Why MedTech Companies Need to Move Beyond CRM to Optimize Sales and Strategy

Hello, and welcome to another MassMedic webinar. We're going to give everyone just a minute or so to log on, and then we'll be getting started with today's content. Hi there. If you're just joining, we're giving everyone about 30 more seconds, and then we'll be getting started with today's webinar.

All right. With that, we're going to kick off today's webinar. Thank you so much for joining another MassMedic webinar. Today, we have our friends with us from AcuityMD. My name is Nicole Owens, and I am the Director of Marketing Communications for MassMedic. If you're not familiar with our organization, we are a membership-based trade association that works to bolster the med tech industry, primarily in New England, through education, connection, advocacy, and awareness. Before I turn it over to our speakers for today, I do have a couple housekeeping notes. So obviously, today we have an awesome webinar. We're talking about why med tech companies need to move beyond CRM to optimize their sales and their strategy. We will have time for Q&A, so please, at any point, please put your questions in the Q&A box at the bottom of the screen, and we will do our best to get to them.

And we are going to have a couple polls, so please stay engaged. We'd love to have you involved in those and see your answers. All right. Without further ado, I am pleased to turn it over to our two speakers for today. We have Aalap Patel. He is the Head of Solutions and Value Engineering for AcuityMD.

And a guest with us today, David Solar. He is the Vice President of Business Development and Marketing from Healthtronics. Aalap. Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here today. As mentioned, my name is Aalap Patel. I am Head of Solutions and Value Engineering here at AcuityMD. I've been here almost two years now. I spent the previous eight years at Salesforce, all within their med tech vertical, at a variety of different roles there. And the seven years prior to that, I spent at a company called Model N, which is in the revenue management space for both med tech and other life sciences companies. So it's a pleasure to be here, and hopefully, you guys get some value out of the webinar today.

Thank you, Aalap. My name is David Solar or David Solar, whatever you want to call me right now. I was born and raised in Puerto Rico. Started my career with pharmaceutical, Pfizer, then moved my way to Boston Scientific in 2011, managing and developing the business in Latin America, especially for the urology service line. In 2017, I moved to the United States with Boston Scientific and covered, say, a few leadership positions until I joined Healthtronics, like you, Aalap, two years ago as the Vice President of Business Development and Marketing. I'm very excited to be here today and discuss why we partner with AcuityMD for our strategic and CRMs.

Fantastic. Let's go to the next slide here. So we're curious, actually. We have a poll set up for everybody that's out there viewing. We're interested in knowing what is the active weekly engagement rate for your CRM.

And you should have a couple of choices that pop up for you there, and we'll see what results here. David, any guesses here? It depends on what CRM tool they're using. But if they're using some legacy CRM, I don't want to bias the results, but I think it's going to be between one and two.

Who knows? Yeah. Let's give everybody another minute here, and then we should have some results that we can discuss. There we go. Fantastic. So here's the results, David. So it looks like the number one answer was 0% to 40%. So, David, I think your guess is spot on there. But more shockingly, it looks like about 31% of respondents said, "I don't know."

So, as we see it here, over more than 50% of the people are either not using their legacy CRM or have no idea what the usage looks like here. So, again, that's consistent with my experience historically.

Fantastic. Well, great. Let's talk about why the responses to the polls ended up that way. There's a problem with traditional legacy CRM. Number one is there's just a lack of strategic prioritization that you can do directly through the CRMs. I'm going to talk much more about this throughout my presentation, but the vision of CRM is to have a 360-degree view of your customers and your prospects. But-Pretty much most of the time, we only get about a 180-degree view of your customer or prospect. And the 180-degree view is in the past, right? We're looking at things that happened last week, things that happened last quarter, things that happened last year.

So there's a general lack of data that's going to be able to provide you inputs into an actual strategy discussion. Who should I go see tomorrow? Who should I go see next week? And then the two things that happen as a result of this is there are missed opportunities, right? There may be opportunities in white space that you failed to discover, right, because of asymmetric information.

And failed deals, right? Your win rates are going to be affected by this. The more sort of information you have about your customer, about their business challenges, and where they're going over the next couple of years, the more likely it is that you're actually going to be able to influence them, and win some of the business there. So ultimately you want to be able to close deals faster using a CRM, but unfortunately, there's barriers. And I think this maze graphic here kind of represents exactly what that looks like. There's a lot of hoops and hurdles that reps and salespeople have to go through, in order to get full use out of their legacy CRM.

