Pulmonx commercial team partners with MedScout to deliver access to life-changing technology
When Pulmonx sales leaders needed to increase awareness about their breakthrough medical device, they turned to MedScout to help identify the busiest COPD practices, bringing a new life-saving procedure to those who needed it most.
The FDA approved the Pulmonx Zephyr® Valve as a “breakthrough device” in 2018, and it has now been used to help thousands of patients with severe emphysema breathe better since then.
Studies show the Zephyr Valve helps patients to breathe easier, do more and enjoy a better quality of life compared to medication alone. Zephyr Valves are placed in a minimally invasive procedure that does not require cutting or incisions.
Initial challenges
As with any new medical technology, the biggest challenge on the commercial side is getting information about the treatment to the clinicians who manage the patients. The commercial team’s ability to identify and target physicians who treat patients with COPD was critical to the business.
Pulmonx wanted to answer simple questions: Which physicians and medical centers were treating a high volume of COPD patients? How could a small sales team optimize their time and efficiencies by finding the centers most likely to engage in a new treatment option?
While Pulmonx was on the cutting edge of medical innovation, limited and old prescribing data, manual entry across multiple systems, and hard-to-use spreadsheets hindered its market development. Spreadsheets often lacked crucial information, such as practice or physician details, that would help a sales rep prioritize their efforts and time. Infrequent updates kept data stale while doctors moved practices, treatment facilities offered new procedures, and medical organizations merged. Even when the information seemed helpful, the spreadsheets were not connected with any other systems Pulmonx used, such as Salesforce.
Inconsistent data use resulted. Some reps wrangled insights from it, but the data was not used to its potential. Instead, they indiscriminately visited all potential referring and treating centers in their territory. One experienced sales rep put it this way: “The old-school approach of scheduling lunches with physicians to determine their interest in a new procedure was always time-consuming and failure-prone. That approach is no longer an option.”
Meanwhile, sales and executive leadership felt like they were flying blind on key sales performance metrics. Without that information, coaching, forecasting, hiring, and creating a strategy for territory growth were all manual, tedious processes subject to personal bias and uninformed by data.
Commercial leadership sought common goals:
- A simple way to understand sales territories and target their efforts
- Current, reliable data
- A tool to organize mountains of complex information and find insights they could put into action daily
- Ease of use, so field teams could glean actionable understanding quickly and intuitively and put it to work immediately—with minimum training
- Straightforward integration with the broader processes and commercial systems already in place
Treatment Acceleration and Time Savings with Medscout
Pulmonx found the solution it sought in MedScout’s platform, which incorporates data from millions of physicians and tens of thousands of medical centers to generate insights on procedures, diagnoses, referrals, payments, hospital affiliations, and more. An intuitive interface provides information reps need, including detailed dossiers on target physicians and medical centers, the ability to query all that information instantly, and optimized route planning using the MedScout mobile app.
Initially, the platform sought to create growth in reps’ territories in two distinct ways:
- Locate providers who serve patients with chronic respiratory conditions. Such providers should be equipped to discuss the Zephyr Valve with those patients and need to know where to refer them for necessary testing.
- Find testing facilities able to run a series of tests (COPD workup, PFT testing, and high resolution CT) to select good candidates for the Zephyr Valve procedure.
During and after a swift rollout, Pulmonx sales personnel and leadership gave feedback to MedScout, further improving the platform. In a few short months, the MedScout team added new features and functionality, including:
- MedScout-CRM integration, so reps can easily sync physicians to Salesforce and other CRM platforms, eliminating time-consuming and error-riddled data entry
- Territory-level visualizations, to help reps focus their efforts and build more-effective sales plans
- Net new intelligence that shows the physicians active at a given hospital or medical center, making it easier for reps to capitalize on their previous gains within a facility or medical system
- Sales team alignment and reporting, which gives regional directors quick understanding of who on their team is doing well and who needs help
Ongoing success: Shorter sales cycles and better pipelines
Pulmonx’ use of MedScout has demonstrated significant benefits: 10,000+ new opportunities were identified in the platform, with 2500+ synced to Salesforce, 200+ new referring physicians activated, and 100+ new treating centers identified to date.
Reps strategically expanded the referral base within their territory through targeted queries and physician collaboration. For instance, MedScout could find providers or practices who often prescribe oxygen, submit pulmonary testing CPT® codes, or report ICD-10 diagnosis codes for COPD and emphysema. Using the MedScout platform, reps were able to educate physicians in their territory about the Zephyr Valve.
Targeting criteria helped identify providers who are good candidates to become Zephyr Valve treating physicians, as well as facilities that might become Zephyr Valve Assessment Centers. In the words of one territory manager: “Now, instead of wasting time evaluating a broad swath of potential clients, I log into MedScout. By reviewing which procedures a physician already performs, I have a clearer idea of whether that physician will actually want to learn more about my product..”
Takeaways from Pulmonx success with MedScout
Identify the most-promising new treating physicians and treating centers.
Pinpointing the providers and facilities who will be most receptive to Zephyr Valve procedures means better market saturation. “The ability to stack-rank which offices to schedule appointments with based upon actual opportunity is priceless,” says one sales rep. “I no longer waste time cold-calling random offices or scheduling appointments with a target physician, only to learn that they have never done an interventional procedure.”
Save hours with mobile app trip planning and the MedScout CRM integration.
A sales rep can plan a day in the field, and the app tells them the most efficient route to take. As they take notes or move things through the sales funnel, the integration keeps everything in sync between MedScout and the CRM. “In MedScout, I can easily find the information I need to plan my days in the field in three clicks,” says one territory manager.
Use MedScout for better and quicker personnel onboarding.
New sales reps can get up to speed on their territory more efficiently, wasting less time in fruitless in-person visits with little chance for success. One new sales team member said MedScout “helped me wrap my head around my territory much faster than I’m used to as a new rep.”
Inform leadership with robust geographical visualizations and pivots.
An easy-to-understand user interface that combines data from the CRM and MedScout data can detail progress to quota, territory penetration, and recent sales funnel activity. Armed with that understanding, leaders can make educated decisions on where to hire next, which territories to examine for best practices, and which sales reps to give more support
MedScout is awesome. I’ve been able to do so much with it so far. This is the best tool I’ve used at any company.
—Territory Sales Associate Associate
I can’t say thank you enough for the ease and functionality of MedScout. In particular, thank you for the “Routes” feature that I am utilizing at this moment. I’m now able to build out referral education and outreach events efficiently based on geography. My schedule is now optimized for many days in advance, and I will be able to use my prospect lists to cover a lot of ground in the most productive way possible.
— Pulmonx Territory Manager
Using [a competitor product] was generally overwhelming and confusing. I feel it was easy to get “lost.” I can definitely say that MedScout is much, much easier to use.
— Pulmonx Territory Manager
