All posts by timwalker317526

Be the Vision keeper for Medical Device Product Development

March 17, 2016 timwalker317526

The Story

A great product manager friend of mine had spent three (3) years driving a product to market. At long last he was on the precipice of launch and his wife read the value proposition and said to him, “I don’t buy it.” Normally, this off handed comment would not have affected him, however in the case his wife was also a prospective customer. He started to doubt the product concept and reached out to me as a second set of eyes.

This product should have taken 18 months to get ready for launch. However, several personnel issues, technical challenges and of course a poor regulatory strategy had made the commercialization process a huge battle. He had invested so much emotional energy in just getting is ready for launch that he had lost the vision.

So here is his learning, as you roll the Value Proposition through the R&D phases toward commercialization it is easy to get lost in the day-to-day effort it takes. But from time to time you need to stop and separate yourself from the emotional connection you have to your device and ask is this product still relevant? Is it still believable? (Or have a trusted colleague do it for you). He had gotten so busy helping the team be successful that he had compromised his commitment to constantly check in with the customer along the way to see if he was still on course.

The Vision is Job 1

Once you propose a product concept and get the ball rolling within your company you need to, as best you can, free yourself of the inevitable details of product management and stay in a pure marketing mindset. You are the only one who can be the keeper of the Vision. Your role is to sell the vision, over and over and over again. Keep the team on course.

Don’t let them react to one customer’s voice. Make sure that every new voice is taken into account and melded into the overall strategy. There will be constant pulls to get you off track. Gently but firmly, keep the crew pulling toward the same destination.

Utilize your customers to help. Periodic check-ins to see how you are progressing toward that destination is critical.

What if we do get off track?

The worst thing is to launch a product and have it flop. Launches cost $100,000 to millions of dollars. The opportunity cost for the sales organization is huge. Not least is the hit your departments reputation will take for future launches. If you keep checking the Vision’s viability and if the product is living up to that Vision you should be ok. But if something is off, raise the flag! If you raise the flag early enough, course correction might be at a team level only. Raise the flag too late in the process and then it will be out of the teams’ hands. Either way you need to raise the flag. In an intelligent organization the raising of a flag is not the career limiting action you might fear. Not raising the flag and flopping might well be career ending.

What type of things can get you off course?

Unfortunately a whole lot of things can blow you off course. Both internal and external aspect of the opportunity can change. Some of the things to be aware of are;

Technical design decisions that seem benign to engineers can really sneak up on you and do damage to the value proposition.
Competition can beat you to launch with a similar product
A new technique or substitute technology can blow you out of the water
The cost of the product may preclude you from being profitable, the temptation will be to raise your target price until you are profitable, and however, you may price yourself right out of the market.
The incidence and prevalence of the problem you were solving may change.
There may have been an untested assumption that raised it head later in the process and proved more impactful than originally thought.

and many, many, more.

This is why you need to continue to validate your original beliefs. Keep the environmental scan sweeping the skies around your product Vision. Take a lesson for the military and don’t shut down the radar after the first sweep. Things change with time and events.

How did the story end?

My friend was ok. His wife’s hospital was not in his customer segment. He stopped the full launch and did a soft launch into only targeted centers and everything went well. Not perfect. Some of the decisions that were made at the team level with respect to design were changed to optimize acceptance within the target. The changes did not trigger a new regulatory filing and delayed the launch by 3 months.

In the defined segment the product is now number one in unit share! The segment did turn out to be smaller than expected.

“Experience is what you get, right after you need it most.”

Make it a great day,

Tim Walker

p.s. please feel fee to comment on this or any of my posts.

Tim Walker is the Principal consultant for The Experia Group. A small consulting firm that specializes in providing experience and expertise during critical device commercialization phases to increase the probability of success. www.theexperiagroup.com.

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State the Opportunity Size with Integrity, Medical Device Marketing

March 14, 2016 timwalker317526

The Story:

I just completed teaching a Marketing Management course at the MBA level. In the same time frame I was working with a start-up medical device company advising on their investor deck. I reached a common realization. There is a natural tendency to inflate market projections by capturing every conceivable dollar potential worldwide. There is nothing unethical or morally wrong in putting your absolute best foot forward, but there is no value in inflating the opportunity.

