#35 - How to capture sales leads in the new COVID world (9 mins)

Brought to you by Tiger Buford. Congratulations, you have found Inside Orthopedics. I am Tiger, your orthopedic industry insider and retained recruiter for early-stage orthopedic companies. This is episode number 35 titled How to drive sales leads with digital marketing. In this podcast, I'm going to teach you how to use digital marketing to capture new sales leads, especially in a COVID world. Enjoy Inside Orthopedics. It's always ad-free. Here we go. Okay, orthopedic sales leaders, this message is for you. In the new COVID world, the orthopedic sales process will be less human touch. I think we can all agree on that. Post-COVID, you are unlikely to meet your surgeon at the hospital or at a medical meeting. It's just going to be a lot harder to get inside the hospital. The days of bumping into surgeon prospects in the hallway or the doctor's lounge is The days of meeting surgeon prospects at large medical meetings are over and may never come back. Surgeons have changed how they learn about new orthopedic products, how they learn about new technologies, how they learn about new procedures. Orthopedic surgeons are seeking information almost entirely online now. So how does a device company earn a surgeon's attention online? The short answer is digital marketing. So what is digital marketing? Well, digital marketing can be a lot of things such as branding or direct-to-consumer, but I'm going to talk about specifically a digital marketing campaign that is a systematic set of online marketing messages towards— targeted towards orthopedic surgeons. The goal of such a campaign is to drive new sales leads. Digital marketing will get your new products in front of new surgeons on their own time while they're looking at screens or their phone. Digital will qualify your new surgeon leads. Digital is completely flexible, it's 100% measurable, and it's budget-friendly. Sounds great. So how does this work? Well, let me, let me kind of walk you through an example case to see how this whole thing works. So the fictitious company TechSpine has a unique new product and needs to create new spine surgeon leads. Because of the pandemic, TechSpine has accidentally saved $50,000 in trade show expense and travel so far in 2020. TechSpine sales force has access to Has less access to the new spine surgeons at hospitals or ASCs, and they can't attend medical conferences to meet surgeons. They certainly cannot text or even call surgeons directly. So, Tex Spine decides to explore a digital marketing campaign to gather new leads and drive new sales. So what does this look like? Let's— let me walk you through 10 quick steps of a process of a marketing campaign that is digital. So first, TexSpine chooses an orthopedics media agency that understands both their business and their orthopedic surgeon customers. Next, TexSpine sets a budget for the new campaign at Let's say $50,000. It's important to note that TexSpine can easily shift the budget during the campaign into areas that are more successful and move it away from areas that are less successful. Next, TexSpine chooses what product, procedure, whatever they want to focus the campaign on. Let's say it's a new spine procedure. Then TechSpine determines the target customers. Let's say they choose spine surgeons and neurosurgeons where they practice, and let's say they specifically want to target 3 markets: Greater New York City, Dallas-Fort Worth, and LA, because TechSpine has strong sales distribution in those large markets. This is one of the advantages of digital marketing. You can literally target people in tiny geographies, zip codes, anywhere where they are. Next, TechSpine does an inventory of all the relevant content of their new spine procedure— images, video, written— and they may go get some new written material, video, With help from the agency. Working with the agency, SpineTech chooses exactly what the surgeon will see, read, or hear online. TechSpine determines what sales lead information that they would like to know about each new spine surgeon lead in New York, Dallas-Fort Worth, LA, so that the sales force can follow up. So the agency is off. They build landing pages, they develop the digital ads, they start the campaign. Once turned on, spine surgeons interact with the online content and complete the lead gen form. Sales management then Sends sales reps to contact the surgeon at the surgeon's request for a demo or training. Bingo bango, the new sales process is off and running, and this was all created without face-to-face presentations. So it sounds too good to be true, sounds expensive. Well, it's really not. Let's talk about the budget for a minute. Here's some quick math. Here are some ballpark sales numbers for a digital marketing campaign for a 6-month duration for an orthopedic device company. Let's say you convert your $50,000 in saved travel, medical conference entertainment into a digital marketing campaign. With this little $50,000, you can actually generate new sales that are worth 2x, 5x, maybe 10x of your spend in annual sales with new surgeons. So here's the process. Your $50,000 in digital marketing campaign creates online engagements with surgeons in your targeted geographies that you control. Which leads into— results into lead forms completed by the surgeons in your targeted geographies, which results in warm sales calls and demos and training, which results in new customers doing at least one case, which results in repeat procedure business at Let's say up to half a million dollars a year. So I hope you found this useful. This is kind of how it works. This is the way the whole world works outside of orthopedics, and orthopedics is kind of late to catch up, but COVID is forcing us to think about this process differently. Let me know if I can walk you through a digital marketing strategy and campaign. And how it would look for your company or products. And stay safe out there.