A small direct marketer of high tech medical instruments hopes a new online device will help it break open more markets and reduce selling costs.
Medwave, which manufactures and markets such medical supplies as wrist-based blood pressure gauges, is banking that a new Web-based system will help it boost sales by at least 10% and possibly reduce its $150,000 annual cost for direct sales visits, says Rich Niemczyk vice president of support services for the Danvers, MA firm.
Niemczyk says Medwave chose the Advisor system from Kaon Interactive because it felt the system might make it easier for Medwave’s international distributors to get a product demonstration without the company necessarily having to send a sales person on a long and expensive sales trip. He notes that Medwave felt such a high tech product as Primo warranted a high-tech marketing tool.
In addition to having the system on its Web site http://www.medwave.com, Medwave will use Advisor, which relies heavily on PDF links to send product information with moving demonstrations directly into online newsletters for its prospects and customers. Advisor can also replicate the program on compact discs that Medwave would give out at trade shows.
Niemczyk thinks Advisor could give Medwave an advantage over the competition.
Medwave’s new product, Primo, replaces the traditional blood pressure cuff and is being sold to doctors and nurses for use in offices and hospitals. Specifically, Primo is intended for use on adult patients with wrist circumferences ranging from 11 to 22 centimeters, and reportedly makes it easier to get blood pressure readings from historically difficult patients such as the morbidly obese, those with cardiac arrhythmias and geriatric patients. It sells for $1,000.
In general, the 15-year-old Medwave, which pulls in annual revenue of just under $1 million, gets response rates running between 5-8% to its lead generation mailings for existing products like the Vasetrax and Vasetrac, blood pressure monitoring devices that also work in the wrist. They each cost around $600.
Those mailings go out to directors of nursing and ultimately to directors of purchasing at nation’s 5,000 hospitals, says Niemczyk. Once a lead is qualified, Medwave begins the selling process, which last between 90 days and six months, depending on budget cycles.
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