My professional opinion is that the revenue or potential opportunity you quote must be congruent (Walker’s Law of Congruency illustration below) with your overall story and plan. Angels, VCs and VPs of Marketing are too savvy to be drawn into an overstated market potential.

It is better to progress the story through the fair market potential to the realizable potential, quickly and then tell your story (plan) and state the five-year revenue forecast, then dwelling on a fantasy.

If your story doesn’t sound like it is worth it, or, if it doesn’t deliver on the expectations of Senior Management don’t fudge the model, change the story.

Over the Top Market Assessment

By over-the-top I am referring to the fact that every marketing plan I see states that the product represents a billion dollar opportunity. Not every marketing plan does have a chance at reaching a billion dollars and that is ok. If is does, it might be well beyond the timeline for a needed return.

Realizable Market Opportunity

In general, there are exclusions from the Grand market that are driven by the nature of your product. If the product has a narrow indication or is a line extension it probably will not be worth a billion dollars ever. It may be the first of five applications needed to reach full potential. It is not productive to spend a disproportional amount of time explaining the grand potential, mention it and move on to your story. As much as you would like to think that the most important thing to the reader is the huge market opportunity, it is not.

Most humans are risk adverse. They would rather see a tight story as to how you will realize the revenue forecast than create a dreamscape for the future.

Targeted Market Opportunity

I read with delight as a student defined the nature of the customer segment that they believed they would be successful with or in. By having a customer target, which you should have, you exclude a section of the Realizable Market Potential. If your segment represents only a quarter of the realizable potential then reduce that number by 25%.

Revenue Forecast

Once you know the Target Market Potential you continue to discount your potential for factors such as:

Competition
Capacity
Market attractiveness (Did the product end up with the features and benefits you had hoped for?)
Channel leverage
- The number of outlets
- The number of direct sales representatives
- Access to the targeted customers
Launch timing
Environmental barriers

Last but not least you need to have a beta factor (ß) a final reduction in your target market that represents the unknown and the unknowable. How do you calculate this last discount factor? You look to history either internal or external to your company. How accurate have your prediction been in the past. Do you have positive or negative reasons to believe that you will be as accurate this time?

Typically, the revenue forecasts are seldom realized. Of the 100+ products I have launched more of them under perform, in the first year, than over perform. After 30 years of product forecasting you would think that I could get the first year launch numbers correct. But there is always the unknowable and the X factor. The X factor is the political (not always bad) aspects of revenue forecasts. Typically, there is what you believe and then what everyone else is willing to bet on. Plot your actual performance against both numbers and learn.

Remember that your marketing plan will move through the project with you. At each step you need to add credibility by validating any and all assumption you have baked into the story. (E.g. the first version assumed that R&D would delivery on the utility that you wanted to commercialize. Some subsequent revision will account for whether they did or did not).

Note: The challenge to increasing accuracy with time is keeping the caveats and assumptions clearly in the mind of top management as decisions are made. I have been in many discussions just before launch where a Sr. Manager reminded me that my original forecast numbers where much larger than they are now at launch. You need to be prepared to answer that challenge without throwing the manager or the team under the bus.

“Experience is what you get, right after you need it most.”

Make it a great day,

Tim Walker

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Assessing Opportunities in the Medical Device Market

February 29, 2016 timwalker317526

The Story: I attended a recent Med Device investor conference and was approached by a colleague who had been following my blog for a year or so. I’ve known this gentleman for over 20-years, but had not spoken with him in quite a while. He asked when I was going to post something about doing Opportunity Assessments.

It is funny how people pigeonhole you into different skill sets. He remembered a Market Assessment I had done in the 90’s that apparently impressed him. I have done so many assessments, both Product and Market that I had to look it up. I was humbled by the fact he remembered it.

