Strategies for Achieving Commercial Excellence

Welcome to Medical Design & Outsourcing's webinar brought to you by AcuityMD. You can see the title right there, How to Win in MedTech: Strategies for Achieving Commercial Excellence. Got a great panel for you today, with representatives from three very innovative companies in MedTech, really, going after, I think, some of the more interesting spaces, in our industry, orthopedics and neurovascular. But we'll get into all that in a moment. check out the resource widget. We've got a couple of really interesting links there. You can access those, if you want more information about this topic. AcuityMD is a great, creator of, conversations and white papers centered around this space, so make sure you check those out. if you have questions during the presentation, we'll try to take them during. most likely we'll get to most of them after, but it helps us a great deal to know how many questions we'll be managing. So, don't wait until the end.

To ask questions, just type them in so, we know how best to handle them, and, please use the, ask question widget for that. you can expand the slides, with that little icon there. I don't know how to describe that. I guess it's four arrows or something like that, but just, push on that there button and, you'll see things much bigger. next, if you have any problems with this platform, it's impossible to imagine that technology could create a hiccup or two, but even ours does. make sure you refresh your browser. That's the easiest thing to do. if that doesn't get it, make sure, and this might actually-- I would put the X first. Like, try closing all your a- other apps and browsers. Focus on this conversation. Get rid of the email.

Get rid of anything that could draw from this. certainly close out on Zoom or anything else 'cause that's just gonna draw bandwidth, and, make sure you're focusing on what we're saying. So hit the X on your other windows. once again, if you're still having trouble, go for those three lines. But, I would always suggest just going, to the ask question widget first and emailing our great producer, Amira Weingartner. She'll fix any problem you might have. so if the first two don't work, or I guess the first three, just ask Amira for help and she'll be right on it.

Once again, this webinar is brought to you by AcuityMD, a great, friend of, Medical Design & Outsourcing and our other properties, so great to, be bringing you this conversation. I'm gonna introduce our excellent panel today. we've got Tim Dutton, Senior Director of Commercial Excellence and Corporate Affairs at Intellijoint. Taryn Sacchitella, she's Senior Manager of Enablement Programs at Route Ninety-Two. And Nick Smith. Sorry, Nick, I don't know how I trip over your name. Nick Smith, Director of Sales Growth at AcuityMD, the easiest of the bunch, and I choked on- That was the layup. That was the layup right there. I just lost the championship game right there then. but we'll move forward and try to recover from this, stumble by me. So, I didn't notice, up top the reference. We do have our little emoji buttons there, so, please, it always helps to see the hearts and the thumbs and all the other good stuff that comes our way when we make a good point. So don't be shy with that. So, folks, welcome to today's conversation.

Glad to be here. Thanks for being part of it. So, we're going to, explore the, commercial excellence, which is, I think something everyone is striving for. And, AcuityMD, you've kind of developed a formula for this. So first, let's sort of unpack commercial excellence. What is commercial excellence? Let's get a definition from folks.

I can kick it off. Who wants to go first? So- Sure. Thank you, Taryn. Yeah. So I guess for me, it's really specifically the support system behind the sales force. So it's that internal, like, hug around all of the salespeople to give them the tools and resources they need to not only sell faster, but be more strategic and be able to be good stewards of their business, understand how to manage their portfolio, and reduce the administrative labor that often they're weary about so they can go out in the field and be more effective and efficient.

Great. Tim, do you have, something to add to that? I love that. Yeah. It's, - I think the slide too, just about re-repeatable processes, right, I think is key. Intellijoint's fifteen years old, but, still feel like a really young company sometimes. and we're really at that phase now where we have a product, we're selling across the U.S., we're selling internationally, and for a long time we've been thinking internally about revenue per head. How do we maximize revenue per head as a kind of key for activity? and I think that has had some product elements, and now with commercial excellence, it's like, okay, but what about customer service? What about our field operations? How about our actual hiring practices? It pulls it much more across that entire journey. And I think about like scalable, cost-effective processes that really help the team to be set up to win, and to maximize the time that they have in the day to actually go out and sell and do the things that they love to do and not be bogged down in those manual processes.

That can be frustrating at times. No, to... The commercialization I think is, underappreciated as to the complexity of it. I think once everyone's like, "Hey, we're commercial," like, "Let's all systems go from here." But, I think the challenge just starts then. Nick, you've got a, like from AcuityMD's perspective, you folks have been around I think five years now. I remember from when you started. you've got a great perch in the view of what's going on out there commercially. What are you seeing?

