How to Win More at MedTech Industry Conferences

Welcome, everyone. My name is Lee Smith. I'm one of the co-founders at AcuityMD, and we are here today to talk about how to win more at MedTech industry conferences. I think a lot of companies invest a lot of resources into industry events, and so we want to kind of run through a clear playbook for how to be as effective as possible at these events.

So, I'm joined today by Dave Carey and Jeremy Laynor, and maybe I'll have each of them give a quick introduction before we jump into the content. Dave, you want to start us off? Sure. Happy to, Lee. Hi, everyone. Dave Carey, I am the CEO here at Preceptis Medical. We're a company that is taking pediatric ear tubes out of the OR and bringing them to the ENT's office for lots of good clinical and economic reasons. So, 30 years in MedTech.

My largest experience is probably at Medtronic and Stryker, but several startups, too, and a big fan of Lee's platform at AcuityMD, and happy to be here. Yep. Thanks, David. Jeremy Laynor, I'm the Chief Commercial Officer currently at OnPoint Surgical. Early stage, advanced surgical navigation platform. We're currently focused on spine, and really kind of changing the landscape as it relates to AR and AI and how to integrate these really high-tech components into nav to provide our customer spine surgeons a great platform to improve patient outcomes. So, exciting stuff. Most recently came from Providence Medical Technology. Spent eight years there building out our commercial effort and our global sales team, and similar to Dave, have a nice blend of big companies like Medtronic, as well as a lot of startup experience, and have a lot of experience with Acuity. I was one of the early customers, and have known Lee for several years, and the team, and it's a tremendous platform. So excited to be here and share a little bit about conferences. I've been to a few hundred of them, so definitely have experience in conferences.

Excellent. Well, welcome to you both. We're in good hands, and as someone who also came from the med device world and spent a lot of time in marketing, industry conferences are a hot topic for me personally. So why don't we jump in?

For the agenda today, we're going to kind of build from pre-show through closing the loop. So we'll talk about setting goals, building a target list, making sure you come prepared and you arm your team well, leveraging your customers and other tactics at the event, and then closing the loop and follow-up.

So to start, I think goes without saying, setting goals is important, but especially when you're investing a lot in conferences, having a clear vision in mind of what you're trying to achieve before the meeting so you can determine later on if you were effective or not is really important. And so, the way we like to think about it usually is distinguishing engagement goals. So the activity that's going to happen at the meeting versus some of the outcomes or metrics that you may see lagging behind. So I think this is a pretty good framing, and I'll pass it to Jeremy. Maybe elaborate on what you've seen as kind of a successful lead up to a conference.

Yeah, I think it's really important, one, to get really organized prior to a conference, meaning setting your team up for success. So who's going? Who's attending? Who's the leadership? What resources do you need to be successful? Obviously, I think if you show up and think that your booth traffic is going to be the way that you're going to generate leads and have a really successful conference, I think you're setting yourself up for failure before you get there. And one of the things that I think I've learned over years and years of working and attending these conferences is the more work you do up front, meaning weeks and sometimes even months prior to the actual conference, preparing your team, getting organized, all the pre-marketing that goes into it, really getting strategic about what you want to accomplish will lead to a great couple days in whatever conference town you're in. And the more organized, the more focused, and the more clear understanding of the objectives you're trying to accomplish at that particular conference, the better. And sometimes that could be one or two really important engagements with a key potential customer. It's not about volume.

I think it's really a quality game, and I think Dave kind of mentioned that as we were discussing that before the webinar today. Any amount of time that your team can spend preparing, using a platform like AcuityMD to really get focused and highly segmented on what you're trying to accomplish at the meeting, it's going to pay dividends, and you're going to get a return. And don't depend on the booth traffic is probably the big point for me.

Absolutely. Dave, anything to add there? No, I think you covered it very well, except to say that, look, the three things startups never have enough of are time, people, and money. And so we have to be super efficient with all of these things. And I consider the event management to be kind of, the event itself is more like the center of the bell curve. There's prep on the upfront, and there's follow-up on the back end, and if you're not going to execute all three of those really well, don't go. As Jeremy mentioned, I used to be one of those guys, I can think back to my Stryker and even my Medtronic days, where I'd be out for two dinners every night. And ultimately, I realized that I wasn't highly effective at either. And so, the further up I moved in organizations, the more I realized impact's important.