A second gentleman that was at this same conference remembered me for the way I developed a Product Portfolio, he asked when I was going to blog about that topic. Again I was humbled. This guy is as sharp as they come.

Both topics are huge in scope. This post will set up some thoughts and definitions; I will follow-up with a more detail set of posts over the next month or so.

Opportunity Assessment defined: An opportunity assessment is the systematic, fact based, analysis of the market and/or product variables and assumptions that are used to determine the future financial viability of a given “Opportunity”.

Portfolio Plan defined: The Portfolio Plan is the resultant of a systematic decision-making process that combines a series of investment options (opportunities) into a strategic investment across time. When the opportunities are combined they will optimize that investment against a strategic objective set forth by senior management, hopefully that came out of a formal strategic planning process.

Connecting Opportunity Assessments and Portfolio Planning: You can create an Opportunity Assessment completely independently of portfolio considerations. But to do a serious Portfolio Plan you can’t do it without a series of valid Opportunity Assessments. To facilitate a defendable Portfolio Plan you have to make sure that the methodology used to develop the Opportunity Assessments is consistent and not based on opinion.

Side note 1: Even if your organization uses M&A activity to build the Portfolio you still need that Opportunity Assessment. You might just call it Due Diligence. Take care to ensure that all departments use the same Opportunity assessment rules and validation requirements.

Side note 2: Depending on how your organization is structured, you will more than likely need to build the assessment in tiers of certainty. Some of the work takes resources and if you don’t have the resources you need then you will need to convince someone that the opportunity is worth looking into. Think about the following flow:

Vision
Hypothesis
Preliminary
Verification
Validation

What does a good Opportunity Assessment look like? It all starts with defining a problem in a specific therapeutic area or market. Opportunity identification is a whole different topic. For this post I will assume that the problem has been identified.

So the key questions that must be answered are:

Is the opportunity real?
Is it worth going after?
Can your company win, if they go after it?

A NO to any of these basic three questions suggests that it is not viable, for you. Of course everything has many shades of gray and all assessments are nuanced by political, economic and time frame realities. So I will write from a simplified dogmatic position. Take it for what it is worth to you.

Is the opportunity real? There are two parts to this question. Is the problem real? Is the solution real? To answer these questions you must have a clear understanding of the un-met need. You must also have a reasonable belief that full utility can be delivered via the final product design at a cost that is affordable.

Side note 3: A mistake that often occurs is that someone sees a problem and assumes that everyone must see, have, or suffer from the problem. This is seldom the case. A measured assessment of the size of the opportunity is step one.

Side note 4: In almost all cases the problems are already being solved or mitigated today, somehow to some extent. Don’t discount the value of understanding how this happens. In a latent need these substitution solutions maybe your largest competitive hurdle.

Is it worth it? This a unique question that each organization will answer differently. Depending on your grand objectives that have come down from the Strategic Plan there maybe hurdle rates that must be met even to be considered as a viable opportunity to be considered.

In general this is a financial/strategic question that requires a number of models and market/segment/solution assumptions to be made. The more informed these assumptions are, the better the decisions will be.

Typical you will need:

A disease model
A market model
A set of explicit solution assumptions (validated to your comfort level)
A set of explicit market assumptions (validated to your comfort level)
A set of assumptions about the success of your product solution (validated to your comfort level)
Cost of developing the product
Cost of launching the product
Sensitivity analysis of the revenue and profit models
A discount factor is developed (probability of success on all fronts)(project ßeta)
A pricing model
A business model to deliver long-term success
NPV
IRR
Payback period
Strategic value (risk reduction, critical growth objective, etc.)

Side note 5: If, you are going to use this as one of the opportunity assessments in your portfolio planning process, then the there needs to be a pre-set standard quality level for validation of assumptions.

Can you win? This question is primarily an assessment of your internal capabilities and resources. Some of these questions feedback to the “worth it” question. For example, if you need to acquire or invent a new technology to provide an effective solution then you need to make sure the cost of invention or acquisition are in the financial models and it could well impact your discount factor (project ßeta).

