Salesforce CPQ for Medical Manufacturers
Medical equipment manufacturing sales is a tooth and nail business. What we often hear from our clients is the need to be flexible when it comes to pricing. That translates to the ability to support different pricing strategies for different buying groups.
Recently, we delivered a transformative pricing project with a global medical equipment manufacturer. There were three key components to this transformation project:
- Agility
- Transparency
- Workforce enablement
The overall challenge was simplifying the processes involved in delivering quotes to clients. The legacy process required coordination across multiple teams and systems. Getting a simple quote to the client required coordinations between three different teams using multiple systems.
Our objective was to consolidate these disparate processes under one roof: Salesforce CPQ. The aim was to not just streamline operations but to empower Sales and Marketing with self-service pricing capabilities.
Given that medical manufacturers operate in a highly regulated market, it can take years—from initial concept—to putting out a saleable product. Therefore, go-to-market pricing strategies are often kept simple using a combination of cost- and reference-based pricing.
After the product is launched, the next big game is the ‘buying group’. The top three buying groups in the industry are group purchasing organizations (GPOs), aggregation groups (Agg Groups) and integrated delivery networks (IDNs—often also referred to as health systems). The size and volume of business these groups deal with often varies geographically. For instance GPOs are large, powerful groups in the US, but not so in Canada.
Here is an example of how a hospital is aligned to an IDN, GPO and Agg Group:
Salesforce’ CPQ offers a wide array of pricing-related functionalities out of the box. Examples include product and pricing rules, product bundling, and so on. At N28, the art and science of configuring Salesforce CPQ for simple quoting has been done and dusted many times over for various clients.
The complexity in this instance was due to the intricate web of buying groups and their overlapping pricing structures. A single hospital was accessing pricing from the IDN it belonged to and also from all the GPOs and aggregation groups it was associated with.
The N28 team implemented a tailored Salesforce CPQ system that enabled multiple tiers of pricing access for a single SKU. This includes:
- Tiered pricing for influential buying groups
- Bundled packages for value-based pricing, and…
- Support for distributor/reseller models.
Here is a custom pricing access view component we developed to simplify the complexity of the underlying business model.
N28 equips medical manufacturers with the tools to master the complexities of pricing strategies. Our expertise in Salesforce CPQ implementation ensures that clients can seamlessly adapt to the diverse demands of various buying groups while optimizing internal processes. The result? Enhanced efficiency and profitability in an ever-evolving and competitive market landscape.
