Meducat Medical is a company that provides specialty sales team capabilities to large medical device companies or distributors in South Africa.
Many large corporates find it challenging to give all product ranges the focus required to grow sales at each product’s full market potential.
Medical device corporates often sell specialty product ranges within their larger product portfolios. These specialty product ranges usually target a specialized group of surgeons who are trained to perform this particular type of surgery.
A great example of this is the field of Operative Hysteroscopy within the field of General Gynaecology. Only a few of South Africa’s trained gynaecologists have been trained to perform this type of surgery.
These specialists expect the sales person calling on them to be extremely knowledgeable in the field that their products support.
The sales person is required to have extensive knowledge in the following areas:
- The overall disease area that their specialty product serves
- How their products work
- For troubleshooting
- Tips and tricks
- Features and benefits
- Indications
- Contraindications
- Clinical information supporting their products effectivity and risks
- Training and education opportunities for specialists and their staff
- Supply and availability of their products
- Reimbursement status of their products
Company sales representatives usually carry numerous products and are unable to give all products the necessary attention to deliver the required sales results across all their product ranges. It is natural for the company or the sales representative to focus on their larger lines of products used in the more generalized areas of surgery.
Using the above example of the field of general gynaecology, product ranges such as sutures, cutting and coagulation devices and surgical trocars, for example, get more attention and coverage by the sales representatives simply because these products usually drive the largest revenue in their overall product portfolios. The sales representatives also tend to have a more generalized knowledge of the use of these products in the area of general gynaecology. Sales representatives often find it difficult to acquire the necessary specialized knowledge to sell the specialty products within their larger basket of general products.
Another challenge large companies have for supporting these specialty product portfolios is that of having enough “headcount” (the term used by corporates to describe the number of sales people that have been approved by The Board of the Company or by their International Affiliate). As companies grow into larger entities, it becomes challenging to justify “specialty headcount” for these specialty product portfolios. Sales people are the companies most expensive resource and companies are under pressure to show maximum revenue per “headcount”.