Commercial Insight and Continuous Learning: Evolving How Customers Engage with Midmark

In my 25 years with Midmark, I've had seven different roles, covering all three of our markets—medical, dental and animal health. These roles have included Sales Representative, Senior Director of Animal Health, Vice President of Medical Sales and Vice President of Global Sales.

That experience has given me a unique perspective on and understanding of how our customers engage with Midmark across our three markets and various customer-facing teams.

This is really helpful in my current position as Chief Commercial Officer as I continue to act on our initiative to improve commercial execution within Midmark. While the work is ongoing, we have made significant progress as a company in transforming Midmark into a united commercial organization focusing on consistent customer engagement.

This ongoing initiative has always come down to one very important question: How effective are we in engaging our customers in their learning journey?

Customer engagement is now a team sport. It's no longer enough to align your sales and marketing teams in how they engage with customers. You must also ensure all customer-facing teams, including customer experience, customer service, technical support, education, delivery and installation teams, are aligned around a unified, cohesive and consistent customer experience.

And that's what we are accomplishing at Midmark. During the past several years, there has been a concerted and deliberate effort to shift our go-to-market strategy. This has included looking at how we nurture and engage our customers, developing an internal understanding of what we do well, and identifying opportunities for growth and competitive advantage.

As an organization, we have embraced numerous methodologies around continuous improvement. We have created an education program led by professional clinical educators that ensures Midmark Teammates better understand the patient and provider experience and how our #healthcare customers can use specific equipment and technologies to enhance the quality of care. 

Three essential commercial imperatives have supported this effort to improve our commercial execution:

1.     Customer Enablement—We build confidence by simplifying the complex and providing a coordinated and evolving end-to-end customer journey process that takes our customers from design, delivery, installation, training and support.     

2.     Digital Transformation—Midmark continues to leverage the trusted network our commercial teams have built while accelerating the development of our digital value stream platforms that link to how our customers want to explore, learn and engage through our go-to-market channel.    

3.     Commercializing Innovation—Midmark is committed to delivering research-driven, continuous-value solutions that are uniquely differentiated to help our customers augment their workflow or solve unmet clinical needs.

We understand that while a customer might want to purchase a product, they do not want to be sold to. They want to have a conversation. They want to learn and be informed. They want us to listen and understand their challenge and what they are trying to achieve.

We address this in various ways to ensure we are engaging with our customers consistently, when, where and how they want to have that engagement in their buying journey. This includes:

·       End-to-end continuous engagement with our entire commercial team through an orchestrated process. We have clinical, design, sales and marketing delivery, installation and technical support expertise working together to engage with customers during their journey. These teams understand their roles and responsibilities, as well as the customer. They work peer-to-peer, with the sales team often facilitating where and how these different levels of expertise are brought in and engage with the customer.

·       A culture of learning that is based on our internal methodologies around continuous improvement. Our clinical training program focuses on helping customers understand how best to integrate our offerings into their facilities and workflows to ensure a better care experience and better patient outcomes. We create and deliver content in a way that intersects how customers are learning. Midmark is also going through a digital transformation to ensure data analytics is key to our customers' continuous learning and improvement. 

·       Commercial insights that teach healthcare customers something new about their business. We develop these insights by combining information, such as facts, data industry trends, experiences and observations with customer needs, like enhancing workflows or quality care provided. Before talking to customers about products, features and pricing, we work down a learning path together to understand what they are trying to solve. We then can triangulate our products, technologies and services to allow them to comprehend how their issue is being addressed and their goal will be achieved.

This ongoing evolution of our commercial execution hasn't been easy. But I've seen the success of our efforts first-hand. It has really galvanized our teammates around what we want to accomplish. We are making a difference with our customers and within the point-of-care environment. Our customers recognize and appreciate how we engage with them, and many view us as a long-term, trusted partner.

It truly is a representation of Midmark's #culture of caring for our teammates, customers and communities. While we're working on challenging ourselves, we're all bonded by this culture and the singular goal of helping our healthcare customers achieve their goals and deliver quality care.

To learn more about Midmark, visit midmark.com or midmark.com/careers.