As we sort of build this out, there are several challenges, and I'm going to go into each of these in detail. But at a high level, I think David sort of referred to this earlier, effectiveness of your CRM is really going to depend on how many people are actually using it, right? And as we saw from the poll results, over 50% of the people on this call either don't know how their CRM is being used or it's being used very little, right?

Number two is legacy CRMs require a lot of data input from reps themselves, right? So there's always a garbage in, garbage out cycle that results as a result of human-populated information within the actual CRM. And what does this mean, right? If you guys tuned into my last webinar, my convictions are clear here, right? Administrative work takes the time away from selling. A salesperson's job is to sell, is to go out there and form relationships, market their products and influence people. Their job is not to sit behind a computer and type out exactly what they did yesterday or what they did last quarter. That's not good selling, right? And as a result of these challenges, legacy CRM just doesn't work for med tech sales, right? It doesn't match, right? Legacy CRM is designed as sort of an 80% fit across industries.

Med tech is a very complicated sell, and I'm going to get into a lot more details once we dive a little deeper in there. So as we sort of move on from here, let's talk about the challenges with specifically adoption.

Companies are very quick to invest money in a CRM, but the reality is that's only a very thin slice of the journey, when it comes to getting good value out of your CRM. In order to get good value, it goes back to input. It takes a lot of time and effort on a weekly basis with a tremendous amount of discipline to be able to get the data that you need into your CRM, in order to get great insights from it. And now all of that effort again takes away from the core job of a salesperson, which is to sell.

The other thing you will notice in a lot of these legacy CRMs is there's a lot of fields, right? If you look at an out-of-the-box implementation for any of the top five CRMs, there are hundreds of fields that need to be populated on each record. So the question is, well, which ones are relevant for us? Many of them are irrelevant for the med tech sales cycle. So then the question remains, what value am I getting out of putting all this data into the platform? And then the end result, because of a lack of adoption...

Sorry, I'll rephrase that. In a lot of organizations, the top sellers, the people that meet their quota on a regular basis, are often, in my observation, the people that use the CRM the least. So then the question is, where are your priorities, right? How do you prioritize your time? Do you prioritize it to go and spend your time in the field trying to convince surgeons and IDNs and GPOs to adopt your products? Or do you want to spend that same time sitting behind a computer on Friday night putting in your updates? That's really the question here.

And then as we kind of dive a little bit deeper into the next topic here, garbage in, garbage out, this is sort of a dramatic presentation of what this is going to look like. As I've mentioned in the past, and pretty much every presentation I go to, CRMs again are designed to be a 360-degree view of your customers and your prospects. But the reality is what's happening now is it's mostly historical data that's in that application. Oftentimes, a lot of the fields go empty, right? Unless there's an actual required field in there, a lot of the information is blank.

And then the data ages extremely rapidly. So now, again, later I'm going to go in, and most of the folks here obviously work in med tech, otherwise you wouldn't be here. Med tech sales take a long time. They take a year or two years. And if you look at the quote from Informatica down there, one-third of CRM data becomes stale each year. So if you have a two-year sales cycle with a hospital system, guess what? By the time you're at the midpoint of that selling cycle, the data in your CRM's already out of date. So really, what good is it, right?And then there's minimal checks for accuracy. So again, I'm going to quote an English poet. There's an English poet named Alexander Pope. He's famous for his line, "To error is human, to forgive is divine." Right? And there is no more error-prone process that requires forgiveness than CRM updates on a Friday night at 6:00 PM. So there's very little checks there for accuracy.

And then the end result is not much insight, because the data is not that great. You don't understand the customer's challenges, and you don't understand their needs, and you're not able to anticipate those needs before you go into those meetings. And then as a result of that, the opportunities don't get prioritized in a way that's designed to close business. And then ultimately, all of this stuff is supposed to feed into your overall strategy. There's supposed to be a two-way street here, and it's really hard to develop those strategies when you don't have great data.

As we move on here, again, reporting, not selling. I keep harping on this. CRMs today primarily handle reporting, right? They handle logging who you spoke to yesterday, what did you guys speak about, and what's the next action? Again, all sort of self-generated information, not anything that's designed digitally in mind. So there's a high burden of input. There's a lot of focus on reps having to go in there and put information in there, but there's really not a lot of ROI that you're going to be able to extract out of that information. And there's a couple of things, right? So number one, it's not going to be aligned to the needs of an actual med tech sales rep. As I mentioned, this med tech sale is far more complex than selling tires or sneakers. There's a lack of the integrated market insights as a result of this, right?