Do you have, a cross all functions:

The right people?
Enough capital?
Enough cash?
The right sales force?
The right knowledge?
The right management control system?
The right distribution model?
Access to the right KOL’s?
The right vendor base?
Enough mfg. capacity?
The proper internal systems? Etc.

For any sub-point no, you may plan to acquire the missing aspect that lead to a no; just make sure you discount the probability of success and account for it’s cost.

When you bring it all together the high level scoring is simple, if you don’t have yes, yes, yes, than move on. If you have some narrowly classified no’s, you may want to move to a higher level of accuracy (refer to note 3 above). Just remember that the goal is to eliminate the losers and select the winners. Make a decision and move on.

“Experience is what you get, right after you need it most.”

Make it a great day,

Tim Walker

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Creating Customer Profiles for the Medical Device Market

December 3, 2015 timwalker317526

The Story

The project I am currently working on for a client will go much quicker if I follow my own advice and take care of the basics before creating final field facing messaging. I consider writing customer profiles or personas as one of the most important aspects of marketing fundamentals.

Once you have identified all the influencers in your buying decision the next step should be writing the personas. Without the personas you can’t develop a segmentation or targeting strategy. Without segmentation and targeting you can’t really develop positioning statements or value propositions. This is why the customer profile is a basic building block. Combined with your environmental scan you will have the fundamental inputs to developing the rest of the S-T-P marketing fundamentals.

Customer Profile Defined

A customer profile is a one-page document that describes the psychosocial aspects of your targeted customer group. Specifically, it will include the following elements: demographics, psychographics, behaviors, media preferences, influencers, preferences and environmental/organizational constraints.

Psychographics

Are they anything like demographics? Sort of! Demographics explain “who” your buyer is, while psychographics explain “why” they buy. Demographic information includes gender, age, income, and marital status – the dry facts. Psychographic information might be their habits, hobbies, spending habits and values.

You can only effectively reach your target audience when you understand both their demographics and psychographics. The combination of both sets of data starts to form your buyer persona – a detailed picture of the people you work with now, and would like to work with in the future.[1]

Why are these profiles so important?

In a crowded field you must constantly look for leverage, something that will give you a leg up on the competition. Understanding your customers at a deeper level than competition will give you that leverage. It might lead you to align your product with a select group of customers. It might cause you to use colors and language that are more appealing. It might mean that you hirer different types of salespeople. Even if you can’t spend the market research money to do this exercise in a systematic method, it is worth doing! Treat the first draft as a hypothesis! Come back to that draft after every significant customer interaction to see if you have confirmed or rejected an aspect of your profile.

Here are a few simple steps in creating a good profile

Describe your customer

Demographics
Psychographics
Behavior
Language preferences

Locate your customers

Where do they hang out?
What do they read?
What do they watch?
How do they learn?
How do they communicate?
Who do they admire?

Understand their buying practices

Where do they begin their research?
How do they receive the information they use in device selection?
What is their problem?
What benefits will you provide if you solve their problem?

Understand your current customers

Why did they original buy from you?
Why do they continue to buy?
Why didn’t they buy from you?

Write your first draft of the persona/profile

Write one per influencer.
Use names to give them life.
Look at the intersections for common elements.

Test, Test, Test your beliefs

You must find a way to validate your personas. Market research is the obvious choice, unless you don’t have the cash to pay for it. Then you have to use time and touches.

Tip

There is no such thing as an average customer! It is ok if you have to breakdown the persona into subgroups. I call these Archetypes. Your leverage will be greater if you find multi-modal conditions. Use of the mean/average is something that will lead you to being an average marketer.

“Experience is what you get, right after you need it most.”

Make it a great day,

Tim Walker

[1] http://blog.hubspot.com/insiders/marketing-psychographics

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Running a Key Opinion Leader (KOL) Meeting within the Medical Device Market

November 13, 2015 timwalker317526 1 Comment

The Story

I will be running a KOL meeting this week and I thought writing this blog would be a good way of capture advice that I might give myself. KOL panels can be incredibly valuable, if done well. They can also be a bit embarrassing if done poorly. Here are some helpful tips.