And I think Jeremy's exactly right. If you're waiting for people to come to the booth, you don't wait when you're in the field to go out and see customers. When you're a startup, you don't have the name brand recognition. You've got to go out and tell your story. So how you find people, how you target them, and how ready you are for them is completely up to you.

Totally. Yeah, I think those are great points on being very specific with your goals. Like look, this whole menu of potential engagement goals is probably not going to make sense for every single company. And so depending on how you can be most effective, depending on where you are commercially with your product, you should hone in on a few of these and really determine what's going to make the most impact at this event, given who's going to be there, and be successful with that, but don't necessarily cast the net too broad, so to speak. So I think great points, and again, depends a lot on the context, but kind of good menu of options here to really think about. Okay. Going to segue a little bit as we think about building up to the conference and building a target list. And again, there may be a number of criteria or ways to target, and I think the default or the maybe industry 101 approach here would be to look at clinical relevance and volume and take the attendee list and stack rank it by volume and say, "That's who we're going to go after." And of course, that's a relevant starting point and a fine starting point, but when we talk about getting really specific and targeted with how we're going to achieve our goals and how we're going to make the most impact at the conference, you should expand your ICP or think about other variables that you may want to target people off of or you may be using to engage people. And so maybe Dave, we'll start with you.

How do you think about building out a target list and trying to figure out who you're going to engage with at an event? Yeah. I'm a big fan of talking with folks about their referral landscape, and so I like to have those conversations and sound educated about the markets that my prospects are in. And so AcuityMD's great for me for that because I can roll in and sound and actually have information like I'm a subject matter expert on market development in those markets. For us here at Perceptus, we're purely a market development story now. And so for us to be able to repackage some of the AcuityMD effort ourselves and relaunch it to help surgeons get a start in their markets is hugely valuable. So I'll give you an example. We have a customer that just came on with us in Florida, and she's very excited to tell our story and wanted to make sure that the market knew about her.

So we literally drew a 50-mile map around her practice and we put all this together in a conference. And so these are the people we should be going after for you. I know you do X number of cases, but there's literally 10X going on around you. Let's go tell the story together, and we'll build a marketing campaign for you. And so we're doing that, and it's been very successful, and I did it at Stryker with Mako, and so to a certain extent, we're reworking some proven strategies here, but they're effective. And the peer-to-peer thing's really important, too, because whenever you're teaching somebody a new way of doing things, they want to know what their peers are doing. Some spaces are very podium-focused. ENT is to a certain extent, but not as much. They care more about the people that they came up through with residency with, fellowship, people they wrote papers with. The peers are hugely important when they're thinking about moving from the OR to the office. So those peer connections that we can hunt down on AcuityMD and find folks that have made the transition to help those that haven't yet and set up kind of a phone-a-friend network has been really impactful to our business.

Yeah. Interesting. And I guess from that standpoint, as you're thinking about building out a target list and honing in on who might we really try to engage with at a conference, Jeremy, will you ever look at peer connections of your existing customer base or your KOL base who you know is going to be at the event?

Yeah, I was going to say, on this list, if I was ranking peer connections, probably one of the most powerful tools or feature sets that we would look at when preparing for a conference.

A peer-to-peer engagement, the more of those opportunities you can tee up at a conference, or really any other time, but at a conference especially, is probably the single biggest indicator of how much output you're going to get from the conference. So the more of those types of peer connections you can establish, you do the homework through the platform, whether that's the same fellowship, I think Dave mentioned residency programs are great, but even published papers. What clinical studies have they been involved in? It doesn't have to be the same paper, but maybe it's the same interest in a particular aspect of their practice, right?

We've had tremendous success with that, where maybe they didn't know each other that well, but there's that mutual connection through an interest like that. And then beyond that, there's KOLs for different manufacturers that are non-competitive to yourself. So in my instance, we're in navigation. We don't have a particular implant or procedure, so there's lots of physicians that engage with other companies and have met other peers and friends through that and become really respect each other's opinions because they share similar interests, not only in the clinical paper, but maybe in a certain procedure or a certain implant, et cetera. So I think the peer connection's a huge one, and anybody not doing that is really leaving a lot on the table.

