Prospecting and Selling in the Age of Constant Distraction: An Executive Roundtable Discussion with Life Sciences Leaders
Moderated by Colleen Burns, Fractional Chief Marketing & Growth Officer | CBM Group
In an era defined by constant distraction, the battle for a prospect’s attention is fiercer than ever. Faster innovation cycles, more product launches, and the ubiquity of smart devices create an extremely noisy environment that swallows even the best pitches whole. You aren’t just battling your competitors: you’re battling text, email, social media, and a litany of daily dopamine hits engineered to capture your prospect’s attention.
Rising above the noise is challenging but rewarding. In a sea of distraction, the pitch that stands out will shine like a pearl. Building a sophisticated commercial engine – one that incorporates traditional sales and marketing best practices, modern selling technology, and rigorous data analysis – is the best way to shrine bright and win big. But what does that entail?
To explore the formula behind winning commercial vehicles, we selected a panel of senior executives driving success at pharmaceutical, medical device, and life sciences technology companies. Together, we discussed the strategies, tools, and frameworks needed to successfully prospect, nurture leads, and close deals in the age of constant distraction.
Here are their insights.
Our panel of experts:
Erin Mistry, EVP and Chief Commercial Officer, CorMedix
Steve Paul, Chief Commercial Officer, Vertos Medical, now a Stryker company *
Mark Karch, Former Chief Commercial Officer and Current Commercial Advisor, Datavant
* On 10/1/24, Stryker announced that it completed the acquisition of Vertos Medical Inc., a leader in interventional pain management solutions for chronic lower back pain caused by lumbar spinal stenosis.
Effective messaging and communication are considered the pillars of productive prospecting. What constitutes an effective message to a physician, patient, or health network?
Erin Mistry: In our experience, building credibility into your messaging is key. There are several ways to do that. Including specific data points demonstrating your value, for example, is crucial. If you can quickly show how your product or service helps the prospect generate business, retain employees, or streamline operations, you’re more likely to get (and keep) their attention. Another way to build credibility is to reference peers, networks, or organizations operating in the prospect’s ecosystem. This can include influencers, thought leaders, or credible publications. If you know where they turn for information, you can use that to build a bridge and meet them where they already are.
Steve Paul: When Vertos set out to establish a new market with a novel therapy, our salespeople needed to choose their targets with remarkable precision. To Erin’s point, we quickly learned that our effective messages capitalized on an existing connection, such as a physician referral or area of academic interest. Identifying the links between a prospect, their colleagues, activity at society meetings, and other tangibles helped our salespeople demonstrate a better understanding of their physician and practice’s goals and motivations, nurturing new customers and creating true brand advocates over time.
Mark Karch: Today, effective messaging is challenging. We are all facing a constant barrage of information across a staggering array of digital and physical mediums. To cut through the noise and make a meaningful connection, the prospect's problem or opportunity must be communicated in detail. Otherwise, it won’t be understood. A clear message map is required to effectively articulate the sentiment your prospect needs to hear. Then, you rigorously test your message – over and over – to identify and amplify points that resonate. Continuous improvement is essential.
An effective message is crucial, but some recipients are more valuable than others. How important is Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) development for your commercial team?
Mark Karch: Developing a well-defined Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is fundamental to commercial success and efficient resource allocation. While the total market may be large, breaking it down into specific segments helps teams focus their efforts where they're most likely to succeed. The ICP serves as the foundation for every aspect of the commercial strategy - from product development and packaging to marketing and sales. By understanding exactly who your ideal customer is, teams can tailor their entire approach to resonate with these high-value targets, leading to better conversion rates and stronger customer relationships.
Erin Mistry: Agreed. You must be able to prioritize customers who will generate the best ROI for your service or product, and a strong ICP is the fundamental way to do that. Understanding how your offering will impact a specific, high-value customer segment is key for converting early adopters and strengthening both your brand and business.
Steve Paul: Establishing a meaningful and accurate ICP is necessary for proper segmentation, targeting, and resource deployment, all of which support your broader sales strategy. For example, as Vertos began to scale our commercial effort and salesforce expansion, the interest level from prospective physicians was extremely high on paper. Taking the time to properly vet a practice’s ability to onboard a new therapy – from initial training, working with staff to change practice patterns, and managing time and effort needed to implement it – generated key learnings that helped us develop an accurate ICP and align effort to execution.
You have your story and target audience. Now: how do you reach them? In a world of myriad mediums and dwindling attention spans, which channels work best?
Steve Paul: LinkedIn. Unsurprisingly, the world’s most popular digital networking site has become an extremely effective platform for prospecting, outreach, follow-up, and dialogue that supports or directly activates sales conversion. LinkedIn provides unmatched value compared to other channels and mediums, in our experience. This could reflect the novel, disruptive nature of our product, but in my opinion, the channel has inherent strengths than any sales team should try to take advantage of.