#1 tip: Know what your objective is first. Otherwise you will end with, at best a fragmented process, at worst an expensive party.

The top ten list

Bring value to the clinician beyond the honorarium that you will be paying them. i.e. one suggestion is using a keynote address speaker on a relevant topic that is slightly off-axis.
Know what you want to learn before you plan the event or invite a physician.
Don’t settle for narrative as the only input mechanism; get qualitative and quantitative data.
Recruit a physician to co-host the event. This will bring credibility to the event as well as providing you a test bed for your structure.
Don’t solicit advice on issues that you are unwilling to act on.
Work them hard; it communicates how valuable you believe their views are.
Comfort and convenience wins out over fancy and exotic every time.
Leave time in the schedule to let the physicians talk to one another without you present.
If you and they have the time for entertainment, make it memorable not expensive.
Themes are great for spring dances; don’t go overboard with tying everything together.

More tips for success

Logistics, logistics, logistics
A good rule of thumb is to spend 4 hours of planning for every one hour of meeting time.
Structure is important to good data capture, however physicians will rebel against any structure that you might design. Accept that and make sure that within your structured discussions that you plan for unstructured time.
Conducting a pre-meeting survey is a great way to learn of dramatic differences of opinion. Actually using the slides from the survey is a great way to introduce controversial topics without it seeming as though you are trying to stir the pot.

When to utilize professional and independent moderator/facilitator

I have developed the view that whether a professional moderator is used or a skilled facilitator from your own company is employed is dependent on a couple of issues:

1. What is the critical nature of the decisions I am collecting information to support?

For high-risk critical decisions I prefer a non-company based facilitator. It eliminates bias.

For politically charged decisions I prefer an independent facilitator. It takes the pressure off the product marketer.

2. How many physicians will be attending?

I don’t recommend more than 10 physicians, however if you must go above 10 then a professional facilitator is preferred.

3. If there are a number of different physician specialties or a mix of clinician types than a professional facilitator can be helpful managing any accidental friction that occurs.

4. If you are going to spend the time and money to gather a group of physicians to help you resolve your critical issues, an additional $10,000 to have a coach or moderator involved make the chances for success go up dramatically.

5. Take the time to prepare a final report document that captures all that you learn and reveals the data organized by the data or findings that are associated with the critical questions you were trying to resolve.

Tips in selecting the attendees for your KOL panel

Select your attendees based on your objectives.
Make sure the invitees are representative of your target customer base.
Ensure that the physicians are still practicing physicians.
Don’t send the invitations until you have vetted the potential personal conflicts or subservient relationships that may exist.
If you “over-invite” to cover potential no’s or last minute cancellation make sure you can handle the overflow, if it happens. My approach is to nominate 30 physicians who all meet the acceptance criteria. Rank them. Invite 12 to get 10. If you don’t get 10 out of the 12, then extend to the next three people on your list. Keep rolling until you get your 10. This way you minimize your exposure.

Final thought

If you have never organized a KOL panel before, don’t be stubborn, ask for help. If there is no one in your organization that has done one well, hire someone to help.

“Experience is what you get, right after you need it most.”

Make it a great day,

Tim Walker

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Market Development; “is it really different than Product Marketing?”

September 2, 2015 timwalker317526

At the heart of the Marketing continuum are three aspects of strategic marketing: 1) New Product Portfolio Development, 2) Market Development, and 3) New Business Development.

Are they really different? Yes and No is the answer. To be successful in any of the three areas you need a strong understanding of the core principles of marketing, a great understanding of your organizations capabilities and of course, a strong understanding of the nature of the customer and the environment in which they work.

The analytic tools you use will be very similar. The basics of great messaging will apply. Where they differ is in the nature of the problem you are trying to solve.

Market Development Defined

Market Development is simply the creation or expansion of a market. To expand a market or create a market you have to first “sell” the idea that a problem exists. You need to educate the potential buyers that they have an un-met need that they were unaware of.