The other piece I would mention here is affiliation and access. I think Dave and I are both in earlier stage situations now where limited resources. So if you have an approval at a certain IDN or a system. And the last thing you want to do is try and go fight that battle and start from scratch. I want to go build out. I want to so land and expand. So we're going to look at any targets that are going to be attending the conference that are also in an approved account. These are great opportunities for us, and that's a pre-email in advance. "Hey, we have this approved technology. It's available at your hospital, at your system, at your IDN," et cetera. "We're going to be here. And by the way, one of your colleagues is going to be here. We'd love to have you for blank." Is that a dinner, a demo, a meeting at the booth? Da. So I think those two, to me, really jump out. The referral landscape's great. I love that idea as well. But I think for tactical speed, accelerated kind of movement within the sales process, I really like those two features.

Excellent. Yeah. All makes sense. And maybe to summarize a bit here, of course, we're looking at volume, and we want to identify relevant surgeons. But to our whole conversation around goals, prioritization and focus is really important here. So you can kind of use a number of these variables to hone in on where you want to invest your resources, right? If you have a competitive surgeon who's going to be tough to convert, maybe they're not going to be as high on the list as someone who's a connection of one of your KOLs. Maybe they did fellowship with them. They're at a facility where you know you have access. That's where you can really stack the deck and focus your efforts to hopefully get the most out of the conference.

So I think all those make sense. Any final comments here? Lee, I would just jump on one more thing. Yeah. With Pipeline and if that's your CRM or whatever your CRM is, it's really important to make sure that as you look at your opportunities that your team's currently driving, for guys like Jeremy and I, it's important to know where some of these folks are in their deal funnel so that we can hopefully advance things and maybe close a few things. And so, taking that list of attendees and then marrying it up against the funnel is really important because all I'm trying to do is further that effort. So yeah, you're right. You can go after the whales by finding the largest volume people. But really what I'm trying to do is advance the things that are already in play. And so I think that's an important consideration.

Absolutely. And I think that's a good segue. I'll move us into kind of arming your team and really setting up the conference for success. And we're kind of now looking, let's call it in the weeks leading up to the conference. But to your point, Dave, the context really matters on where you are with a deal. You may approach a net new opportunity, a net new surgeon a little bit differently than you would someone who's maybe already gone to a lab or has some sort of engagement with your team or your product. And so I think really tailoring the outreach in advance is important, right? You may have kind of a message to different personas or message to different users based on what events you're running at the conference. If you're running a lab or if you're having a KOL at the booth, that outreach might look a little bit different. But nonetheless, really nailing that outreach to communicate in advance of the event what's actually going to be happening, what you want that physician to do is critical. And then I think another plug, and we'll talk a little bit about this more, is using AI to brief the team. And I'm sure you guys can both speak to it from the executive standpoint, but you want to know what's happened previously.

What does the team want you to achieve at the event? We've got a lot of AI capabilities now with AcuityAI as well to really prep executives. "Hey, here's the context on this physician. Here's a call plan. Here's everything about their practice." That makes it really easy for someone who's stepping into a conversation with a really important physician to have all that context and background before it. So I'm curious, yeah, from your guys' standpoint, what really matters as you're preparing for an executive meeting, maybe with a key doc that you haven't met yet?

I'll jump in. As you build your business, and both I think Dave and I in previous experiences, where you may have hundreds or even 1,000 or plus customers, as you kind of move up the rankings, you can't stay up with all of these customers. And I think we didn't mention this yet, but customer engagement for me is really important at these meetings. So it's not just the peer-to-peer opportunity, but it's a chance to see a customer that maybe you only get to see as a member of the executive team once or twice a year. Mm-hmm. So when I get those opportunities to engage with our most important stakeholder, which is our current customer, I want to kind of have a really good understanding of where they're at, right? From both their what's going on in their practice, how are they using or leveraging our technology? Is that trending up? Is it trending flat? Is it trending down? Is there anything I can do to help make sure that's tilting in the right direction? And/or help them with anything else in their practice. So, the concept of having an AI tool or something where a rep could very easily, or a manager very easily kind of communicate several of these kind of status levels or, "Hey, really need you to, with Dr. Smith, cover this," in a way that I can consume and kind of take in on my flight to the conference is super valuable because phone calls, great, text, great, but things get lost. So to have that in a concentrated place, I think, makes a ton of sense.