Mark Karch: In today's digital landscape, LinkedIn has certainly proven to be particularly effective for reaching professional audiences with complex solutions. The platform's business-focused environment makes it ideal for sharing thought leadership content that demonstrates expertise and builds credibility. While multiple communication channels exist, LinkedIn's ability to target specific industries, roles, and decision-makers makes it especially valuable for B2B communications. The key is to focus on providing genuine insights rather than pure promotional content, which helps establish authority and engage potential customers in meaningful discussions.
Erin Mistry: For us, productive sales conversations always follow strategic marketing, typically executed using an omnichannel approach. LinkedIn is a valuable tool, but broader initiatives, including traditional advertising and public relations efforts, have proven effective at influencing customer perceptions and shaping a market-level narrative. This lays the groundwork for personalized email outreach, allowing us to tap a proverbial pump that has already been primed. When a prospect has absorbed your information via social or other public channels, the direct conversations are more natural and productive.
To that point, marketing must ultimately support sales, and vice versa. How do you use marketing as a prospecting enabler, and why is it important?
Erin Mistry: First, through targeted market research, we identify our customer segments and understand their specific needs using surveys, interviews, and focus groups. This is used to create educational content in the form of webinars, workshops, white papers, case studies, and more. These assets allow us to inform and intrigue prospects prior to first touch. We then use specific marketing analytics – such as share of voice (SOV), brand recognition, and a wide range of engagement metrics – to benchmark our overall brand awareness against actual script pull-through, helping us fine-tune and optimize our approach.
Steve Paul: The strategic alignment between marketing and sales teams creates powerful momentum for both new customer acquisition and existing account expansion. A well-executed marketing campaign can significantly amplify sales efforts by creating awareness and engagement across multiple channels. For example, at Vertos, our "Elevate Campaign" demonstrates how a comprehensive marketing strategy can effectively reach multiple stakeholders - from physicians and their staff to potential patients. This integrated approach has successfully increased awareness of the mild® procedure as an alternative treatment for lumbar spinal stenosis, ultimately supporting sales objectives by educating all key decision-makers in the healthcare journey.
On that note, what advice do you have for companies that are choosing or replacing their customer relationship management (CRM) system?
Erin Mistry: Ultimately, you should choose a CRM that provides easy customization for both front-end and back-end reports, and that can provide you with the right type of support for the least amount of spend. Different businesses have different needs. Large systems that require multiple levels of customization, time, and resources may not be right sized for your business. At one company, for example, we moved from a large CRM to a smaller one with great support, easy-to-use interfaces, and other valuable features for essentially a third of the cost.
Mark Karch: HubSpot has been an incredible tool for the commercial team at Datavant. We harness its content repository and customer relationship management (CRM) functions to both deliver meaningful content quickly and provision that content to a new prospect via landing page. We’re all in on HubSpot and its capabilities.
Steve Paul: We found great and seamless incorporation of Salesforce with Tableau as our core CRM and Sales reporting system. By investing in a platform that was incredibly scalable and could meet our needs at all levels of increasing revenue and field headcount, we were able to avoid having to constantly tinker and relaunch sales tools and reporting systems. The key is to balance reporting and data features with field selling time; asking your salesforce to spend too much time on CRM and not enough time in the trenches is a recipe for lost value.
Looking at technology more broadly, are you successfully incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) in the sales process? If so, how?
Erin Mistry: Our team is looking at ways to use AI as a commercial facilitator, but our initial area of interest aligns more closely to marketing. We plan to use AI to accelerate and refine community and omnichannel digital campaigns, in combination with DTC tactics using social media. We also see potential utility when it comes to filling gaps in market data, especially at the start of a product launch, when there are more unknowns.
Mark Karch: At a business level, I wouldn’t say that we are taking full advantage of AI today. The technology holds a lot of potential but needs to be implemented carefully and responsibly at an organizational level. We are evaluating AI-powered offerings like Chilipiper and Claygency but have yet to commit. That said, some of our more tech-savvy reps are using certain tools to help with prospecting and crafting email responses.
In a time where competition is loud and resources are precious, should the Sales Development Representative (SDR) role be outsourced?
Mark Karch: Over the years, Datavant has had an internal SDR team that has expanded and contracted based on our needs and growth stage. Generally, I believe that the stage your company is in, as well as the maturity of your product offering, should drive the “internal vs external” SDR decision. I’ve personally found it to be a mistake to outsource this core function in very early-stage companies where messaging is still evolving.
Erin Mistry: If a highly specialized team is necessary for a particular customer segment, or if there are significant nuances related to reimbursement or providers, it makes sense to consider bringing that expertise in-house. If you operate in a specialized market with various reimbursement mechanisms across different care settings, for instance, ensuring continuity of care between inpatient and outpatient services must be a priority. Bringing on account managers who can empathize at the customer level and effectively communicate your value proposition across these segments is important.
Can you describe a time when mentorship played a crucial part in your – or your sales team’s – success?
