The med surg industry has seen more than its fair share of change through the pandemic, putting Covid-19 recovery and the safety of frontline works above all else and leaving healthcare suppliers and manufacturers scrambling to adapt. Forecasting for future growth and benchmarking performance against market performance will be key priorities for Med Surg manufacturers successfully navigating the post-pandemic environment.
Overcoming business challenges in Med Surg post Covid-19
The past 18 months have been a tumultuous time to be in a position of executive leadership, sales management, or marketing in the Med Surg industry. The medical and surgical industry is vast, complex, and ever-changing under normal circumstances, but Med Surg leaders have also had to content with the added disruptions to product mixes, supply and demand models, and working environments.
Companies have been forced to throw forecasting goals and business plans out the window, and instead providing the products most important to fighting Covid-19 to help keep patients and frontlines workers safe.
Additionally, Med Surg leaders have been forced to rethink the way they deploy their sales and marketing resources. Evolving customer needs and traveling sales professionals being forced to work from home, sometimes for the first time in their careers, moved the ball from exceeding growth goals and daily sales updates to keeping customers and employees happy in a nearly impossible business environment.
As we emerge from the pandemic, leaders are asking key questions to ensure they not only overcome business challenges but thrive in the post-Covid-19 environment:
“How can I leverage essential data insights to make key business decisions with limited time and resources?”
“How will my organization assess the new post-Covid landscape, apply new performance dashboarding and measuring commercial execution?”
Ways to drive success with Benchmarking
With care settings returning to a “new normal,” now is the time for organizations to re-establish their benchmarks and prioritize the quickest path to improvement; evaluating sales execution, creating attainable growth goals, and benchmarking performance against the market to name a few.
In a poll conducted by Precision with 10 major manufacturers across the healthcare industry, each of them identified forecasting for future growth and benchmarking performance against market performance as an essential business need entering the back half of 2021.
To drive success with benchmarking, consider these tips:
1. Identify the right benchmarking tools & resources
Current benchmarking tools may be antiquated and primarily focused on performance monitoring rather than recommending and driving sustained improvements. Be able to drill into data to reveal the cause of benchmark failures and identify opportunities to make improvements. If resource constrained, find a trusted partner like Precision who understands the industry, and can analyze data and gleam insights for you.
2. Evaluate benchmarks against current market and industry factors
Refresh key strategic plans and growth goals based on the latest market trends. Evaluate quantitative data against industry peers and competitors to identify relevant changes to the landscape (ie. new players, global/regional variations, recovery timing) and to identify new opportunities (ie new products, mix changes, new consumer preferences).
3. Update performance benchmarking KPIs based on identified gaps
Re-establish key business metrics and practices extracting, collecting, and analyzing current data. Analyzing past performance trends against current data is a first step to identifying performance gaps. Don’t undervalue the data you have – leverage it to gleam insights or engage a data partner to help organize and analyze your data, to help with comparison models. Once performance gaps are identified, make informed decisions for improvement and continually stay updated on new available data insights.
Benchmarking, dashboards and KPIs are not new to the healthcare industry, but the industry as we knew it has changed. New goals, new gaps, new products, and a new competitive landscape among the many factors that must be re-evaluated for an organization to determine where to focus their improvement initiatives and sales & marketing efforts. Effective benchmarking provides a competitive edge to organizations, helping to adapt, grow and thrive through change. And if you are time or resource constrained like so many organizations are right now, a trusted partner with the tools, data expertise, and industry knowledge can help.
Precision is a leader in B2B market insights and channel sales analytics. We take great pride in being true partners with our clients, leveraging our rich B2B experience, unique data sources, and proprietary statistical models to help our clients solve complex business problems.
Want to learn more about how partnering with Precision can transform your business? Connect with us at info@precisioncorp.net or visit us at www.precisioncorp.net.
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