Ultimately, market insights are driven by the information that you're getting out of your field force. And then, as I mentioned, inability to handle multi-stakeholder decision-making. Think about what it takes to get a piece of capital placed at a hospital and actually producing value for your company. You have to go and talk to the surgeons. You have to talk to various committees. You may have to talk to some of the managers at the IDN. There are seven or eight different stakeholders in this med tech sale, and yet most legacy CRMs are designed so that the maker of the product can sell it directly to the consumer, and that's just simply not the case in med tech.

As we sort of build this out a little bit further, again, to double down here, legacy CRMs are not built for med tech sales. As I mentioned, who is the primary buyer, right? Is it the patient? Is it the patient that's getting the actual implant, or is it the surgeon that's putting it in there? Or is it the primary care doctor that did the initial diagnosis? It's undefined, and each company defines that very differently. Which leads to my next point here, which is inaccurate terminology, right? Closed won. What does that actually mean for a med tech seller? Because you placed your capital at a hospital, does that mean that you've closed and won that business? Probably not, right? You've probably only closed and won that business, or even if it closes at all, it's when people are actually using that piece of capital to get a better health outcome is really when you're earning revenue for your company.

And then what happens in the cases of leases, or in the cases where they placed the capital, and then you basically pay for it using consumables. So again, I think you guys see the picture that I'm trying to paint here, which is the terminology is just different based on which part of the med tech industry you're even talking through. Again, med tech is a heavily regulated industry, so the regulatory requirements are very deep. And CRMs only capture...

Because of all the open fields in CRMs, there's the possibility that you're going to capture information that really shouldn't be in there, which is all open notes fields. And then, as I said earlier, med tech sales cycles are really long.

Again, based on my observations over the last 20 years, they could be anywhere from a year to two years. So the question is, if you're in year two of your selling cycle and your data is from a year ago, what good is that doing you, is the question.

All right, great. So now I'm going to transition over to David, who's going to talk to you guys a little bit about some practical topics over at Healthtronics. And take it away, David. Thank you, Alab. And before we start discussing the best practices, I want to tell you a little bit about the company. Healthtronics is a leader in kidney stone management service solutions and investment platforms. So think about a mix between med tech company and devices, and a service solutions. We serve over 1,500 physicians across the US and over 2,000 facilities, Shockwave Lithotripsy, or ESWL, Laser Lithotripsy, Ureteroscopy, ancillary income platforms, and it was founded by urologists 30 years ago. And the reason I want to discuss a little bit what we are doing is because every company is different, right? We are, like I mentioned, like a mix of service and med tech.

To the audience here, you might be encountering and you might be in a company that is also a complex industry. And the reason I'm here today is not because I'm a sales consultant for Acuity. I'm not on their payroll. I'm here because they were able to adapt the CRM, AcuityMD, to our needs. And one of the things is that I've always believed in CRM tools. Early in my career, I was the superuser or the lead from a sales perspective. And I bet we have people in the audience today here that are, right now they're leads of their CRM platform or their superuser, and maybe they are discussing, "I need to create a contest to drive adoption. I need to create a superuser." And maybe I use a superuser that is straight out of college because they're business and computer savvy. Or maybe I use one that is more tenured, so they get engaged in the technology.At the end, all the things, they really help drive adoption, but at the end, the adoption falls down again. Because we are trying to create a strategy to use the technology or CRM versus having a CRM that wants us to use it.

We can move to the next slide. And the previous CRMs were not meeting these needs that I just mentioned. We were just creating strategies to drive adoption. In previous organization or in my current organization, the interfaces were not user-friendly or intuitive. Technology has changed a lot, and we need to adapt to the technology. Not everyone has an iPhone. People have Androids. Not everyone has a laptop to carry to the field, especially in sales.

IPads. So how do we create or have one that adapts? It was challenging. I think the mobile versions being limited was another hurdle. We don't want people, like you mentioned a lot, people want to sell, they want to execute. They don't want to come back on a Friday at 6:30 PM to enter all their information. You are going to miss stuff. You're going to be doing it because someone is asking you to do it, like you have to do it before the day ends, and it's not going to provide the value to the person that is going to read it or the value to you that are doing the input.