Steve Paul: Absolutely. Fostering an environment where team members are encouraged to seek active coaching, outside perspectives, and engagement with subject matter experts (SMEs) pays huge dividends. This is especially true when you’re looking at high performers who are always seeking out new experiences and learning opportunities. Giving them these opportunities and feeding their thirst for knowledge provides some of the best return on investment.
Erin Mistry: Mentorship is crucial for teaching members of your sales team how to both perform, and eventually, lead. We offer employees the opportunity to speak on a topic of interest and demonstrate thought leadership among their peers. This helps them build confidence and perform at the highest level possible. We also help them network with industry experts and develop relationships that are professionally and personally rewarding.
If you could only give one piece of advice to a CEO who is looking to Sales to find new, high-value prospects, what would it be?
Steve Paul: This is such a broad question that I would really need to split my advice into one of two camps and go from there. For example, the advice in a mature "Market Capture" model would be very different from a "Market Creation" or disruptive model. If you are trying to take market share, that playbook and tools are very different versus creating a new therapeutic category and defining high-value targets accordingly.
Erin Mistry: Create a culture that focuses on creating opportunities to listen and understand your prospect’s business…not a culture based around “get out and sell,” but one based around “get out and listen.” Your ideal sales representative should say: “tell me what's going on with your business and let me see if I can help you.” Create a culture of listeners and problem solvers, not a traditional sales team. Then, ensure you have the practices in place to support that mindset.
Mark Karch: I always like to start with the obvious: ask your happy customers for leads or where you should go to get leads. Ask them: "Who else should we be speaking with about this?" or "Do you think it would be beneficial for us to attend this particular event?" This can be handled by either the salesperson or executive that "owns" the relationship, or as part of a customer satisfaction survey. That said, the personal touch is always better.
Conclusion
In today’s hyperconnected world, attention has become the scarcest and most valuable resource. Our panel of commercial leaders has illuminated several crucial strategies for breaking through the noise and building meaningful business relationships:
Message with Purpose: Effective communication must be credible, data-driven, and precisely targeted.
Know Your Ideal Customer: A well-defined Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is non-negotiable.
Choose Channels Strategically: While LinkedIn has emerged as a powerhouse platform for B2B engagement, an omnichannel approach is needed.
Align Sales and Marketing: The modern commercial engine requires seamless integration between marketing and sales efforts.
Embrace Technology Thoughtfully: From CRM systems to AI tools, technology should enable rather than obstruct the human elements of selling.
As we look ahead, the organizations that will thrive are those that can masterfully blend technical capabilities with authentic human connection. In an age where attention is increasingly fragmented, the ability to rise above the noise – not with volume, but with value – will separate the exceptional from the ordinary.
Meet Our Panel of Experts
Colleen Burns is an accomplished Executive Commercial Leader with over 25 years of experience in Healthcare and Technology. Holding a BA from the University of Notre Dame and a Masters in Organizational Psychology from Columbia University, Colleen has successfully driven growth and market penetration for life sciences, medical devices, diagnostics, and healthcare technology organizations of all sizes. She excels in building scalable marketing and business development infrastructures, leading strategic initiatives, and mentoring teams. Colleen is the founder of CBM Group (www.cbmgrp.com) and works for multiple medical and healthcare technology companies concurrently as a Fractional Chief Marketing & Growth Officer.
Mark Karch is Former Chief Commercial Officer and Current Commercial Advisor, Datavant, a leader in health data logistics making the world's health data more secure, accessible, and usable. Throughout his career, Mark has held commercial leadership positions in both healthcare data and technology. At IQVIA, he led SaaS technology sales, joining IQVIA through the acquisition of Appature, where he led the company's commercial launch and served as EVP of Commercialization. Prior to that, Mark served as Executive Vice President of the pharmaceutical business at Allscripts. He has a BA from Penn State and MS in Health and Business from American University.
Erin Mistry has over 15 years of industry experience at the executive level from consulting to in-house executive management. She is currently serving as EVP and Chief Commercial Officer at CorMedix, a medical device company focused on developing and commercializing therapeutic products for life-threatening diseases and conditions. Prior to joining CorMedix, Erin was Vice President of Market Access at Intarcia Therapeutics responsible for pricing, coverage, access, real world evidence (RWE) and channel strategy for a competitive product in Type 2 Diabetes and was Senior Managing Director at Syneos Health where she was responsible for the global P&L of the Value Access Practice. Erin holds an undergraduate and Masters degree in Biomechanical Engineering from North Carolina State University.
Steve Paul has more than 25 years of successful commercial execution in the medical device field. He has deep expertise in setting strategic vision and leading sales teams to achieve results and has worked for companies such as Boston Scientific, Masimo and served as Vice President of Sales and Commercial Operations for Breg, a major manufacturer and distributor of orthopedic devices. He served as Chief Commercial Officer at Vertos Medical, who developed the mild procedure for patients suffering from Lumbar Spinal Stenosis, which was acquired by Stryker in September. Steve has his BA in Political Science from UC Santa Barbara.
Comments