Yeah, I mean, I have an interesting background because I was actually the first person to buy Acuity, during my time at Elvis. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. So I have a different lens. You know, I kind of transitioned to, you know, away from- Medtech proper to the software side, but I think commercial excellence is really the ability for a lot of the internal champions to align together, you know, to create an environment that really supports field sales and their efforts. You know, it's sales operations, marketing, inventory management kind of all working together to make sure that it's a seamless, internal process to support field sales and ultimately making it a better customer experience. And if you're making it a better customer experience, then you're going to have better patient outcomes. So it's been fun to kind of see both ends of it, you know, through different lenses.

Let's look a little more deeply into MedTech. MedTech is a complicated industry, even after you've gotten that approval. there's things you can do and cannot do, but why is commercial excellence critical for operators and companies in the MedTech industry?

Throw it out to the group. I'm happy to tackle this one to kind of start off. I think- I want you folks elbowing each other for first questions. I want a fight. I want some energy. The, - So, you win this one... the selling cycle is long, and it's complicated, and you don't really necessarily know when that moment's going to strike and things are going to accelerate all of a sudden. And so you need to have your team back at HQ, which for us is in often a different country from where we're selling. We're based in Canada. majority of our sales are in the US. We need to actually have everybody ready to go to support the team, whether in New York or Florida or California, where- wherever that is.

And that doesn't even get into just the nature of the MedTech sales cycle itself with the back processes, too. And so having, recognizing that takes time, you want to be able to maximize the sales rep's a- ability to actually go in and win. for us, when we were kind of younger, that was kind of, okay, let's get like bread and butter type of like sales playbooks and those sorts of things. Mm-hmm. And now you think about scale and nationwide scale, too. It's a lot on the operational side of the equation, too. How do we get the right product to the right customer at the right time to make sure that s- that surgery for the ultimate customer of the patient happens through the best, possible way that can be. and that's mission critical for the health of that individual, and so we want to make sure that we're excellent so that actually happens the best it can.

Taryn, what would you- I think too... Yeah, I think also just thinking about like health systems, they're super complex, so it can be really hard to standardize processes across a team-... when regions are so different. The integrated, vertical integration in a hospital can vary across, you know, a state, let alone the country. So it's really hard to kind of pin down how you can scale when everything is really complex. And I think commercial excellence becomes even more important to be able to support the teams with the right data so they understand how to target a message, across very different stakeholders that they're going to come into play with, so.

No, that's a great point, and I think regions are different, hospital systems are different, and even departments within those hospitals are different. I mean- Yeah, and as an example-... the doctors are different. Yeah. Yeah. And just an example for Route 92, like our market's really complex and webbed, and it's a really niche network of physicians and, very relationship oriented. And so it can be really difficult to even build a sales process when it's so nuanced and very... It's a very, congested market. Mm-hmm. So it brings a whole other slew of challenges that requires the sales to have additional support, when they go out and are working with, you know, a very competitive landscape.

Physicians I, you know, I've found are driven by different things, right? You know, some want to be, you know, the next KOL of the company, like they want to be a speaker, - Hmm... you know, microphone. Some are very clinical focused, you know, and like understanding what drives at, you know, at the most ground level I think is really important from a sales process standpoint when you're engaging. And I saw towards the end of my time at Olympus, like I was bringing in more B2B sellers than people that had a lot of previous MedTech experience. Like how do you... You have different people with different experiences. You could have someone with ten years of experience, and rock solid from a, you know, a pro- you know, understanding products and the physicians, or you may have someone that's brand new breaking into MedTech for the first time.

Mm-hmm. I think the largest, you know, I think shift has obviously been GPO, IDN, and local agreements. So you may find the doctor that may be the one you want to align to, but unless you truly understand the contractual obligations of the network you're working in, you know, I think we talked about, Taryn, that the health system, you could be going down the wrong road. You could spend a lot of time, resource, and product and samples in an area where you may not be able to win when you get through supply chain.

And I want to unpack one thing you said, but to the audience, I also want you folks to be involved in this as well. So submit your questions, as they come to mind, and we'll get to them, when they do. And be-- You know, I can read pretty well, so, you know, give us some examples. Let us know what you want us to focus on and what your problems are, and I'm sure we can help you with that. So, w- let's sort of break things down into the different parts of the process. what are some of the s- the starting point and the early challenges, in this, in the selling process? And go. Who wants to go first? I'll go. I'll go. All right. Taryn, I'm sorry. Taryn, I'm sorry. Here we go.

I think, well, for us specifically, I think it's just resistance and fear of the unknown from the reps. So, and I try to make sure, like approaching... I mean, we just started our commercial excellence team at the company in January, February. So- Oh, wow... very new. and I approach it going in trying to understand like where the fear and the resistance comes from, and often I find it is fear of complexity, again, this administrative burden that they think they're going to encounter, potentially a loss of autonomy being back in this, "Oh, you know, here we go. We're becoming a huge corporation again," when a lot of people come to the smaller companies to actually get out of that. Or just failed past initiatives from having, you know, such driven metrics that they have to meet, and that's kind of the focus, that they kind of lose, you know, the why behind why they're there. And so that's been our biggest challenge is working with the sales force to really push the partnership aspect rather than we're coming in to, you know, add all this extra work on you. All right.

