However, data on the Latin American hospital market isn’t so easy to organize—as you likely have noticed. There are more than 20,000 hospitals in at least 17 markets, if not more. Each market has its own idiosyncrasies and available resource. While one market could have a richly detailed list of clients and potential clients, another could very sparse information. More importantly, your data sources may well be scattered, so not everything is neatly organized in your CRM so your sales team can easily access and use strategic data.

Next-Level CRM

Fortunately, there are strategic steps that can help you strengthen your CRM and thus benefit your sales efforts powerfully.

Compare. To see how strong your CRM system actually is, you need to compare it to a robust dataset for the Latin American hospitals that are your clients. This will allow you to see the holes and blind spots.

ID them. When running this comparison, you would need to identify a unique “bridge” ID to every record identified in both your CRM and this second dataset. This will allow you to track and update these institutions over time.

Work in. The broad comparison and identification will allow your sales team to discover new accounts, which you can then drop into your CRM.

One and done. The end result is that this process will allow you to house all of your CRM data for all markets in one system—no more scattering. This will make for a smoother, more efficient sales operation.

How Do We Know This Will Work?
Well, we’ve already done this for several clients. They used HospiScope to cross-check their CRM systems and expand them, creating one integrated base that’s powered by detailed, reliable data.

Contact us to find out how we can help you organize your CRM system and maximize your sales of medical devices and equipment in Latin America.

The problem with achieving this in Latin America is the lack of reliable information that gives you a picture of the market’s demand. Many companies try to explore these opportunities with the tried-and-true method they have available: person-to-person outreach from their sales teams. This works, without a doubt, but it’s also limited.

Fortunately, there is a way to scale up your efforts to understand the market demand for your product—and you may find the results to be surprising. Here are some ideas to do that.

Develop a profile. In the same way that marketers develop profiles of their target clients, a medical device manufacturer can use their existing data to build profiles of their best clients for their particular product.

Research new hospitals with your desired profile. With the proper dataset of Latin American hospitals, you can search out hospitals that fit the criteria that also characterize your best clients.

Don’t stop with just hospitals. With your developed criteria, it could be helpful to think about other types of medical facilities that could use your product. For example, a manufacturer of imaging equipment would naturally want to target imaging and diagnostic centers. Some of these may already be clients but others may be under the radar, especially in Latin America, where data on such facilities can be scarce or underreported. Your business intelligence team or a reliable research partner can fill those gaps and find more of these imaging or diagnostic centers—many of which could very well have a strong need for your product. The same applies to other types of products: it’s a question of identifying other types of medical institutions that could need your products and compile the pertinent data points about them.

Next Steps
Contact us to explore how our HospiScope database and custom research capabilities can help you define new secondary markets for your products and give you a fuller picture of the market demand for your product.

This can often pose quandaries for device companies with big plans. Sure, the day-to-day sales strategy for lower-end medical devices is fairly straightforward. But if you have something new, expensive or revolutionary (or all three), you may face challenges in developing an effective sales strategy.

Defining Market Potential for Medical Equipment/Devices in Latin America

Luckily, there are still methods available for getting the data you need for more precise market sizing for innovative but expensive medical devices or equipment in Latin America. Check out the following tips to get started.

Start with “similars.” Develop a list of hospitals that already possess similar equipment to the product you plan to launch, so as to develop a base list.

Analyze attributes. This is trickier, but essential. You’d want to identify the unique characteristics of hospitals that have similar types of equipment. For this you’d need clean data on many hospitals, and then have your team apply linear regression analysis to statistically identify these characteristics.

Widen the net. With unique characteristics established for companies with similar equipment, you’d then have to go further and identify hospitals in Latin America that share these characteristics but DO NOT possess similar equipment: these would be good potential customers.

Discover the drivers. With these potential clients, you need to understand their acquisition drivers—what makes them purchase new equipment. So either your business intelligence team or an experienced research partner would have to talk to a representative amount of these potential clients to understand what leads them to purchase new equipment, especially more leading-edge equipment.

Build a target list. Once you’ve gathered the data and analyzed it strategically, you then have a list of potential clients with strong statistical propensity for acquiring the type of equipment you’re launching—and you also know the motivating factors that leads them to buy. With this, you now can develop a solid, market-based launch strategy for your product and improve your chances of closing.

Why This Approach Is Needed

This data-driven approach may be very different from what you’re used to doing, and in fact, this isn’t very common among companies selling medical devices/equipment in Latin America. More often, companies rely on their sales teams’ personal relationships to drive business. This is fine—but as we noted earlier, Latin America’s medical device and equipment market is both promising and challenging. So what has always worked may not work well now as budgets become tighter and competition strengthens. Business intelligence can provide a crucial edge to make the difference to close the sale. We know this because we’ve directly helped medical device manufacturers successfully drive new business with this intelligence-centered approach.

Contact us to find out more about our HospiScope data and how our business intelligence can help you with market assessments, identifying new clients and growing your sales significantly.

The North America region has the highest share in the market, with the United States being the major contributor. However, markets such as the Asia- Pacific are promising to exhibit the fastest growth in the forecast period. Factors such as a large patient base and increasing investments in healthcare sectors in countries like China and Japan are proving favorable for the market growth. Despite the increasing competition, the neurostimulation devices market will continue to be dominated by North America owing to factors such as continual support and interest of global investors thanks to the advances in technology and the government’s increased focus on improving patient safety and procedure efficiency by using neurostimulation devices.

The major players in the market include St Jude Medical, Medtronic, Boston Scientific, Aleva Neurotherapeutics, Cogentix Medical, Depuy Synthes Companies, Dr. Langer Medical GMBH, EBS Technologies, Intrapace, Neurological Surgery PC, Neuronetics, Nevro, and the Magstim Company.