Excessive data entries. I think you touched on that. I think less is more in these type of platforms. And that requirement of continuous engagement, we do need to do continuous engagement, but it has to be engagement that is going to pay off.

In terms of the managers, not having that data that was accurate, right? Sometimes having, "Wait, but when I'm validating this data, this doesn't sound good. I think we're way off here." The pipeline management. It's not only about what we're doing today, it's what we're going to do in the next 6, 12, next year, when we're presenting projection to key stakeholders inside the organizations. Having something that will limit the use of other tools to supplement a pipeline. Minimal information on referrals, notes, or backgrounds.

I don't want to go into Google or Safari or Edge to try to look for information that might be accessible on a CRM, not necessarily waiting for another rep to put in there that is already populated with that info. And then at the end, value for the spend. It's not about expensive or cheaper or cost-effective. It's that what you're paying is delivering that value. So that was the challenge. So I'm wondering, for the people in the audience, before I go into our needs in particular, what do you want out of a CRM?

And we're going to do a quick poll here. Yeah, David, I was going to say, I think when I talked about terminology earlier, I think CRM is also something that gets thrown around. I think if you ask different people, I think you'll get different answers. So that's what I anticipate here.

I'm not going to bias the results here, so I'm going to stay quiet this time. All right. We should have some results shortly here. While this poll is happening, one thing that is also important for a CRM tool for an organization, again, you can have the best technology, but you have to have the right people as well, right? But also a support from leadership.

You need that top-level leadership, that senior leadership, CEO, COO, and that's something that we encounter here. We had that support to implement a good CRM tool. Look at the results. Oh, here we go. So two-thirds of people said all the above. That's not surprising, right? Based on my observations here. And then pretty much it was a wash, and then measure pipeline was the second answer.

And that was about a fifth of people. So that's pretty consistent with what I've seen. I don't know, what do you think, David? Same, pretty consistent. Actually, measure pipeline being second demonstrate the importance of this on a CRM platform and how many companies are moving towards the pipeline process and having one that is accurate, having one that you rely on it and can trust with the data. So yes, let's move to the next slide. All right. So our wish list. Our wish list was convenience, ease of use, mobile-friendly. Prioritizing accuracy of data. This is important. If we are going to have to spend on a CRM tool, we want that data to be accurate.

Smaller organizations like ours, and even bigger, we don't have 500 reps in the field like in the past. We are more strategic. Many companies have business development directors, business development managers, market development managers, and they have larger geographies. So prioritizing is going to be important. Powerful. The robust targeting. The ability of really targeting and moving the pipeline. Prioritization. Pipeline management, that's going to be important. It's not only presenting a pipeline, how, with a simple way, you can move that pipeline into closing, into contracting, into targeting.

Comprehensive. I think this is one that really I was looking for. If I see a Dr. Patel in a CRM tool, who is referring to him? Maybe I know that person that is referring to him. Maybe I have a relationship with him already. Physician details. One of the things that I saw, and we're going to talk more about that, but has he published anything? Is he a doctor that is really interested in the type of technology we're bringing? What is his experience? Where he went to college, where he did his major, his fellowship. And again, where is he going? How many sites of care?And at the end, having empowering data is the benefit, not the effort. Because if it requires a lot of effort, the high performers, like you mentioned, the people that are hunters out there, the people that are in the field, are not going to spend time writing stuff there. It has to be beneficial for them and give results. And right in reps' hands. And those useful insights are going to be important, not only for the execution, for the pre-call as well. And when I say pre-call, it's not that we're going to work a lot in writing notes on what I'm going to say. It's all there, and that's what we want.

So one of the things AcuityMD delivered our wish list. And when I say deliver our wish list, and that's one of the reasons I'm here today, is not that they got me a platform in front of me and said, "This is your platform, this is what we offer." It started with the questions that we discussed in the previous slide. What are your needs? What would you like to see? What's the way a pipeline will look good for you? What's the way you like to present your pipeline? So they adapted, and they adjusted to the needs of the customer, in this case, us. We have better data now, more data accuracy and reliability. It leads to better decision-maker and more confident. Now I can go to the field and say, "This is the right doctor that I'm going to go in front of. This is the right champion for this solution."

Easy onboarding. I think this is important because you can have a platform, and you can give a PO to a company for a CRM. They give you training. That's it. Bye-bye. Let's move to the next one. We haven't seen that here. And shout-out-- I don't know if I can do that, but shout-out to Jack, my customer success manager, because he's always there, right? And whenever it's something that he can help me right now or not help us, he's always there to help. And when I say he, it's AcuityMD.