Product Marketing Defined

With Product Marketing you are “selling” the solution to an already established problem or un-met need.

The Question is, “do you ever have to do both at the same time?”

The answer is yes, to varying degrees.

Typically, it is very expensive and a slow process to develop a market from scratch. There are many benefits in being the leader who creates a market. Typically the first mover advantage will provide leverage in the market place right up until someone develops a better solution.

On a relative scale product marketing is quicker and less expensive than creating markets.

The Story

A client of mine has a great product. There is a real clinical problem that this product solves. There are three or four “use cases” for this product. Some of the use cases are obvious to the key stakeholders, some aren’t. The strategic marketing challenge is where to place the available funds? Which will drive the right kind of success?

It is not always obvious what to do. What will bring the most success for the least investment? It is times like these, when you are facing complex strategic questions when I fall back on the core principles and tools of marketing.

When in doubt ask a customer (s):

Who is/are the buyer(s)?
Who are the key none buying influencers?
Are the problem(s) that you are solving the same or different?
Is the product the right product for all use cases?
What are the barriers to success?
Is there a genuine value proposition for all stakeholders?
Is the value proposition strong enough to make it worth the users time to be educated?
What resonates with the customers?
What evidence or proof will the buyer need to accept your proposition?

Scan the environment:

How large is each use case opportunity?
Is there competition or are you substituting an alternative solution?
Is there new technology on the horizon?
New laws or regulations that are coming or that are needed to provide leverage?
Are there any parrallel examples of successful strategies

Craft a hypothesis strategy:

Test your hypothesis
Model the potential results of your strategy
Select a strategy
Fire a bullet not a cannon ball[1]

There are no formulae for crafting great market development strategies. You have to eliminate the non-starters and then design tests to explore the ones you have hope for.

“Experience is what you get, right after you need it most.”

Make it a great day,

Tim Walker

[1] Great by Choice, Jim Collins, Harper Business Press, Chapter 4, p. 60-98.

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The Marketing Continuum: a progression of activities

July 24, 2015 timwalker317526 2 Comments

The Marketing continuum provides a tremendous variation of opportunity for you to ply your special talents. From corporate strategy to advertising, from portfolio planning to merchandizing, from market development to product requirement planning, there is an opportunity for growth for you.

The Story

I met with a recent MBA grad that I found to be brilliant. This person questioned whether they could sustain the excitement that they felt in their first marketing position over a life long marketing career. My first question was, “why worry about it now?” Just enjoy the position. As we spoke it became apparent that no one had ever laid out the opportunities that the marketing continuum could offer him.

Intent

What this blog will do is define the continuum, explain some stages of the continuum and provide a tip or two about working within the continuum.

Caveat

Before I dive in, it is important to explain that the continuum is drawn left to right. There is not a hierarchy. Every role in marketing is equally important. There are a number of other continuums in the Medical Device Company as well. None are superior to the other. It takes a team to commercialize a medical device.

Marketing Continuum Defined

The marketing continuum is the progression of marketing activities that move from high-level strategy to tactical implementation of the business model. Marketing is the framework in which companies get intentional about their pathway to success.

As shown in the figure above there are, about, seven areas of marketing contained within the continuum.

Corporate Strategy
Corporate ID/PR
Strategic marketing
Market development, Product portfolio development, Business development
Commercial marketing
Marketing communications
Field activities

Corporate Strategy is included in the marketing continuum because to develop strong corporate wide strategies many of the areas of expertise that marketers must processes are required. Without a marketing mind-set you cannot develop corporate strategies.

Corporate ID/PR is critically important and must provide an over reaching consistency with the product messaging. I include it to differentiate from the Market Communication role. Corporate Identification, i.e. corporate branding is a very different set of skills than standard marketing communications. There are so many more customers for that type of message, employees, future employees, government, investors, users and buyers, C-suites at your customers, etc. The messaging becomes broader and less specific.

Strategic Marketing represents the general overall positioning that an entire portfolio of products or services will be built around. It will define the opportunities for Market, Products and Services, and Business Development. Strategic marketing is often performed as a staff function, committee or senior management. Many times, too often, an outside consulting firm performs this function.