And totally. Yeah, we also started at the beginning of this year, about six months ago. and the... It-- But it's-- We're formalizing a process that's kind of been underway for us for the past two years. we've been... As we've shifted from younger startup to more formal, high-growth scaleup, that has come with internally thinking about how we manage a lot of accounts across the US and be able to grow efficiently, as well. And we're no longer the size of the business where everybody knows everybody too, and there's people, back at head office doing things. So how do you have, like, the right communication channels? How you have the right governance channels? Who do you go to for different things? There's just... That was just, I think, some growing pains and some just well-known kind of challenges. And so for us, it was, there was demand from our sales team for a lot of things, and there were some quick wins that we did at the beginning of the year that were, that was really great.

And now as we tackle some more, let's call it complicated challenges, where you do need to standardize, you need to balance standardizing with the sales team who is independent, wants to own their own business. And so how you do best practices with guardrails and balance that with standardization, that's, I think that's the art and the science together to it all. and a lot of what we're doing too right now is at the technology layer. we've been-- we did... have done, as of this week, a complete migration of our CRM, our customer relationship management software, which was just fundamentally misbuilt a couple of years ago. So we've done a big kind of IT revamp of that this year as a core foundation that was needed so that we can now start to automate and optimize different workflows on top of that.

I think the why is important. And you know what I mean by that is, you know, I'm experiencing, you know, we're experiencing rapid growth at Acuity, and it's, you know, we're now implementing more tech stack. And, you know, it can slow you down. You gotta slow down to speed up. I'm sure you face that when you add tech stack at your companies. I'm a big proponent, whenever you're doing it, is giving the why. Like, why are we doing this? You know, what can we expect out of the gates, but what are we, where are we going to get to by implementing something like this? And if I put on my old Olympus hat, like whenever I would kick off, like if I was gonna launch a new CRM or, you know, a new process, giving the why to the sales team was always so important.

And then also bringing in some sales team members into the commercial excellence process I think is important. Because if you can get some of the individuals in the field that are respected into the process, at least getting their eyes on it, and then they help roll it out, I feel like it's always well-received, because they feel like they were a part of it. So I think the why is important.

And I think too, and I know we'll definitely get into this later, but language is really important with the sales team. And we work on this a lot at Route ninety-two, especially recently. We built out a new playbook, and it's not being so directive, but more giving encouragement, or you could do this is for you, this is a guide for you. Just kind of the way we're communicating out to make sure it really reinforces that partnership aspect versus we're just coming in to throw all this on your plate. so I feel like that's something that commercial excellence teams can really do better with and continue to do better is, just being mindful of the way that we talk about it.

All right. Well, our audience is the best, and we've got a couple of questions here, we're gonna get into. So our first question is from Steven. Steven said, "Tim mentioned the value analysis process.

So many in our industry are really struggling right now with this. What are some of the ways you're arming your sales force to align to the clinical, financial, and operational requirements of the VAC? And how are you reviewing your materials internally?"

Not sure who wants to take that one first, and you can see it there in the Q&A box too. I can start. Tim. I think, two things that we've done over the past year. One is, I think, not surprising, but we did a really big refresh of our back deck, the core, materials. And we went straight to surgeons and different administrators really reviewing what exactly they want from us, and we standardized that as you have to use this product. Sales reps cannot, go off and make their own back materials. This is the one and only back deck that you can use. And that was, I think, a bit more forceful of approach, but I think that was built thoughtfully and co- and collaboratively to kind of get at a lot of, I think, the challenges that Steven re-referred to, at the game. So that was one. And then we've also, internally on our team, started to, have people on our team own a lot of the different, network approvals as well to try and offload that from individual reps to then allow for someone who's really skilled at that to go-wide on different networks to then allow the individual reps to go deeper within networks. and we now have good data.

That has really enabled us to do that faster and more smartly too, knowing, which ones to go after. We've had a lot better success with over the past year. I think one of the most important things is understanding that, like you don't... You have to understand who your champion's going to be, and sometimes the highest volume physician isn't necessarily going to be your champion. They have preexisting relationships with competitors, and they're actually going to be your blocker, and you don't know it. and so I think really identifying who is your champion that you can align to get you through the process, upfront and anchoring into that person, I think is paramount.

And I think just speaking to the clinical operational financial aspect, it's teaching the sales teams how to quantify value. we recently had a mid-year meeting and spent a lot of time, reviewing how we focus on the economic value piece of the product. And so making sure there's enough supportive materials in place. So clinical evidence sheets, good, you know, budget impact calculators. Right now we're working on a more, robust one, but we do have cost calculators to help them, help the sales team work with the, within the VAC process to be able to speak to that, economic value. So I think that's another big piece, in addition to getting a strong clinical champion, is just offering the right resources to help them show that.