And a platform that works seamlessly on all devices, and it lowers the barriers to adoption, that people really want to use it. The pipeline. I don't know how many types of pipeline that was created before this CRM tool. From a PowerPoint, from an Excel document, from changing it with formulas. And right now, it's a simple drag and click pipeline management that is triggered by the opportunities that the people are entering and the targets.

An enhanced strategy. Like I mentioned before, the data right in the reps' hands will facilitate the strategic selling without extra effort. And last but not least, partners, not vendor. I think I started my conversation like this. Again, we are very busy. And when AcuityMD called me and said, "Hey, could you help us with this?"

Many people would say maybe, "Well, but you're a company. Why would I go there? I'm good." But no, I feel like I owe this organization the ability because I've learned a lot on this CRM tool and how to drive adoptions. But they also listen. I think one of the things is when we were working on that pipeline, when we were working on how do we target in a specific way, they listen, and they implemented. And also, it's not only for us to deliver value or bring value to us. We're delivering value to our customers using Acuity. Because the platform by itself helps us bring that value to different customers out there.

We have seen an immediate and impactful value. Again, I'll go back. You can have the best technology out there, but you also need the people to drive it. You need the leadership, you need the company engaged in this. But if you have the right CRM tool, it's going to make things easier. Right now, we have 100% of our team is using AcuityMD.

And I bet you can say right now, "Oh, of course, maybe he has 10 that are using it one time per month." But no, we are using it more, and it's consistent. And again, there's people that need to use it more, of course. It happens in every organization. But they know it's valuable. And what it's doing is that the people that are using it the most are getting the best out of their time and strategic imperatives, and people are starting to follow even more.

No super user needed. The data speaks by itself. The results, the most engaged people are doing more. The pipeline. We are using the pipeline to present directly from the CRM to different key stakeholders, and that is really helping us be accountable for what we have in growth in the organization for the next few years, what other type of solutions we can bring into the equation, what other kinds of specialties we could go. Because it's not only, ah, you're in the urology space, AcuityMD is just going to show you urology. No, we can tailor this, and we can look for opportunities for-- And you can look for opportunities as a company of what's next for you all in the next five years as you continue to grow and scale your organization. And also the strategy. There's a few things that we are actually serving as consultants to our customers. And I don't want to give a lot about the platform that AcuityMD is providing right now. There's a lot of things that they have been launching in the last couple of months that we don't have to wait a month to have it out there. I open the AcuityMD platform, it's there already.

But there's solutions that we can share with the customers. We can say, "Hey, this is the market. This is how it looks like. How are you looking there?" And it's data that is trusted data. And they really are like, "Oh, you're providing value more than trying to get a sale or solution or a service, or say buy. You are really providing value to us." And it's because of this type of CRM platformUh.

Fantastic. Alap, I'll treat it to you to see- Yeah... the increased adoption part. Yeah. So I think the question probably on the minds of most of our viewers here is like, "Okay, well, what do we do?" Right? Where do we go from here? What's the result of us increasing adoption of CRM and tools? So number one, I keep mentioning this, and hopefully everybody takes this one point home. The whole point of increased adoption of CRM, and any commercial tool for that matter, is so that you have a clearer view of the future. Right? So it doesn't matter whether you're one of our customers that's pre-commercial, that's looking to size the market and communicate with their investors, or if you're one of our Fortune 10 customers, right? Everybody wants a more accurate forecast. And the better data that you get, the more market data that you get in there, the more adoption you have, and people are disciplined about putting in updates, the more accurate that forecast is going to be and the happier your shareholders and your stakeholders are going to be.

One thing that's very lost, right, when you don't use the CRM the correct way or you don't use it at all, is you don't understand your wins and losses, right? I know we're all human, right? At the end of the day, we all want to celebrate the reasons why we won. But the reality is you also have to apply the same amount of effort to looking at why you lost, right? Using a CRM means that you can have people indicate reasons, right, for why deals were lost. Were they lost because of an industry bias? Did they take a KOL payment from one of your competitors? These are the things that are lost on a lot of our customers today, or a lot of our prospects today.

Now, again, I think we'll probably talk about this a little bit later as well, but putting information into the hands of your reps when it's contextually important for them is going to be one of the biggest values you're going to get out of increased adoption for your CRM.

