It’s hard to believe it’s been two weeks since we were in Minneapolis for Flywheel 2024 because the energy from that day is still resonating – not just with our team, but with the customers and prospects I’ve since connected with. There is a palpable sense that AcuityMD is unlocking some big steps forward for MedTech companies and that we are a compounding force for them.
One of the biggest takeaways from this year’s event for me personally was just how quickly organizations of all sizes realize value once they adopt AcuityMD. We announced the general availability of AcuityMD Contracts at Flywheel, and two of our beta customers, LivsMed and Intellijoint Surgical, shared the benefits they are already seeing from this new solution. For both of these growth stage companies, their lean teams need to maximize opportunities. Alex McLachlan, Director, Commercial of Intellijoint Surgical, shared that in just a couple of months, Contracts has made their sales cycles three times faster than before. In fact, in one instance, a rep on Alex’s team needed only two weeks from initial outreach to close because Contracts pointed him to a prime on-contract opportunity. And Contracts is not just changing tactics for Intellijoint Surgical, it’s also changing their strategy. With the Targeting and Contracts intelligence Alex has at his fingertips, Intellijoint is starting to push for more umbrella contracts that cover an entire IDN rather than individual sites of care. This is putting them on a tremendous path to growth.
Stephen Jarrells, Vice President, Sales and Marketing at LivsMed, has quickly expanded his team’s use of AcuityMD. LivsMed is a South Korean company making their initial inroads into the United States. Launching an unknown product in a new country, Steve needed his reps to have accurate information on the best targets, as well as provider-specific details that would make each conversation as effective as possible. He recalled making a 3-hour drive with a rep convinced that one surgeon was a giant opportunity. But not only was this doctor rarely at the hospital they visited, he ended up being a relatively small piece of business compared to other surgeons they literally drove past on their trip out to the desert. Wasted time and missed opportunities are hugely impactful for a company working to establish itself in a new market.
Prior to meeting AcuityMD, Steve had introduced a CRM solution and a separate data platform to his team, but this required his reps to spend hours every weekend manually filling out activity reports, and didn’t lead to increased sales. After LivsMed launched AcuityMD Targeting, he quickly added Territories, Pipeline, and then Contracts. Manual data reports, a CRM, and an ERP have all been replaced with AcuityMD, and now LivsMed reps have a single source of truth that is enabling them to close opportunities in under 90 days when it used to take 6 months or more.
Ralph Beentjes of Intrinsic Therapeutics showed what’s truly possible when AcuityMD gives you back hours and hours each week by eliminating manual processes. Intrinsic had tried three other data platforms, but not only were their data dumps out of date and an incomplete picture of the market, the manual synthesizing and reporting Ralph needed to do took up the majority of his week. He was just churning out reports that only looked backward, not forward.
With AcuityMD, Ralph developed a new initiative to create a power ranking of the surgeons their top reps sold to. By combining nine factors including procedure volume, Sunshine Act data on product compensation, and more, Intrinsic was able to determine the commonalities of their power users and prioritize targeting surgeons outside of their portfolio that shared those features. Ralph even compared the distance from a surgeon’s office to an Apple store to determine the surgeons most likely to be early adopters.
This creative analysis and powerful information has turned Ralph’s sales operations team into a side-by-side partner with Intrinsic’s sales reps. The two teams now work together strategically to identify the best territories, the best targets, and then perform post-analysis on won deals to leverage that success for future opportunities.
But it’s not only growth stage companies that are maximizing their opportunities with AcuityMD. As Niki Kennedy, Senior Vice President, Endoscopy at Merit Medical noted, even though Merit’s endoscopy products had been on the market for 15 years and their sales reps had tons of experience and anecdotal information about the market, they still didn’t trust their existing data solution. Reps were complaining that the information they were given was sending them down the wrong path too often.
Merit Medical decided to evaluate AcuityMD, and as Niki noted, they were immediately blown away by the true scope of their market that AcuityMD showed them. Merit Medical didn’t realize that procedures that could potentially use their endoscope were being billed across multiple codes, many of which they never even considered as targets. She shared a great story about one rep in the Bay Area who had success targeting big academic medical centers. The rep continually resisted their manager’s requests to call on rural community hospitals, claiming the volume just wasn’t there. AcuityMD showed that the #1 volume provider in the region was at a community hospital, and that provider is now the top customer for this rep. The power and speed of AcuityMD is simply game-changing, even for well-established companies, reps, and territories.
Even more exciting, Merit Medical has recently completed an acquisition that is going to double their headcount and territories. Niki is using AcuityMD Territories to easily simulate new territory maps to ensure equal opportunity before rolling them out to the newly-combined team, minimizing any potential pain points following the merger.
Chris Conicelli, Area Vice President, Eastern US - Advanced Surgery, Baxter, and Tyler Wunder, Director, Commercial Excellence - Advanced Surgery, Baxter shared how they moved their team to AcuityMD from Baxter’s company-wide CRM. Chris had a great insight that “Your best reps are the least likely to use a legacy CRM.” This line opened eyes throughout the ballroom. Many organizations have inadvertently directed all of their visibility into the deals they are losing, but hardly any into why they are winning. They have little that they can use to build off of successes because successful reps are too busy selling and not entering data.
Chris and Tyler detailed how their Baxter division simply wasn’t getting the results they needed from a legacy CRM, so they made the independent decision to expand their AcuityMD footprint from Targeting to also include AcuityMD Pipeline. Despite initial pushback from leadership, the immediate results they produced gave them the confidence they needed in order to expand adoption within their team.
We also heard Danielle D’Amico, Regional Manager at a Fortune 500 Medical Device company, share the challenges she faced as a sales manager in building out quotas and territories. Changes to each were often met with friction, and Danielle didn’t really have data she could point to as informing the changes. The teams mostly relied on individual experience and anecdotes, which led to mixed results. Additionally, when she transferred into the Philadelphia region, she had no personal experience to lean on and didn’t know where to start. But AcuityMD quickly showed her a $0 account in the area with significant potential. Her well-experienced team had been focusing all of their efforts in a different part of the territory and were initially resistant to change what had historically worked. But when Danielle showed them the data in AcuityMD, the reps fully bought in, and it led to more activity and results in 6 months with that one account than her previous 3 years.
We’re privileged to have so many customers willing to share their successes with a broad audience at Flywheel. Hearing these stories in person reminds us why we’re so committed to this mission. And I’m so proud that we’re expanding on that mission with the launch of Contracts and AcuityMD Care Journeys. Seeing the delight on the faces of folks as they were introduced to our new solutions, hearing the potential they see in them, these are the moments I live for.
If you weren’t able to join us this year, you’ll definitely want to join us in Chicago for Flywheel 2025. This is quickly becoming the event for MedTech commercial leaders to stay ahead of market trends and take the latest best practices back to their organizations, and we know it’s going to get bigger and better every year. We can’t wait to see you next October!
