For decades, medical equipment and devices manufacturers targeting Latin America have employed tried-and-true, traditional approaches to sales:

• Build personal contacts
• Pitch prospects one by one
• Be active in trade shows to increase brand awareness
• Keep at it

That’s pretty much been it. Different approaches, particularly those involving data to drive targeting, just weren’t possible. The available data for Latin America on capital equipment, medical devices, consumables, PACs, RIS and other categories was either unavailable, incomplete or extremely out of date. So the typical push made perfect sense.

Now it makes a lot less sense.

Global Health Intelligence (GHI) built a team to do all the important digging as far as purchases and imports of different types of medical supplies and equipment in LatAm for nearly 90% of the hospitals in the region, not to mention quantifying the market share of different companies in different categories. This means you can take a much more strategic, informed approach to spiking sales. While it’s great to see medical devices sales going up 8% YOY in Mexico and sales surging with infusion pumps and capnography equipment, that general data isn’t as helpful when you don’t know who has the greatest need—and how to reach them. With this in mind, here’s how to increase your sales of medical equipment in LatAm using a data-driven approach.

 

#1: Drill Down to Find Opportunities

Your sales team obviously knows who they want to target based on previous experience—they bought product A before so they’ll probably need more soon. But what if casual touching base with your clients doesn’t reveal a need in another area—simply because your client doesn’t handle that area and doesn’t know? Yet if you could call up a hospital’s equipment purchases in the past year with a few quick clicks, you could see opportunities that you never even thought of…because they never came up in client conversations before.

 

#2: Plan Strategically with Greater Precision

When it comes time to map out strategy for next year and how much to commit to different parts of the budget, many sales and marketing teams know what they’ll do…and at the same time, they don’t know. They don’t often have hard data on what’s happening in different areas that can help them figure out how much to allocate in marketing/sales or which areas they should target more in the coming year because there’s a need. Instead, they rely on feel—their impression of what’s happening based on what they’re seeing and what their clients say. This could be valid when you have an experienced team in place—but why not add objective data to be sure that your team’s feel for the market is solid?

#3: Strengthen Your CRM

There no question that a good CRM software like Salesforce can streamline your customer relationships and strengthen marketing campaigns. But why limit yourself to ONLY your data? By integrating your CRM with GHI’s hospitals database, you synchronize your contacts and their buying habits with identified sales needs based on real-world equipment counts so you can further increase the efficiency of your targeting and cross-selling via CRM, not to mention making your marketing efforts more targeted by basing them on real-world needs from rock-solid data.

 

#4: Power Your Propensity Analysis

This approach tries to predict customer behavior by using variables and isolating out who among your customer base is most likely to buy. While there are a number of great tools out there for running a propensity analysis, the strength of your results are only as good as your data. As with CRM, why base your analysis on just your internal data? If you can incorporate real-world sales results from real-world behaviors for dozens of categories, you’ll be able to identify many more prospects with proven needs you can meet.

 

NEXT STEPS

Contact GHI for a 30-minute demo to see how our tool can help you get started with these 4 approaches and jump-start your numbers ASAP. Just tell us where you want to improve and the challenges you have. We’ll show you how easy it is to get your answers and then apply them to your sales strategies. While tried-and-true is fine for an approach, there’s always value in trying a new approach based on a true picture of the market—and that’s what we can give you.