The Art of “Seeing” – Chapter 3

By Tamer Flores – CEO, International Growth Specialist

Have you ever “SEEN” the opportunity to get ahead in your market with just a few adaptations of your product and exceptionally take advantage of it?

With the right Expansion & Commercial knowledge you just might have the chance to do that, and this is one time when I seized such opportunity.

THE CASE OF “REQUESTING THE RIGHT FEATURES FOR YOUR MARKET”:

When I was working as CEO of a company distributing Pacemakers and Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillators (ICDs) internationally, I was representing a European line that was already big in South America and it still was on the mission to grow bigger. In the cases when you are already important in a market, you compete mostly against your own company and results, to “grow the pie” and not only to “get a bigger piece of the pie,” and for doing this some adaptation to the market is necessary.

The question is: How do you adapt a highly technical product to a market? And the answer is: through cautious observation, listening to your customer, and an open mind from your manufacturer.

In our case, some of the most advanced features like the “daily automatic follow-ups” (capture, sensing, impedance) were reserved for only a few of the most expensive devices: the top-of-the-line dual chamber ones. That was because in the European and US markets around 90% of the devices sold were dual chamber. However, in South America 70% to 80% of the new devices sold were single chamber devices.

Therefore, my idea was that the manufacturer in their NEXT generation of devices would allow at least one family of single chamber devices to offer “daily automatic follow-ups.” A change like this takes some time in this industry, but fortunately the manufacturer was responsive. Once we made the request, met with the top-level people in our region and then pitched our need to the top executives of the company. The idea for gaining market share was approved and it just needed to be implemented, which would take as a minimum eighteen months.

In the meantime, we started working with our customers. South American Doctors -like every customer- want to feel that they are heard, so we made a very public survey in our whole market asking them which features they would want most for their market. As we had projected, “daily automatic follow-ups” won as the most needed upgrade with 90% of the votes, something we had already anticipated. We already knew it was approved and would arrive in one and a half years, but it still took us several months of work to do that. After six months we publicly announced that the change our Doctors requested had been approved and the new models would come to us in one more year.

We created an anticipation and a desire for these new devices to arrive to our territories. We knew that it would take another twelve months for us to have the product at the hospitals so we created a whole campaign around it, with an important launch meeting including the best Doctors of our market attending this big event. The way we marketed it: this was not something that the manufacturer did for us, it was “SOMETHING WE ACHIEVED TOGETHER.”

At that moment our market share was 35% percent (the highest one between the competitors) and after this we achieved peaks of 50% for single chamber devices. Our manufacturer made several million dollars by getting sales of these devices in the whole region of South America. All these thanks to our request for different features -which already existed in other versions- but applied to our market’s main products. Our own distributor company also took advantage of this in the territories we served.

So, this is another example about the market expansion, business development, and commercial strategy side of an important business deal that I have worked on. Sometimes these opportunities are right in front of your eyes but you may ignore them if you are not alert. This is why it is important to have that extra knowledge, instinct, and talent, so that you can work to develop The Art of “Seeing”.

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