Hundred percent. Yeah, I'll follow you, Jeremy, here. Funny story. I used to have this VP at Stryker. He was a very fun guy. And he always before we go out with a customer to dinner, he'd say, "So what are you hoping to do? What's the next step? What do you want to advance tonight?" And then he would make a point of asking for it. Right when the salad came out because he always said if they were going to say no, it was going to be a really awkward dinner.

But I always thought it was funny, but he was right. He wanted to know what you wanted to get done so he could make sure to stay in front of it. And I think what has always attracted me to AcuityMD is the user interface and making data easy to consume and action on. And so for me, this is a big part of why I even use the platform is so I can roll in. I don't have to ask the dumb questions about where they did residency, fellowship. I already know all of that information. I've given the surgeon the respect to know that. And I've also known because, we're in a who else says so business, I also know what other peers of his are currently working with us, which only enhances the conversation and the credibility. So I think this is another one of those things, if you show up prepared, you're going to get a lot more out of the conference than the guy that's just hoping to show up and run into people.

Absolutely. Makes a ton of sense. And maybe I'll just double-click a little bit into the AI functionality because obviously this space is moving really fast and right now, we just launched AcuityAI into the platform. And so, I think, this just has the opportunity to really supercharge a lot of the prep and pre-work for conferences and whether that's simply asking the AI, "Hey, who should I be targeting at this conference?" Maybe that's going to surface a few physicians that weren't on your list initially. "Hey, draft me an outreach email to this surgeon who I know is a connection of Dr. Jones," right? Or, "Build me a call plan that I can send to my executive to achieve this goal." All that is now available. Previously, you would've had to do that manually or do that work on your own, or do the research yourself. That is now going to be generated for you in the click of a button. And so all of that pre-work can become a lot more efficient, more automated, and ultimately, I think you can be more effective and more powerful in the results of the conference. But curious, either of you guys, any comments on the early results from the AI functionality?

It's really easy. That's what I would say. It's extremely easy to use. If you have any experience with ChatGPT, similar, and it's all about great prompts. And, I'm just kind of getting started with the AI functionality, but very promising and easy. And similar to Dave, UI has always been a real strength for me of Acuity. And I think this just now enhances that and it's tapping into the speed and the functionality and, as we learn the prompts that we need, not just in conferences, as well, but I think day-to-day activity within the platform's going to get really enhanced with this feature set. Yeah, absolutely. And if you're managing a conference or doing prep for a conference, put this in play because it's going to save you a lot of time and probably surface some things that you weren't aware of in the past.

So, this is in beta available now. And we'll segue a bit into execution and we've talked quite a bit about leveraging your peers at conferences and I think, obviously in this industry, peer-to-peer events and peer-to-peer education is really critical and commonplace. But maybe one of the things that's, I'd say, underutilized sometimes at conferences. So I'm curious, Dave, maybe we'll start with you because you brought it up earlier as well, but elaborate on how you think about that, different ways that you'll use your customer base or your KOLs to facilitate peer-to-peers at events. I think we're just now putting the finishing touches on a program that we call Hummingbird, that's our product, Ambassadors. And what we found was that surgeons are at first nervous about making change to their workflow.

It's been working for them, so why would I want to mess with that? And the reality is that while we're really detail-oriented and we're a very professional organization, we're still industry. And, so a lot of surgeons like to hear from other surgeons. And so, this ambassador program, for lack of a better way to put it, is kind of a phone to friend, kind of let me walk you through how I made the transition to office, how my practice has evolved, and the improvements that I've been able to drive. And so, like many things, when you're trying to take on big change, it's hard to know where to start. And the peer-to-peer for us is invaluable about getting people out of the blocks and having them have somebody that can provide a resource. Early on when I came on here and met customers, they all told me that they were talking as they were going through the transition with someone else that had already made the switch.

