A quick guide to selling into community care channels
If you’re considering starting or progressing your career in medical device sales, you may find that you’re well suited to selling to community care providers. Here’s a quick guide on what you can expect!
What is community care?
Community care aims to provide long-term care in the community rather than in hospitals and other institutions, where you find secondary and acute care providers. There is a general focus for these care providers on the elderly, disabled, and those with mental health issues.
How are products sold into these markets?
As the products in this market vary hugely (from occupational therapy through to stoma solutions) building strong endorsements from community-based nursing teams is hugely important. In this sector, sales professionals have more face to face contact with patients too – you’ve got to get them buying into your product as well as healthcare professionals.
This is where these roles are aligned to salespeople with clinical background, as they are more likely to have experience engaging with patients in a medical setting. If you’ve got more of a pure sales background, you might be interested in finding out more about primary care channels here.
What does it take to sell products in these markets?
A lot of the community care clinical areas and their choices of product are sensitive and personal to the patient, so sales professionals need to be as comfortable conversing with patients as they are healthcare professionals.
Trained nurses/clinical specialists are often utilised in sales roles to sell to community nurses who have the power to decide what to buy. The knowledge that clinical specialists in sales roles have lends itself to success selling as they may find it easier to engage with clinical staff than those with a pure sales background.
To find out more about how your background can lend itself to a career in medical sales, click here.
Are there any challenges in these markets?
Sometimes it’s not so simple for these community nurses. Even if they want to buy one of your products because it’s the best thing for their patients, their hands may well be tied due to cost. This is why relationship management and gaining endorsements is so important to drive through sales.
Giving this kind of power to community groups has been a great opportunity for Meditech firms to benefit from and capitalise on their regional trust relationships.
If you’d like to get in touch about your career in medical device sales, contact us on [email protected]