Market Development creates a larger opportunity, for the products and services by facilitating a new understanding or behavior in your current targeted group of customers.

Portfolio Development creates more products and services that act synergistically to penetrate market segments within the define market.

Business Development or M&A activities create new markets or provide access to technologies that power product and service development.

Commercial Marketing is critical to the success of the continuum. It is where the activities turn toward selling, training and building broader relationship. It is where the needs of the many are converted to the needs of the few or the one.

Marketing Communications is the process by which, all the core messages are posed into a language, an image, a smell, and a feel all to trigger the desired emotional response from the customer. Once created these messages are then packed into different outlets or media types to reach out to the customers in an effective and efficient manner.

Field Activities, such as, sales, clinical support, referral development, national accounts, customer service, service, etc. has the task of taking the general messaging about the corporation, products and services and making it relevant to one customer at a time. Each customer interaction has to be nuanced.

Having a marketing mind-set will serve you well up and down the continuum. The tools vary a bit, but the basics of marketing are the same in each stage of the continuum. I encourage you to work the continuum until you find your best fit.

“Experience is what you get, right after you need it most.”

Make it a great day,

Tim Walker

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The Inventors Dilemma in Medical Device Start-ups

July 14, 2015 timwalker317526

The Story

This Post may seem a little self-serving, it may be. But I celebrate everyone’s success and feel compelled to sing out when I see inventors going down the wrong road. To some, the issue we are going to discuss is a bit of a chicken and egg scenario. I don’t think so. It is more like the birth of twins.

I have been working with a number of early-stage start-ups [5] over the last several years [3] and have witnessed 15 ‘funding pitches’, or more. I have noticed a trend. Those that get funding have strong technology, strong teams, some traction, and have real solutions to real problems all woven into a story that shows how they will generate revenue (the business case).

To an investor there must be a viable business case. The stronger the case, the more solid the ‘go to market strategy’, the less risk is perceived, the more likely they are to invest.

I watch as these inventors ‘pitch’ their ideas and never deliver the punch line. How will this solution specifically make money? The second thing that is missing is an integrated commercialization strategy [the reason to believe that the solution can be delivered to the target market].

Passion and technology are critical, but they are not enough. Crafting an effective commercialization strategy and packaging it into a clean, understandable story is an art. It can’t be formula driven. Yes, there are several outlines that the story can be organized into, but it is the connective tissue that links the story elements together. Humans make emotional decisions. The investors have to feel the value as much as calculate it.

There are a number of ‘approaches’ to telling your story. Lean start-ups, the Canvas, the five T’s, etc. Many inventors get caught up in these approaches because they don’t have formal business [marketing] training. They think that there is a formula for business success that is disconnected from their solution.

What Can They Do?

Developing that commercialization strategy needs to be done by a “professional” marketer. Yes, it will cost some money. As a scientist, clinician, inventor it is baked into your mind that if you “build it they will come”. The investors that you are presenting to are smart enough to know that it is simply not going to be that easy.

As an inventor/entrepreneur you need to factor into the use of funds during the friends and family or angel rounds enough cash to hire a professional marketer to develop a commercialization strategy that is plausible. At the very least you need to have them scope the process that they would use to develop the story. A plan-to-a- plan. Find a good marketer and let them craft your story and determine the strongest go-to-market strategy.

“Experience is what you get, right after you need it most.”

Make it a great day,

Tim Walker

Uncategorized

Conducting an Autopsy for Medical Device Launches that are Heading South

July 10, 2015 timwalker317526

The Story

In the last post I made mention of a “Launch Autopsy”. I received several inquires as to what I meant by that term. So here is the answer with a high level look at the process that I have developed to figure out, “what went wrong?”

The first product I ever launched went south. That was in the 80’s. I was committed to determining what went wrong and what I could learn to prevent it from happening again. That is the first time I formally dissected the activities that lead up to a failed launch. I became a fan of “de-briefs”, regardless of the level of success that was obtained. A commitment to constant learning and refining of my skills was to become a hallmark of my life. If you’re curious what went wrong with my first launch? The short answer, pricing.

