simpler with the right solutions in place.
Read on to learn about three solutions for successful sales under MDR.
1. Content Management
All customer-facing employees at your organization will need to be able to prove MDR compliance, whether to new and existing customers or enforcing bodies. This makes it vital to ensure the appropriate content is readily available and easy to share.
Unfortunately, creating a single source of truth for content remains a challenge for many organizations. In fact, data from CSO Insights revealed that nearly a third (27.3%) of European organisations use multiple document repositories. Almost 18% simply email content to their salespeople.
This all too often leads to outdated, inaccurate content usage.
By creating a centralised content hub that acts as the go-to source for all sales collateral, you can make sure your sales reps are empowered to quickly discover and share the right content at the right time. Additionally, your marketing team will have a single location where it can update resources as necessary and notify employees of any changes.
The key is making sure whatever sales solution you use makes content easy to find, share and update.
Cerus Corporation, which produces products for blood centres, hospitals and patients around the world in the form of vital technologies and pathogen-protected blood components, struggled to equip its sales team with content related to new products and industry news.
“Before Showpad, keeping our frontline resources armed with current assets was a manual and time-consuming process,” said Senior Director of Global Marketing Alain Segers.
This problem was compounded by the spread of Zika virus in Brazil and the ensuing press, which led to a deluge of customer questions when the company had yet to produce customer-facing content.
Using Showpad, Cerus was able to quickly upload files, notify team members and present the necessary information in a hyper-targeted and localised way.
“We had to react very quickly, which we could do thanks to Showpad,” Segers said. “In a single day, we had our EMEA organisation up to speed and had made the relevant reference material available.”
2. Messaging Oversight
While it’s critical that everyone in your organisation has access to the right information, it’s equally important to maintain control over what is and isn’t allowed to be shared.
Some documentation may need to remain internal-only, making it essential for your organisation to not only make it clear which pieces of content can and can’t be shared with prospects and customers, but have easily enforceable measures in place that prevent individuals from sharing the wrong content.
Promega is a manufacturer of high-quality tools for life scientists, including reagent “tool kits” and integrated systems to aid in protein analysis, drug development, molecular diagnostics and more.
On the one hand, Promega’s salesforce uses Showpad features such as Collections to build libraries of content that can be customised for specific buyers. At the same time, the company is able to control which sales assets can be shared, and for how long, to prevent potential problems. Showpad’s comprehensive compliance settings and user permissions ensure only approved content makes its way into customers’ hands.
“Our research and development teams are very controlled about how they share information,” said Manager of Strategic Marketing Jen Makovec. “But we still want to be able to show customers that we’re ahead of the game and release information in a way that doesn’t impact our ability to publish on that technology in a scientific journal. Showpad allows us to lock down certain pieces of content and have them expire once a product launches, and that’s a pretty critical feature for us.”
3. Training and Coaching
The right content isn’t enough to succeed under MDR – the people that make up your organisation must also be able to confidently speak to compliance.
Whether it’s ensuring everyone understands how MDR impacts your organisation or making sure your customer-facing employees have the knowledge necessary to reassure both buyers and enforcing bodies, proper training and coaching are key.
As with content, this is made much easier by centralising all training and coaching activity – videos, FAQ sheets, checklists, quizzes, etc. – in an easy-to-navigate hub that not only provides instruction, but enables managers to track progress and spot potential issues.
And remember that not all training is created equal. According to the National Training Laboratories Institute for Applied Behavioral Science, lectures, demonstrations and discussions are far less effective for information retention than practice-focused learning.
Cloud-based software provider iPipeline wanted to optimize training and coaching, but found it difficult with a rapidly growing and widely dispersed sales team. With Showpad, the company could centralise learning for all employees regardless of their physical location, as well as provide ongoing sales coaching through features such as PitchIQ, which allows users to record their pitches and submit them for review.
“Not only does Showpad Coach solve the problem of trying to get everyone in the same room for the day, but it also gave us the ability to record and grade a product pitch and create a simple certification process,” said Associate Vice President of Sales Engineering and Operations Richard Grisham.
The practice-based learning supported by Showpad makes it easy for iPipeline to ensure all its employees are proficient in brand messaging.
“With Showpad Coach we get a clearer picture of how our new salespeople are doing much earlier on and we’re putting them in a much better position to know what iPipeline does and what our products do,” Grisham said.
MDR goes live in May 2020. Is your organisation prepared?
Contact Showpad today to learn how we can help.
