During our webinar on this topic, when we asked attendees if they collaborated with other teams on product launch strategy, only 44% of poll respondents said they did. Unfortunately, this didn’t come as that much of a surprise, as a lack of collaboration between sales and marketing is one of the biggest missed opportunities for most companies.
My experience across many product launches for different organizations has taught me that the first step is to create your ideal customer profile (ICP) using some key categories:
What procedures can we sell into? Is the value prop the same for all of them?
What patients are the best fit for the product and are they concentrated by providers, sites of care, or regions?
Do we expect to be approved by all payors or just a select group? Will we be approved across the country or only in certain areas?
What health systems do we have existing contracts with and which providers are at those facilities?
If this review results in a broad base of ICPs, you may then need to stack rank these factors as you roll out to market. But who performs that stack rank? Most frequently, this process has been owned by marketing, but a big opportunity exists to include sales here because they have valuable context on how things will land in the field. As an example, marketing might include Dr. Singh as an ICP because he has high procedure volume in a key region. But if a sales rep knows that Dr. Singh is a paid consultant for a competitor and will never change products, we already have friction. Giving sales a seat at the table early on not only leads to a more credible pool of ICPs, it gets them to buy in to later marketing initiatives because they feel involved.
Once the initial list of ICPs is created, it’s time to strategically refine it. The product itself plays a big role in this step. Is it an upgrade on existing tech or something truly groundbreaking? New tech may be an opportunity to convert competitive users, but that needs to be balanced against existing customers who may feel overlooked if they aren’t getting your latest innovation.
This refinement stage is where conflict can really arise because sales reps have a lot of personal relationships with providers and know they’re the first to be criticized if the strategy is off. But that’s okay! Sales and marketing should have different perspectives. They’re like siblings - not always in agreement but part of the same family.
Conceptually, this process of identifying and then refining ICPs is pretty straightforward. But many companies don’t execute on it properly because in practice it’s pretty laborious. It’s a big effort to collect, collate, and share all of the data you want to use to create a strategy. Not to mention that while marketing is working with concrete numbers, sales often has more anecdotal data. Both are valuable, but weighting them properly is difficult and is another place where the teams need to be in sync.
AcuityMD streamlines this entire process tremendously. Not just with accessible data, but with simple workflows and a single source of truth that is visible across the entire organization. Simply inputting the procedure codes that fit your product will show how many providers and facilities are in a given territory, and the total volume of both the providers and the facilities. A task that used to take weeks now takes minutes.
Then you can refine the initial list down to your priority targets, just as we discussed earlier. But the additional details like product usage, affiliations, peer networks, and more provided by AcuityMD are very powerful for building out a go-to-market plan. Just knowing at which facility sales reps should approach a provider is incredibly valuable. It’s not in a spreadsheet, it’s not protected by marketing, it’s actionable information that reps can access on their mobile devices. Critically, any updates or revisions are also immediately visible across the organization so nobody is working off of outdated information and heading down the wrong path.
As your launch progresses, your plan is augmented with win/loss information added to AcuityMD with a few clicks. Are facilities that aren’t on contract resistant to adopting new tech from an unfamiliar vendor? Are competitors not converting? Or, at the opposite end, maybe competitors are converting but existing customers don’t see a need to upgrade just yet. Iterate and refine over and over until you have a strategy that’s perfectly on track.
Conflicts will arise. No launch ever goes perfectly according to plan. But being able to process and adjust to changes is key. It’s not just getting marketing and sales in sync before launch, but keeping them in sync well after. With a good plan and accessible information, you’ll have the bandwidth to address these issues and keep the launch on track.
Lee Smith
VP of Customer Experience
AcuityMD