When they're waiting outside of the surgical suite, waiting to meet with Dr. Soler, it's always great to know exactly what touchpoints you've had with Dr. Soler. What materials has this person viewed before? What is their clinical practice? These are all things you want to know before walking into the meeting here.

And then the last, and most importantly, is with increased adoption and better data, you're going to get a way better prioritization of where you should be. No longer is every opportunity in your CRM weighted equally, right? The opportunity tied to the doctor who is already purchasing one of your other products, it should be a higher priority than the net new whitespace customer that you found using AcuityMD's data. So again, you're going to get a much better result because you're going to be able to make many more decisions based on data and what's actually happening in the real world, versus some sort of a subjective test.

And if we go to the next one. Now, again, I flashed this graphic up earlier, right? The maze that many of our sellers, med tech sellers, have to go through in order to win that deal. And if you go to the next slide, by adopting this approach that David and I have been talking about, which is unlocking next-level CRM usage with more advanced analytics and more data, you're going to be able to cut right through that maze as the graphic indicates there. You don't have to go through hurdles anymore. You're going to have access to all the relevant clinical practices for each doctor and for each hospital, and even each IDN, if you're looking to go out there and you're looking to contract with larger systems. Because we have everything based off of claims data, you're actually looking at a model of what's happening in reality in the US healthcare system. We know exactly where the procedures are happening, where they're happening, who's doing them, and who's most influential, right? And I think David kind of took us through a couple of examples of different ways that you can segment some of these markets.

So again, I will reiterate, unlocking CRM value really resides in the quality of the data in your CRM. And then if we go to the last slide here. Again, I just wanted to talk to everybody a little bit about Flywheel, which is AcuityMD's customer event.

Flywheel's basically an event where we invite med tech leaders from all over the industry to talk about their best practices, similar to what David and I are doing here. It's an opportunity for you to hear directly from our customers and other industry leaders who've reinvented their strategies on AcuityMD.

You'd have access to the latest innovations. I think last September, we launched our Care Journeys product, as well as our Contracts product. Many of our attendees were able to see sneak previews of exactly what the solutions look like. One gentleman in particular, he saw a demo that somebody on my team had given him, and immediately he was like, "I want that." So again I encourage everybody to sign up here and come and listen to some of the insights that you can get from some of your peers in the industry here.

All right. With that, I think we are going to move into QA now. And I do see some questions here. So David, I'm just going to read some of these out loud and maybe we can answer a couple of these here. So first question, how do you encourage and track CRM adoption when reps are resistant to it? I'll start here, David, maybe you can add a couple of examples. So there's really two approaches to better adoption, and this applies not only to CRM, but any sort of technology solution. You have the option of the carrot or the stick.

Most companies, I think knee-jerk reaction when they see low adoption, the immediate knee-jerk reaction is to say, "Oh, well, you have to put it in. We're going to put in goals and rules, and we're going to measure you on how often you're putting things in." But I think, based on my observations, the more effective way is the carrot. And I think, David, you referred to this earlier when you talked about drawing people in because there's something in the CRM for them, right? There's some insights in there that's going to help make their lives easier or maybe help close that deal faster. So I'm always of the approach, if you want to increase user adoption, you have to provide some sort of a carrot for people to actually come and do their work in that solution. David, I'm curious your thoughts.

No, I agree with that approach. I also think that as leaders and managers, we always have our one-on-ones in order to strategize. And using the platform for those meetings, have them present directly from the CRM platform, have them present the pipeline, be engaged as well, and showing that it works from a leadership standpoint and from a management standpoint is going to make the people accountable as well. And sharing examples, sharing best practices on how others are doing it to achieve success.

Yeah. No, great points there. All right, here's the second question. Have you seen effectiveness by turning CRM ownership over to sales operations instead of reps? That's an interesting question. So, here's how I would begin that, and David, I'm curious your thoughts as well.

Earlier we sort of talked about terminology, and what does CRM mean? I think we did a poll on that. And ultimately, the answer to this question resides in who owns the CRM, right? Each team is going to have their own sort of bias and what they're looking to get out of a CRM. So moving and transferring the ownership from one team to another, I haven't necessarily seen increased adoption. What I have seen increased adoption is when you elevate the discussion to a higher corporate level, because then you're able to orchestrate multiple processes within your company directly on the CRM and truly achieve the vision of that 360 degrees. David, what do you think? It depends on the organization, like you mentioned. In our case, we actually partner together. We have business operations directors with access to the tool and partner with the business development people just to work together towards the objective. But it's going to depend on the organization. To your point, having that senior leadership engagement and access is going to be important, because at the end, they're going to help drive the strategy as well.

