Most MedTech products that stall aren't let down by the technology. So what is going wrong, and how do you grow in the markets most companies file under "rest of the world"?
Rafael de Matos Leite has spent 16 years building and turning around businesses at Johnson & Johnson, Philips and BD, running P&Ls of more than $150 million across over 50 markets in Europe, the Middle East and Latin America.
“I always tell my team that I'll give you one million dollars for a great plan, but ten million dollars for a decent execution.”
Rafael de Matos Leite
In this episode of the GS MedTech Podcast, Damé Medarski asks Rafael how a BD business that had missed its budget seven years in a row finished first across EMEA a year later, with the same team and the same product. We also get into how to pick your first markets abroad and when a distributor makes more sense than your own team.
You’ll also hear how he stops a sales team drifting back to the easy deals, and what he'd look at first if a board gave him one week inside a stalled company. Press play above to watch, or listen on Spotify.
Key takeaways
- Check whether customers buy again. If they reorder and recommend the product, the problem is commercial. If they buy once and never come back, more salespeople won't fix it.
- Change the operating rhythm first, leave the team alone. A monthly review with every country on the same KPIs cut backorders at one BD business from $1.5M to $200K. That year it closed almost $1M above budget.
- Small teams should go narrow. In Spain, he put most of his resources into 15 Madrid hospitals for a year. Fifteen tenders were published, when Spain had never seen more than two a year, and his team won nine.
- Market size isn't the first filter. Rafael starts with who pays, then the regulatory and evidence bar, then whether you can actually reach customers, then how open local clinicians are to new technology.
- Build the evidence the payer needs. For a BD relaunch, he put over $2M of a $5.5M budget into local clinical evidence and health economics. A product with almost no sales outside the US for five years started selling in four new countries.
Got the strategy but not the team to run it? As Rafael says, most companies fail on execution, not planning. Guided Solutions helps MedTech companies hire the commercial leaders who can deliver it market by market. Get in touch.