So in moving to the office, we want to make sure that they can talk to someone who's been through what they've been through, whether it's in a major children's hospital or a one ENT practice. It doesn't matter. There's things that you need to do to put yourself in a position to do well and to have your patients do great, and we want to set people up to be able to share those stories. So, our plan with these ambassadors is that they're engaged, they're available to peers that can see around some corners, I guess for lack of a better way to put it, and spend some time and make sure that our new surgeons are learning tips and tricks from the guys that have been doing this successfully for a couple of years.

So Dave, will you staff any of those ambassadors at conferences or will you organize dinners, I guess? How do you deploy them at conferences if you haven't- Still getting started with that, but ultimately yes. The idea is that it's kind of a new take, Leon, on the consultants that a lot of organizations have historically had. And, we do feel that this is really a workflow change and it's about getting comfortable with it all. And so yeah, the idea is dinners at conferences and just being available to help people along in their transition Excellent. Jeremy, how about you? How are you both identifying potential peer connections and then facilitating them around conferences? One thing we do in that early stage is we're looking at who are the faculty at a conference. So who's involved in the organization, whatever it is. For us, it's the NASS, the SMIS, the CSRSs of the world. But who's on the board? Who's participating from a leadership standpoint? And in many instances, you have one of your champions already there, and then you build off of that. So, a lot of times we'll connect with one of our surgeon champions or KOLs that's actually involved with the conference really early on and just have a candid conversation.

"Hey, what's your availability? What other physicians are you going to be mingling with? Do you have plans with... Do you think would be a good fit for this technology?" For On Point right now, for instance. And a lot of times, just through that quick conversation, they're like, "Yeah, Dr. Blank, and blank. We're trying to get together." All of a sudden, you've got the small intimate dinner and- Mm-hmm... you know, through a very quick outreach. So that can be kind of the foundation we build off of is something like that. I really like the smaller, intimate one to three, plus your KOL type of setting. Done the bigger speaker programs in the past, done the real formal, big labs, 50 surgeons, and it's just really hard to manage those types of events. So I like setting up a series of smaller engagements. Again, if you don't have a KOL that is involved with the conference, many times you're going to have one of your KOLs most of the time going to the conference. And it's just finding out who's going, what's their current schedule look like, and then can you get early on and really select that best match as listed here, which is, who are some of the surgeons they're thinking about, or connections or peers that they naturally have? And if not, could we come to help facilitate that based on the discussion we had earlier, a couple slides ago, about doing the research. "Hey, Dr. Smith, do you happen to know Dr. Carey?

I see that you guys both published on this paper." "Oh yeah, we're good friends," or, "Yeah, I know him pretty well." "I'd love to set up just a coffee between the two of you." "That'd be great. When are you both available?" And go from there. So I think sometimes we can get a little too complex at these things, and again, it's quality over quantity, keep it simple, things that you can really manage. Less is more in terms of moving parts. And then one other consideration is we've had success in the past doing some creative type of events, maybe off-campus, if you will, where if you get the right group together and they want to do just something very different, get them off, away from the main strip of activities happening at the conference. And maybe it's just a restaurant that's a couple miles away, but kind of getting people together outside of the very crowded spaces where there's a lot of competition has worked really well, too. Totally. Makes a lot of sense. And I'll tie that back a little bit to where we started, which was what we're trying to achieve at the event, right? And there may be an instance where you do need to bring one key surgeon out to dinner or to a lab if you really need to advance that deal. But there may be other instances where a 15-minute coffee or chat at the booth is really all that each party actually wants. And you can ultimately get what you're there to achieve out of that type of interaction.

So it's really thinking back to, "Hey, what do we need to get out of this?" And then executing on it. So I think but all of that makes sense and a lot of different ways to leverage your KOLs, leverage your user base to engage with others who are maybe thinking about jumping on. So great insights there. And then, we'll talk about closing the loop, right? I think we put all this work into conferences, we send people there, we invest all the pre-work, right? And so actually making sure that you follow through is ultimately critical, right? Because you need to show the ROI, and you want to pull through all the work that's been done. And so I think just some basic blocking and tackling goes a long way, and whether you're an executive or you're managing the conference or you're participating at the conference, holding yourself and others accountable to actually logging the leads, right? And you can do that directly through Pipeline or your CRM, which AcuityMD integrates with. You can assign a person, right? So even tagging an @mention in the system, @ the local rep, here's what happened, here are the notes.