Got it. Yeah. No, it makes total sense. Wow, the questions keep coming here. Let's see here. What data can reps use for selling to physicians? Great question. There's a lot. We're in the space.

Here's how I would answer your question. The universe of HCPs is very big. You could theoretically, if you sell something like an artificial knee or some sort of a capital for imaging, theoretically, there's going to be a lot of different physicians that are going to be interested in it. My approach has always been to grab the lowest hanging fruit. And in order to do that, you really have to understand a couple things. Number one, what is this physician's clinical practice? Do they actually do the procedures that are going to be relevant for the products that we're selling? Are they getting reimbursed for that? Is that their main business? That's question number one. The other thing I always want to know is, does this individual have biases? So I'm always looking at the Sunshine Act or the open payments database to see, well, sure, this person has a great clinical practice, but are they taking kickback payments from one of our competitors? Do they go and speak at one of our competitors' events? Those are things that I want to know as well. And then the last thing, and again, I could go on and on about this, I'll just give you the top three, is I'm also very interested in their referral networks. I want to know what those social networks and the relationships look like around that physician. Do we know somebody that's a customer of ours that's connected to this person? Did they go to school with them?

Did they train under them? These are the sorts of insights. And again, I can go on for another 30 minutes of the different data elements required for selling to physicians, but those are the ones that come to my mind immediately.

I think, Alab, also to the question of what things do we have to sell to the physician, I believe and I think this will answer another question that I see in the chat here that says, "When will you get to your product?" I think we're clear on the needs. And I think after this meeting, anyone that is interested in having a one-on-one with someone from Acuity, they can help them. But there's a lot of tools inside the AcuityMD platform that will help us deliver value to the doctors. There's a lot of data, like the patient care journey, that can show a doctor around 25 miles surrounding their practice, where are the patients being treated? Are they losing patients? Where's the patient leakage? Where are the areas of opportunity? So there's a lot of things inside the tool that is not only going to help us target, but also help deliver value to the physicians and sites of care.

Right. Awesome. Wow, this keeps coming up, David, here. So we have another one here. Can we add non-physician customer contacts? Great question. So, again, we've talked this entire presentation about selling to HCPs, selling to hospitals.

There's a whole gamut of user that are executives at hospitals. They are contract managers at IDNs and things like that. So absolutely, our platform does have the executive level contacts for many of these institutions. And the way that we integrate that is you can push some of that information over into the CRM as part of your solution. David, I'm curious as to your thoughts in the industry. Do you guys often find yourselves selling more to physicians, executives? Is it an equal mix?

I know it sounds corny, but I think it's the total office call, right? I think nowadays, it's a bunch of key stakeholders that will take a decision. You can have the physician. I think the physician continues to be the number one decision-maker, or at least the powerhouse into getting us in front of the right key stakeholders. But depending on the organization, I think everyone can relate to that. There's so many other key factors. There's C-suite level leadership. There's different KPIs that everyone is trying to meet from supply chain, from OR. And I think, again, we don't want to have a lot in a technology that then we are converting ourself into that legacy CRMs that we want to separate or distance yourselves.

But I think it's going to be important to have some key points there that are going to help us at least prep beforehand on who is our audience, depending on the hospital. Yeah. And I think it goes back to our point earlier, which is that med tech selling is really hard. It's not like selling tires and sneakers where you can advertise something and somebody goes and buys it with their credit card. It requires multiple steps. So I think absolutely. I think tracking non-physician contacts is equally as important as the actual person that's going to be implanting some of those devices. I think the questions keep popping in here. So what we'll do is, I think we're about to run out of time here, David, so we'll go ahead and answer all the questions after this call is over. We'll make sure you guys all have your information there. So again, David, I just want to, on behalf of AcuityMD, and personally, we value your partnership. This was a great discussion. Hopefully everybody got some value out of what we discussed here today.

No, thank you for the opportunity. It was great discussion, for sure. I appreciate that. All right. Well, with that, we have finished up our webinar for today. So just want to, again, thank our panelists for sharing all of your expertise. I think we had a really great conversation. Thank you all for joining us today live as well. We appreciate you engaging, and I encourage you to go to massmedic.com/events and check out all the other great events we have coming up, and we'll see you next time. Have a great day.