Are those self-service tools? Like, are you create... Are they created on the back end, or is it like, "Hey, here's the tool. Just input whatever you need to," and then it's self-service? Yeah. The latter. The latter. Yeah. Some companies like to kind of control what that looks like in the outputs. Mm-hmm. I think self-service is obviously the way to go. Like, you don't want to be bogged down with creating the materials necessarily. You want to empower- Right... the sales team to understand how to use the tools and be able to do it on demand. Exactly. Yeah. They just go in, input a couple things, and then boom, it's done, so. Cool.

All right. Well, we've got a great question here, and a timely one from Karissa at Olympus. how do you gain internal alignment on what ComEx is, and why is it important farther upstream?

That's a good question because I feel like Route 92 has... It's been taking us some time to do that. Like, even recently, someone from marketing came up to me and was like, "Oh, I think I finally understand what enablement means." And it's like, okay, we have some work there, I guess. But I think it's a lot of, utilizing... And this is very simple, but u-utilizing s-standard calls that we have. So we have a catch-up with our CCO, spending time to talk about commercial excellence. obviously there's a balance to this, so we're not just sending out a million emails a week on what it is and taking too much time on calls, but just ma-making sure there's dedicated time, on c-commercial calls that already exist to align to what we do and what our values are and how we support the team.

And so for us, marketing is actually part of our commercial excellence team. so I think it just speaks to how like it's set up differently in different companies, and that's perfectly fine. for us, my team, the way we think about it is that we want to own the customer journey and understand what are the different ways that we want to deliberately build that customer journey, both for our paying customer, our surgeon, but then also our sales reps themselves. So then the two working hand in hand, from start to finish from that initial marketing outreach all the way through to signing that contract, postback, starting cases, and then growing after the fact with our customer success team. and so we've built it in that way. how we gained alignments, at the end of our last fiscal year, as we were kind of thinking about growth, and our growth objectives, and specifically for the US market, there was kind of a clear need of, need help to standardize the operations on, the back end of not only just going out on the sales front, but how we actually are gonna hit our P&L side of our quota too.

And so that was kind of a key driver behind that. And then so we were kind of thinking about what were the key levers to enable that, outside of our actual operations team, of which is a key partner for commercial excellence.

All right. Well, let's talk a bit about, building the foundation, how you're putting together teams and technologies and, establishing the core components you need to move forward. not sure who wants to kick that one off.

It's all you, Tim. Yeah. Where do we start? Where do we start? Yeah. I think the, most important thing to start with is your culture, right? I think specifically your sales team culture too, 'cause ultimately, commercial excellence is in service of the sales team, so you need to be building your processes and your infrastructure and governance channels to serve that team. And so last year we went through, a, kind of a, an upgrade of on our sales team, really thinking through what our US commercial strategy is and what is the skill sets and talent profiles that we need for that. and so that kind of set the core foundation of, what it is that we want to be doing and growing. and from there, we did a big review at the beginning of the year. we hired an outside, s- consultant knowledgeable within the orthopedic space from one of the big four companies.

And they c- they came in, reviewed a lot of our processes, gave us a lot of recommendations, then it was on me and our executive team to kind of parse through-How we want to go at this. And one of the key things that we started to really look into was then the technology layer itself, both on the CRM, how we actually manage our customer data, our, pipeline, things like that, how that speaks with Acuity, which we use to really help with our targeting and pipelining as well, and then ultimately to the ERP, then drive, resource planning software as well, and try to create a unified platform between the three of them, 'cause all of the individual workflows will then sit on top of that. And if so the technology layer itself is broken, the rest will ultimately be inefficient. You can't do one without the other, but for us, we decided we had to start with the technology layer.

I mean, you know, everyone knows this, culture eats strategy for breakfast. It's, like, always been one of my mantras in no matter what role I've been in, and it's so true. And I would say that, you know, it sounds like Karissa comes from Olympus. I remember when, Suzy Morgan in Olympus kind of helped launch our omni-channel, play, and one of the most beneficial things is, like, at our national sales meeting, we really made it a point to have the commercial excellence and omni-channel teams interacting with the sales teams to create a relationship in person. So I think, like, whenever you can be in person with the sales team, talking about what you're trying to accomplish together, creating, you know, creating a relationship, it's so important for the internal and external teams to get to know each other, 'cause I think that's when change happens. Like, when you know and respect the other person, you've met them, it's just vital for the long-term success of commercial excellence.

