Means of selling have evolved radically over the years. From the traditional barter system to door-to-door selling to commercials, social media and now mobile apps. Mobile apps are great because they offer an interactive interface to users. Interactive sales tools facilitates sales teams to display features and benefits and differentiate their product against the competition.
Among all the numerous industries that are adopting mobile sales apps, the medical device industry has been one of the early adopters. Many of the medical device companies arm their sales teams with several promotional tools, such as traditional product brochures, PowerPoint product presentations, videos and iBook presentations, among others.
There are a couple of factors that justify a company’s investment in mobile:
Apps allow companies to track performance in the field
Before the advent of mobile technology, it was difficult to track, analyze and report sales performance. Companies had to rely on manual reporting along with tedious paper work. There could be times when the sales teams would fail to put pertinent information about the product into use. This often resulted in inefficient sales.
Today, mobile apps can be enhanced with ‘analytics’. Medical device sales people carry these mobile apps along with them, and they feed data on-the-go. This data includes the information salespeople are using, and the frequency of usage. This stored data can be later retrieved in the form of reports, graphs and diagrams clearly depicting the gist of all the activities carried out by the sales personnel.
The information shared by the sales rep also needs to be compliant to the medical industry norms. This wasn’t something that could be tracked earlier. However, with app analytics, this information is easily available. This data also helps identify the pain areas and makes marketing and sales prep up their plans accordingly.
Access to information offline
Many mobile apps are rendered useless if the sales rep is not connected to the internet. If they don’t find a network where they can use the app, they do not have many go-to options.
Thankfully, offline access to apps offer a remedy for this problem. To address this, there are software products that enable the applications to work offline. Whether it is a simple app or a complicated functionality rich experience, it can work just as fine without network connectivity.
It is also possible to track analytics when the sales rep is offline. All this data is then transferred /updated once the sales rep hits the Wi-Fi zone. Thus, lack of internet connectivity no longer hurdles the working of mobile sales apps.
The bottom-line: Better sales!
These apps facilitate sales in ways traditional sales techniques could never have. Imagine walking into a hospital/medical practitioner’s office with a single tablet or mobile device compared to carrying a bunch of brochures and a pile of papers.
Sales apps are highly interactive and engaging consisting of videos, product descriptions and feedback forms. The amount and range of content that can be put into play is vast which makes this medium extremely powerful.
As technology expands, it’s also very easy to be extremely enthralled by the technology to the point of ‘getting into trouble’ mode. Rather than focusing on marketing and sales plans, companies fall into the trap of marketing a digital solution instead of digital marketing. Companies tend to push an application in the market because it is cool, neat and high-tech rather than determining if that application is undeniably meeting their sales objectives.
As long as you stay clear of such a mindset, you are free to explore the mobile world for medical device sales.
