The process
The medical device sales process, in seven stages
revenue - amplified
Search this and you get a seven-year-old post and a lot of CRM vendors describing their software. Nobody publishes the actual process. This is ours, stage by stage, including the two stages most teams do not run at all.
The situation
What we get called about
Six things commercial leaders in this vertical describe. Most companies have three of them and think they have one.
The champion goes quiet
Clinical said yes. Nobody mapped who else had to, and the deal is now sitting in a committee you were never in the room with.
Discovery is a demonstration
The one meeting available got spent on features, so nothing was learned that could be used to build a business case.
No two reps run the same play
Which makes coaching a matter of opinion and the forecast a matter of hope.
The business case is clinical only
Finance is being asked to approve an outcome expressed in specifications.
Price becomes the only conversation
Because no other difference was ever established.
The win is treated as the end
The contract was signed and the product is sitting in a cupboard.
The mechanism
Why a funnel is the wrong shape for this
This is the part that is ours. Not a list of frameworks, but which one closes which gap, and why.
The revenue arrives after the signature
Sixty-eight percent of medical device companies take 70% or more of annual revenue through contracts, and every single respondent in that study said they leave money on the table because of how those contracts get managed. On-contract opportunities close materially faster than off-contract ones.
A funnel ends at the close, so training built on a funnel ends there too. The Bowtie Funnel does not. Stages six and seven below are the right-hand side, and they are the stages almost nobody runs deliberately.
AcuityMD, 2024 Contracts Survey Report, more than 150 medtech professionals at director level or above, September 2024.
Capability is the growth variable
Medtech companies with advanced commercial capabilities achieved a compound growth rate 1.4 times higher than companies with average commercial capabilities.
Which is the argument for a process at all. A named, repeatable sequence is what makes capability something you can coach and inspect rather than something individual reps happen to have.
McKinsey & Company, Commercial capabilities: A predictor of growth for medtech companies, June 2024, research with more than 60 medtech companies.
The seven stages
From territory plan to the reorder
Stages six and seven are the right-hand side of the bowtie. They are the ones almost nobody runs deliberately, and they are where most of the revenue is.
Territory and target
Which accounts, which service lines, and which of them can actually buy this year. Opportunity planning before activity.
Clinical discovery
The F.I.N.D. Interview System® in the one meeting you get. Facts, Important business objectives, Needs, Dreams, from the clinician who will use it.
Credibility and trust
The Four Elements of Trust, read through Everything DiSC®, because the surgeon and the supply chain director need two different conversations.
Map the committee
Three-Wide-Three-High across clinical, financial and IT. This is the stage that decides whether stage five has an audience.
The outcome case
OBJECTIVELens®. One view of objectives, roadblocks and fit, with hard cost, soft cost and opportunity cost separated so each seat sees its own number.
Commitment and objections
LAER, and gaining commitment as the result of the previous five stages rather than a closing technique applied at the end.
Adoption and expansion
The right side of the bowtie. Usage, in-service, reorder and the next service line. This is where the contract becomes revenue.
The proof
What changes, and how you will know
Six problems at the top of this page, six things we expect to move. Every one of them is measured from the A.I.M. baseline, not from a feeling in month six.
Measured
Discovery quality
A rep can state the customer's business objective, not just the clinical need, on every open opportunity.
Measured
Committee coverage
Named contacts across clinical, financial and IT on every deal over your threshold, before the proposal, not after the stall.
Measured
Stage conversion
Movement at the specific stage your baseline showed deals dying at, rather than a flat "close rate" that hides where the loss happens.
Measured
Forecast reliability
The gap between forecast and actual narrows, because every rep is describing the same stages.
Measured
Coaching consistency
Managers coach against the method rather than against personal preference, so feedback travels between regions.
Measured
Revenue after the win
Adoption, reorder and expansion tracked as a stage, because for most device businesses that is where the revenue actually is.
How to compare
Three things get called healthcare sales training
Search the term and you will meet all three. They are not competitors with each other, because they are not sold to the same person. Only one of them is accountable for your number.
Option one
A credential for a person
Sold to an individual who wants to get hired in the industry, priced publicly, from a self-study manual and an exam up to a ten-week programme. Genuinely useful, and aimed at a different buyer than you.
Option two
A module for a department
Sold into learning and development as a catalogue or a platform subscription. Real capability, delivered and then handed back. Almost none of them publish a price.
What this is
A system you are accountable to
One partner who trains the reps, runs the management cadence, and recruits what is missing, on one methodology measured against one baseline number. If the number is not moving, it is still our problem.
Not the fit?
Where to go instead
If the description above is not quite your situation, one of these probably is.
Not sure which of these your team needs first? Start with a baseline of what your reps are actually doing in the room.
One partner
The training is not the product. The number is
Sixty-five percent of healthcare professional engagements lack sales and marketing synchronisation, and 44% of key opinion leaders perceive a lack of coordination between the clinical, medical and sales teams calling on them. That is a system problem wearing a training problem's clothes.
When the reps, the managers, the hiring profile and the measurement all run on one methodology, the customer stops meeting four different companies wearing the same badge.
- ✓One methodology from assessment through to expansion
- ✓The people who train your team are the people who run the cadence
- ✓The hiring profile comes from the same behavioral model as the training
- ✓One baseline number, and we are still on it in month twelve
Veeva Systems, Veeva Pulse Field Trends Report, 4Q24 data, published February 2025.
Start with the baseline
See which stage your deals actually die at
The A.I.M. Assessment reads your pipeline against these seven stages and shows you where deals stall. For most device teams it is stage four, and almost nobody is running stage seven.
Get your A.I.M. Assessment
A short read on where your revenue is leaking. No pitch required.
Run a process, not seven different ones
The medical device sales process
The seven stages above are teachable, coachable and inspectable, which is the whole point of writing them down. Start with the assessment and find out which of them your team is actually running.