Well, moving on, let's look at some strategies for adopting, adoption... for driving adoption and for making an impact. Oh, I think. we'll vote one of the, you two off the island next, I guess. no, Nick will be right back, I'm sure. Yeah, there he is. He just had to refresh. I'm still here. I have three teenage daughters. One stole my charger. Everyone keep going. I was supposed to have this set up, but this is real world. So I'm in the mix. I am just making sure I have power. Then you're in the fight. We're right by your side. So, let's talk a bit about strategies for driving adoption. Taryn, you wanna kick us off?

Yeah. The first thing I can think of is just starting small. understanding that change takes time, behavior change takes a really long time, especially with maybe more veteran reps that would rather write their strategy out on the back of a napkin than go into a system like AcuityMD to manage their business. So one thing that we had talked about at, as a commercial excellence team in the beginning of the year is putting together, a very purposeful roadmap of how we're going to introduce new tools and systems throughout the whole year, planning out as far as Q4. So just being very tactical here, we said, "Okay, we're gonna introduce AcuityMD in Q1. We are going to just focus on education about the tool. Q2, we'll introduce the pipeline.

Q3 and Q4, we're just gonna focus on iterating and optimizing for the team and ensure that they understand how to use it, knowing that it won't be our silver bullet of forecasting probably right off the bat." But just going slow so that we're not fatiguing them with additional work that they might not see the full value right away. So really also just pushing that value prop of like, "Hey, this is where we're starting," being very communicative out- up front about how we are going to do it, and again, that why, and showing them wins quickly. So saying, "Okay, look at the, what the pipeline is doing for business right now. Look how quickly we're moving X amount of deals through just using this tool." So I think that's really helpful is even though we're in this beginning process, we're able to show them wins as soon as we can and show them that data, so they see, okay, maybe this is, you know, worth putting more time into.

I think micro-learning's really important. I've really-... adopted Loom. I don't know if you've ever used Loom before. you know, it doesn't need to be highly produced, but you can create a quick video on best practices and, be shooting that out on a regular basis. It doesn't need to be an hour team meeting on Teams or Zoom. You can learn a lot just by doing quick hits of important things, maybe success stories, what other people are seeing. That really creates a culture that I think breeds success.

Yeah, we use that platform too for our training, and releasing, just, like, very kind of micro videos of, like, we have changed how you do your quotes and contracting in Salesforce. Rather than bringing every single member of the sales team together to do, right? It's just like, this is this video. We al- we also see who's watched the video too, so it's available for us on the back end to kind of see, uptake. And then, yeah, to kind of Taryn's point, one of the first things that our team tackled was, onboarding of 1099s, which previously was independently managed by every single sales rep. and so we offloaded, centralized that with- within our team, and that was from our sales leader.

Biggest, like, quickest win, but also, like, biggest, most painful thing that's being... that's happening right now, like, from, like, a paperwork and just frustration type of thing. Took a couple weeks, when w- and within a month had a new solution rolled out, and that really helped to reinforce the, like, "Oh, I understand what's happening here and how you can help us." And that was just, that was an essential, good first step forward.

All right. Great thoughts. We've got some other, great questions from the audience. question, how do you balance good enough for go-to market with the knowledge that MedTech will continually evolve and require future iterations and revisions?

Taryn? It's a good question. I start with good data. Like, if the data's good, then, you know, good in, good out. So I think that just thinking of, like, past go-to-market initiatives, just making sure that our foundation is solid, I think that's probably one of the priorities. And yes, understanding there's so many iterations and changes that happen, often very quickly, having just that good base of our data, and clean data, I think is a good start.

Add some of your wisdom. Yeah. The only thing I would add to that is, having, sales team leadership bought in too, especially if you know that you're gonna go in with, - and I'm not sure if this question is about, like, the product itself or the processes that we're changing, then I'm assuming it's the processes type of things. Product is-... is different. But on the processes, like for us, we need to sometimes to get some of that data, we actually have to share it with the sales team and know how they're gonna react and use it, and then improve it too. And then if we always kind of strive for the best and not just better, we'll ultimately have spent three to four months thinking about things, working on PowerPoints or Word documents, and then realize, oops, that didn't actually ever go out to the field. and so I think it's really important to work with the sales team leadership on when is the right time to do things, recognizing that there are other things happening in our reps' lives, and the pressures that they're under to actually hit their quotas. and so when to introduce things is I think a really kind of key piece of the puzzle.

Nick, let's talk about, a bit about reps and data. I mean, at QDMD, you're arming folks with a lot of, essential information. How has it helped them move forward and achieve the, commercial excellence they're looking for?