And one thing that we've invested a lot in recently, especially with our launch of AcuityAI, is the voice-to-text, right? You don't need to get on your computer anymore and type all of that in. You log onto Acuity, push the voice-to-text button, and you just talk it in right after you have the conversation. And so trying to simplify this for the folks managing the conference, I think ultimately makes it a lot easier to run the follow-up. And then setting up an SLA and actually communicating and tracking all the follow-up, and then once you've had the time to let those leads run the engagement and actually manage some of those conversations, evaluating the metrics, right? Actually determining, "Hey, were we successful in our goals here? Is this something that we should continue to invest in down the road?"

But Dave, any other thoughts from you on just the closing the loop and the follow-up with conferences? I think one of my core tenets has always been that the easier I make it for people to work with me, the more likely they are to do it. And so you've done a great job, you and the team, about making your program increasingly accessible to us and making it easier for us to go ahead and enter data and manage it. So no, I think that the only thing I would say isDo it. With that acceleration and access that we have now with you guys, it's really important that the team on my side get the data in fast while it's fresh.

Don't wait until the Sunday after the conference is out. By then you've lost half of it already. Do it while it's hot. Do it while it's immediate. Put those follow-ups down. And I think it's also important, it doesn't have a lot to do with AcuityMD, but for every interaction that I have with a clinician, I'll always ask for something to work on, something specifically, that we might be in a unique position to help with. And you'd be amazed at how many follow-up opportunities come from that, just to ask for some work and what's challenging you about your patient outreach or whatever it might be, referrals, name it. And I think they give you opportunities to follow up and hopefully differentiate from everyone else that's just tech dumping on them while they're at the conference.

Yeah, great tactic. Jeremy, any final thoughts here? No, I think he nailed it. I would just say that speed, because there's the conference and the little bubble of the conference, and it's great, especially when things go really well because you've done all this tremendous planning and preparation. Now you've executed. And the reality is, sorry about that as soon as that conference ends, if you don't have that information uploaded, tracked, you're moving on it, everybody goes back to real life again. And especially our clients, our physicians are super busy. That Monday they get back, they're back in with patients, they're at surgery, they're running a practice, they're at the hospital, and that conversation you had, if it doesn't get logged, if it doesn't get follow-up, there's not an owner, it's pretty much vaporizing because the speed at which you follow up and I love what Dave said, if you can set those expectations and there's some mutually agreed upon kind of next steps with the target that you worked so hard to get in front of, and now you had a great peer-to-peer meeting. If you don't move on that within that next two weeks, you've really lost a lot of traction.

And it's just the reality of going from conference bubble to back to real life. And then do you want to wait till the next conference bubble again? Could be a quarter, two quarters, a year from then. So, I think you nailed it, but that speed and that follow-up's really critical, and I think the platform allows for that really nicely and really easily. And voice to text should really drive CRM adoption and utilization at the rep level. So, yeah, thanks. You don't want to be typing out those notes at the conference or after any sales call. Yeah, it's a lot easier. But no, I think, look, clear communication, swift follow-up, nailing the basics goes a long way, right? You don't want someone else to jump in there or too much time to go by before you take advantage of the good interactions that you've had at these events. So I think that's a great point to end on, and I'll just kind of summarize it here for us. But, I think started with goals, right? It all comes back to that, setting your objectives. We talk about a lot of different tactics throughout the process, whether it's building a list or prepping your team, prepping executives, reaching out to customers. All that comes back to what you're trying to achieve, and that could be a few different things, but I think we kind of talked through a great menu of options and tactics on outreach and leveraging peers and building your list based off a number of different variables, and then executing on it as well and being really specific back to those goals.

And then obviously just nailing the basics, closing the loop. And we talked about starting to use AI in this whole process, too, to just be a lot more efficient throughout it. So thank you both for a great conversation and good luck to everyone attending the very frequent medical device conference circuit out there. So thanks again, guys.