A “Launch Autopsy” is the name that I have assigned to these de-briefs. The name came from an article I read titled, “The Anatomy of a Good Product Launch”. I figured if we have anatomy, we can have death and therefore an Autopsy.

Launch Autopsy, Defined

A Launch Autopsy is the formal process one uses to investigate an under performing product that was launched within the past 12 months, it doesn’t have to have failed (died) to have an autopsy performed (perhaps I should rename it).

Why do Product Launches not Achieve Success?

Invariable the launch failures distill down to a “miss”. A miss in the classic aspects of Marketing:

Product
Price
Promotion
Place

It might seem a bit old school, but it works. Each one of the four P’s has additional levels below them. The ‘what’ is level one, the ‘how’ is level two, the ‘why’ is level three. It might make sense to think of Process as the fifth P. To modernize the thinking I also add two Cs, customer and competition.

Product
Price
Promotion
Place
Process
Customer
Competition

I find that if you interview 5-10 key players in the launch, looking for the ‘miss’ in the seven categories’ identified above, you can write a good hypothesis to explain what went wrong.

Beware the Motives

If this process is to be used to conduct a witch-hunt, it will fail to deliver an optimized result. If the goal is to genuinely figure out what went wrong, then it can be a great learning experience for the organization and will improve future launches.

A High Level View of the Process

Read the Quality manual – understand the Quality System well
Scan the DHF paying close attention to the customer inputs (VOC)
Interview the Product Manager and their supervisor
Interview the person that initiate the autopsy
Interview the top sales person
Interview the best historic salesperson who has not done well with this product
Interview the clinician customer that has bought the most
Interview the clinician customer who evaluated it and chose not to purchase
Develop a hypothesis or two that fit the puzzle pieces together
Test the hypothesis
Draw your conclusion(s) and present the findings

Tips

Pull on every loose thread that you discover
Focus on the blocking and tackling
Note but don’t focus on the names
Focus on the process of the work and the content quality

“Experience is what you get, right after you need it most.”

Make it a great day,

Tim Walker

Uncategorized

Message Congruency in Medical Device Commercialization

July 2, 2015 timwalker317526 8 Comments

The Story

Have you ever seen messaging related to a new product that was clearly disjointed? Maybe you saw a tradeshow booth that spoke of the product a bit differently than the sales brochure and the salesman’s pitch was a different story all together?

A VP of Marketing hired me to figure out why their dynamite new product wasn’t gaining the momentum that they had expected. This is one of the most enjoyable and potentially beneficial services that I get to perform for clients. Consider it a launch autopsy.

There are many other causes for a slow takeoff of a new product. For this particular client the issue was a confusing message. So confusing that one might describe it as conflicting. Why is this a big deal? Walker’s Law of Congruency™ states, “As human beings we seek congruency. We constantly are trying to connect the dots. The price has to match the value of the product. The color schemes have to represent the claims, etc. When our minds detect an incongruent message we start to doubt everything about the issue or in our case the product. The customer loses trust in the product.”

How do we prevent incongruent messages as marketers? There are lots of factors, but simply we need to know exactly what our message is, more importantly everyone that is working on or near the launch must understand the message.

How do we stay on message?

We write. We publish the five documents that then serve as the source for every piece of collateral, every training script, every creative brief.

Segmentation
Targeting (user and buyer)
Product positioning statement
Product value proposition
Pricing strategy

These are the five documents that act as the base. Everything else flows from here.

In addition to these five basic documents there is a format to the story line. It is not mine; it is something that is adapted from other sources.

Problem statement
Solution statement
Reasons to believe
Proof set
Call to action

If you publish the five core documents and keep any promotional materials and sales pitches in the five-element format it is unlikely that you will have incongruent or even worst conflicting messages.

“Experience is what you get, right after you need it most.”

Make it a great day,

Tim Walker

Medical Device Marketing Insights

All posts by timwalker317526

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