Yeah. I mean, or when I originally purchased it was the data accuracy piece, 'cause you only have one chance to make a first impression. You know, if one rep sees a big, you know, sees a disparity in what they know to be the truth, you've lost them. and then it's accessibility. You know, the days of, you know, carrying your computers into the operating room or in your car have kind of since passed. I mean, people do it. so it's got to be curated in a way, and at the sales team's fingertips. You know, their days change on a dime. You know, doctor cancels cases, doctor gets done early, where are you gonna go next? Looking at the big board to see, like, all right, who's the next physician I should go to?

Sometimes you don't know. So if it's mobile friendly, which we are, you can do your deep research in your car, in the OR. so I think it's two things. It's making sure it's credible, because if the commercial excellence team launches something and it's not accurate and you're leading them in the wrong direction, they're gonna lose credibility, and it's not gonna work. And then they've got to be able to ac- you know, it's got to be accessible. so I think those two things are very important.

All right. So just to, as we wrap up, and we've got some final points to make after this and some, another question from the audience and more, if, folks want to, throw them our way, we'd love to, keep the conversation going. But, how do you measure success, as you look ahead and measure the impact and future outlook of your sales? What's the ne- what's the final step in this process?

I think there are, core financial objectives for the business. So I imagine it's very similar for Route 92 of as a scaling business that's funded externally. We're relatively small to companies that have been around for, like, over a century years old, right? Like, they would have billions of dollars of their resources that at the end of the day, the pressure is high on a company of our size. And so commercial excellence is really a key enabler of us hitting our financial objectives, because it hits both top line. Theoretically, we are offloading and automating opportunities to give time back to our sales reps such that they can go out and win more business, so more revenue. And through process improvements, reducing inefficiencies and the likes of that, we should also be having bottom line improvements. so hopefully this ultimately has the core objective is a bottom line improvements to our P&L, and our US P&L specifically, where we generate the majority of our business.

We recently got, you know, our Series B, and we've spent a lot of that money on resources. You know, customer success managers, account managers, so that if someone like, you know, Route 92 and Intelligend are using us, like we align, we have people aligning their objectives to the customer's objectives. So I th- I think for, you know, I have a different lens, obviously, a different answer, because of where I sit. But, you know, our objectives are the KPIs that are most important to our customers, and we really try and make sure that we hit them. And we have a cadence with our customers to make sure we're helping them hit their objectives.

Erin? Yeah. I think agree to all that, and then qualitatively, success for us is a happy sales force that also f- is bought in and finds the value. And so because with that, then they accelerate their business, they're more efficient, they're using the tools, they're implementing the processes, and therefore their business is growing and they're moving faster. So having like, ideally for me, having the whole sales team be a group of champions is success. I think just speaking to culture too, and to everyone being committed to the same goals internally, and obviously that's hard to measure, but it doesn't have to be. I mean, there's ways to do it of, surveys and small working groups and obviously just checking in with the reps. But, for our-- for where Route 92 is, it's gonna be hard to see, you know, success quantitatively right off the bat. It's gonna take a lot more time. But I think there's a lot you can do-Upfront to start working with the reps just to have, success in the way that everyone's viewing the business.

All right. I know we have a little information here about Flywheel. Nick, are you spreading the news on this? Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. Like, you look at what MedTech does, like you're constantly providing resources to your physicians. You're attending trade shows, you're providing educational events. You know, you just continue to give to your customer base. you know, we're trying to do the same thing for ours. So you don't have to be a customer to come to Flywheel. you know, it's a great event for all walks of MedTech. You know, we deal with pre-revenue companies trying to do TAM and SAM all the way through strategics that are trying to figure out like commercial objectives. so the event's taking place on Tuesday, October 7th, at The Westin in Chicago. we had, I think close to two hundred people there last year. Transparently, it's a great networking event, you know, but the goal for us is to provide valuable information back to the MedTech community, you know, similarly, to how they do for their physicians and customers.

Check my LinkedIn. I'll post who the speakers are later today, and there'll be a link to the invite, for Flywheel and, if you do come, I'd love to meet you in person. Excellent. I always hear it's a great event, so, folks should definitely check it out. All right, we got some, - It's all about the swag. Great swag? It's all about the swag.

Well, I'll be looking in my mailbox, Nick. Maybe you can send some my way, or I'll make my way out to Flywheel. we've got some excellent questions, from folks. number-- First one we'll hit, what's been the biggest barrier you faced in launching commercial excellence plans? Taryn, can I, throw that your way first? Yeah. Could you say that one more time? There was... Sorry, there was a little- Yes, I can... glitch in the sound.

No problem at all. what's been the biggest barrier you faced in launching commercial excellence plans? I keep going back to personnel, and I say that because of our situation where our area sales directors are spending so much time on hiring initiatives at the moment. it's been hard to get their-- Not that they don't want to have buy-in, but just get as much support as we need from them to drive it down from the top. So right now, how we're managing that is working on our-- optimizing our hiring process too, to take the time that they need to be spending on the field and giving it back to them so that we can be able to implement those processes with the field, starting with them. 'Cause I can send a million emails to update your pipeline, but if you're not getting the coaching from your area sales director, then it's not gonna be effective. So we're currently trying to make sure that our hiring processes are changing so that we can free up their time, they can spend more time coaching. but I think outside of working on having, again, better data and having a good data in, data out system before it even gets to acuity, it's making sure we have the people available to coach our team to these processes that we need help with.

