Will it business be as usual after COVID-19?
MedTech Leaders think again.
For many business sectors, the sales model for decades has been built around your rep on the territory, your fields sales manager over a region, and your national sales manager over a country. This structure has existed in all areas of commercial life for many years. This is what we called normal before the COVID-19 pandemic. Many business pundits across the world are struggling with the question; What will happen after COVID-19? What will be the new normal?
Everyday your sales Rep, and the field sales manager go out and visit customers, detailing products and services. Good sales personnel are well organised, they have a clear journey plan, they pre plan their calls for every single customer, they have strong customer relationships. All was good and well in 2020 and then COVID-19 hit. The national sales manager was made redundant, and the fields sales manager has taken on more responsibility for no increase in pay, and the sales rep has been furloughed. After furlough the plan is to reduce the sales force by 20% and to look for further OPEX cost reductions within the organisation. Sound familiar?
The dates when the economy will opened keeps getting put back by government, so the business of healthcare has to continue at a distance. The challenge to be resolved by leadership is, what is transferable from the old model, to the new normal? Some of these are great planning, a concise and focused call, follow up, and quick decisions. All of these steps and there are probably more, can be transferred from the real world to the virtual world. Using a digital video conferencing approach, the field sales manager can be present at more calls without additional costs. The Customer Relationship Management system (CRM), maps the customer pathway and the pipeline can be viewed from the board room to the field. Is this the new normal? Or some type or form of it?
In an article by Kenneth Baker in the FT.com May 18, 2020 he writes,
‘Our students like these virtual lessons. They eliminate long journeys to school — some of the students travel three hours a day. They allow an outstanding physics teacher — something of a rarity — to reach not only his or her own students, but those in schools that do not have a physics teacher at all.’
In a post COVID-19 world, should the MedTech industry be thinking more about how they can deploy their best assets to a greater audience? Your best trainers having access to the salesforce at any time for one to one meetings, as well as group sessions? Our best clinicals residing in Europe supporting cases in the USA virtually, rather than in person? Is this, the new normal? As leaders we are often the slowest to change, we carry the greatest risk because failure has a cost that needs to be justified, pushing our heads above the parapet forcing us to be brave. Will going back to how we sold 20 years ago, 30 years ago, address the complexities and the noise we face in our markets today? There is, some stuff we can bring with us from the past, using the pareto law, to be successful post COVID-19 I would suggest that you should only take forward 20% of what you did in 2019, into 2021 to be successful.
Carlo Bordoni in his book ‘State of Fear, in a Liquid World’, speaks of a new commercial landscape with rapidly diverging change.
The problem of our time is that our society is “liquid”, it has lost all of its reference points, and its ethical principles marked by centuries, broken down into decades of civilisation and understanding. Our future is a continuous state of emergency, and only the brave, who change, will survive. More significantly, those who change quickly, they will be the ones that create the future we call normal!
MedTech Leaders the message is simple, think again!