Jim, you wanna add some thoughts? Yeah. For us, it's been, time allocation is the word I've, I was trying to think as I was thinking about this question, just anchored on of it wasn't alignment. I think executive team, staff were aligned to it. It's just competing priorities at the end of the day. Like we're small to medium-sized business scaling fast. There's lots to do to just service current customers, new customers coming in the door. And so, when you think about what to do in a given day, there's just a lot of priorities. And so, especially now too, just as like six months in, so last launch, but now kind of bit into think a lot about our operations. our operations team is very busy, and so trying to get them to do the job, but also think about reimagining the job, is just an honestly difficult thing to do. And so I think, hopefully summertime will be quieter. It gives kind of breath to have some of these kind of like reflective conversations about, new ways of working. And so I think that's kind of the path ahead. But yeah, just it's in a high growth company that's now talk- tackling this kind of question for the first time.

How do you rank order this as a priority versus others and allocate the appropriate time and resources to get it done? Fantastic. we have another great question here. do you find that this strategy helps with employee satisfaction and retention?

I think the answer is yes. right. You know, we're only six months in, so we don't have great data on it. but, to date, I don't think there's been, just think off the top of my head, I don't think there's been any real changeovers on the US team, which is fantastic. employee satisfaction, like absolutely, right? Like we're-- What we-- What are we ultimately doing? These are tasks that are manual, paper-based, time-consuming, and ultimately suck away from the core job of the rep, which is what they love to do, which is to go out and be with customers. coming home, staying at your computer, doing these things that are, slow or administrative, I think getting rid of that, optimizing, automating it as much as possible and taking it back onto the team at HQ, I think should, and we've already seen has resulted in better, satisfaction.

Do you find the same thing? I would imagine if you're- And for us- Yeah, if you're accustomed to someone... to having these tools, the notion of not having them would be daunting. Yeah. We're getting there. I think we're in a huge hiring push right now, and we actually have been for the better part of the year, almost doubling our sales force. So the benefit of that is we get to s- set the expectation of commercial excellence right away. So it's harder to convert veteran salespeople that have been with the company for years not having it to the new processes and tools. But with the amount of people we're onboarding, we're hoping that it makes our sales force strong and we don't have as much, I would say like negative attrition, because from the start, everybody has been utilizing the tools. I mean, we've re-revamped our whole onboarding process to include trainings for all of our commercial excellence initiatives. So setting that expectation right away, I think is gonna be more beneficial for our new cohort of sales members.

Nick, how about from AcuityMD and these perspective, are you hearing that from clients? Yeah. I mean, I think the fact that there is a commercial excellence, you know, program in any given MedTech company speaks for itself. It means they care. You know, it- it's... And-- But it has to be... Let me be clear. It has to be served up the right way. Like, you need to make sure that it's like the why is given. Because people that are stuck in their ways, anytime change comes, they- they're always gonna go to the negative. Like, well, they're-- it's going to have this bad repercussion. but as long as the message is delivered, you know, by senior leadership, I think sales senior leadership needs to own the messaging with commercial excellence teams on the why, then it's a no-brainer that it's gonna help the sales team. There are so many moving pieces in MedTech these days.

If you can't streamline process and support the field sales team, it's daunting. Mm-hmm. Got a great question here and one I'm wondering myself. H- have you noticed that the strategy has shortened the sales cycle?

Taryn, any thoughts on that? Yeah. I think it's actually helped us identify the true time of our cycle, and it might actually be shorter than it is. So I think for so long, we just assumed, you know, the VAC process can take nine months. it was all just kind of this approximating, and especially based off of longer VAC processes, kind of just this assumption that it was really long. But then once we started AcuityMD and actually looking at the data, we noticed our sales cycle time actually could be really short for an established business that's already using the product. So if anything, it's helped us identify that it's shorter than it is, which I think is step one to understanding how to even optimize that further.

And I'll add, we don't have great data to date on it, but it's trending in the right direction. And so far, we've had back-to-back, record US rep- quarters so far this year. Now, can I take credit for that? Absolutely not, right? That's one hundred percent the sales team. As much as I would love to say one hundred percent all these amazing initiatives that we've been doing have, resulted in that. I think it's contributed to it, definitely in, indirect and direct ways. but it- it's that, true feeling of momentum that then back to Nick's point of, like, the whys 'cause, like, this is why. And it feels good to win, and this is how we can continue to double down and accelerate these efforts.

All right. another question from Valerie. in what ways do the mobile tools help with getting buy-in from the sales? do they like the mobile version? Or also, what about the AcuityMD platform do they like? Nick, you wanna, kick us off? Yeah. Taryn and- Where do I begin?

Where do I begin? No, I mean, listen, I... Once again, I've been on both sides of it. I mean, we live in a mobile world. You know, you-- typically, you're gonna do your, like, your weekly, monthly, quarterly planning on your computer, but your day-to-day is gonna be in the field. so what they like about mobile is the fact that it's on demand. You can actually use... We have, you know, some people talk about AI as a buzzword, but we have a new AI call plan that a rep can walk in the door and hit a button on the physician, and within, like, ten seconds, it'll populate referral patterns, volume trends, who do they train with. so it's not just about being mobile. It's about embedding tools in the mobile function that are going to catch the eye of the sales team. So when the commercial excellence folks are talking about use these tools, like, how do we make it easier for them? I would say, you know, one of the key things that they like, there's clinical publications, Sunshine Act payment information that's embedded in the tool. So you can walk in a physician's clinical, which they should be, you can pick up a clinical article on your way in the door and show up a lot better.

You know, they don't necessarily wanna talk about the baseball game over the weekend. They wanna talk about what's clinically important to them and their patients. Yeah. I was just going to add- It's all you, Tim. Go for it. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The answer is yes. and I remember when I started this role, our-- my sales leader quietly told me, he's like, "You're writing emails assuming they're all on their computers. These are too long. They need to be short and sweet, because they're always on their phone." I was like, "Ah." That was an important lesson too, and thinking just about the frame of mind and that user experience and how they're gonna be receiving the information, is almost always on mobile in our CRM too. some use it on mobile, some use it on desktop, but it's definitely built for desktop even though it's available for mobile. And one of the things we're gonna be doing later this year is thinking about how can we just, like, upgrade the UI of our CRMs because thinking they'll be increasingly on mobile. we were in Denver, this spring, and we had for our sales meeting, and we actually had a rep from AcuityMD there with us, and just that AI, option that he showed the team, and I think the jaws, like, hit the floor.

It-- I think it had just come out the week before of this, like, the ability to summarize that information and put it back to you, like, this way to say, like- Amazing. And then, yeah, the AcuityMD kind of... The ability to kind of like Google search your searching, but then find exactly the information that you want in a format that's usable, I think is what, team loves about the AcuityMD platform.

My team also loves it. It was funny, I was just on a call before this with one of the, areas, and all of them were saying how easy it is for them to be waiting to talk to a doctor, and they can just pull up their phone and update their pipeline in two seconds, and then they're done for the week. So it was really nice to hear that they're using it in a way that's manageable for them while they're out in the field. also a lot of our sales force loves the targeting tab in Acuity, and have done some very interesting things with it to find out information, and one of them calls it the AcuityMD stalking effect, which is where he was able to go into a physician, look through all the dinners that he's had. He found someone in a dinner that was his neighbor, was able to talk to the neighbor to get contact information for another physician he was trying to reach out for. So they're finding, like, their own innovative ways to find out information about physicians in the platform, which I was very excited about, that they're kind of diving into the creativeness that they can use it for to get, you know, to find their clinical champion, which is really cool, so.

That's great. Sounds like you're gamifying, the sales process. So that's, - I guess so. Did you get someone- Whatever it takes... like, whatever it takes. Nick, we've got a number of questions here asking, how to attend Flywheel in Chicago. So, what's the best way, folks? Yeah, I mean, I think there's two ways. You know, I mean, if you look at the screen, you'll see. If you go to AcuityMD.com/flywheel, we're gonna actually talk about the individuals that'll be presenting, so you can see some of the great topics we have. I will post on my LinkedIn profile after this some more information, and there's also, like if I point this way, a QR code, that you can hit to sign up as well.

I promise you'll learn something new, and it's a great networking event. I love to see, even competitors in the same room together learning from each other. Like, everyone takes down the walls and, it's just a really cool place, you know, for MedTech to come and learn together.

Chicago's a great place in October too, so, definitely I'm sure worth the visit. All right. Well, this has been- And we are gonna go have a deep dish together. We're gonna go have a deep dish. you've... I've, I'm so easily sold, I'm ashamed at how quickly- All of us. This is a crew. All going- This is, sounds great... have a deep dish. We have to pick on the right, we have to pick the right one, though. I know there's a few, favorites out there, and I've got one of my own. All right. Well, this has been a fantastic conversation. I always enjoy hearing from AcuityMD and understanding how they're working with clients to really, again, streamline the commercial process. So thank you all for being part of a great conversation.

Thank you everyone. Thanks so much. It was nice talking with you. Likewise. Great.