Commercialize Your Medtech with Craig T Ingram | Ep. 15 - Full Transcript | The Med Device Cyber Podcast

Welcome back to The Med Device Cyber Podcast. Joined here by the Blue Goat CEO and co-host, Christian Espinosa. And we have a guest today, Craig. Craig, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself? Sure. So, my name is Craig Ingram. People call me Craig T. I got that nickname a few years ago when I was able to speak at a business conference with Kiefer Sutherland and Kevin Costner. So, that's how they gave me this little nickname. It's kind of interesting, but I have 27 years in the medtech industry. I started my own medical distribution company when I was a sophomore in college, and then went to Johnson and Johnson, and then started my venture capital-supported career, back-to-back, multiple companies over the years. And recently, over the last year and a half, I have been doing medtech and healthcare technology consulting to companies to help prevent them, to be quite honest, from going broke. You know, the statistics are very, very high for startup and mid-stage, small-medium enterprise companies of shutting their doors, just because of low amounts of customer adoption. Unfortunately, because commercialization is more of an art than a science, and the deck of cards are stacked against companies when they form and try to commercialize their products and services they offer. Thanks for the intro. It seems like almost everybody has worked at one of the large organizations. The previous guests on our podcast have worked at Johnson and Johnson as well. So, it seems like everyone's coming from Stryker or Johnson and Johnson or something. Yeah. I mean, those are the large strategics, right? So, they're the ones that take a gamble on people that don't have a lot of experience to gain that experience. And without those large strategics that literally bring in billions and billions of dollars annually, very few companies would gamble on somebody fresh out of college or in college even. Yeah, what something you said in the intro is interesting to me because I would think from a business roadmap perspective, if I'm a startup, I'm getting investors, I would have thought about the customer adoption, or client adoption, of my product early on, right? Isn't that part of what investors look at? And isn't that something that should be thought of? Because I mean, if you don't understand your total addressable market and how it's going to be used and how you're going to get it to that market, then like you said, you have a pretty high degree of failure, right? Like, isn't that pretty typical though in an early startup's roadmap? They're going to tell you yes. But just like a car that's not running well, and a mechanic will look under the hood and start tinkering around with the engine, that's what my company does. We lift up the hood and inspect the engine of the company. And we find that nine out of ten companies do not have a commercialization roadmap or plan. They have a business plan. They may have a sales plan. They may have a marketing plan. But the sales plans and the marketing plans fit into an overall commercialization plan. And very few companies can literally pull one out that they've created and typed out and is in written format. And yes, that is what investors look at. But when people think of commercialization, they only think of marketing, meaning to let their total addressable market know the products and services they offer, and then selling. Which unfortunately, the vast majority of sales professionals and even the leadership sales professionals are showing and telling. They're not actually selling and using the psychology of selling to get the potential prospect or potential customer to rationalize why they should own the product or service that's being offered. Hmm. So, the psychology of selling. I've heard this before, people talk about, you know, the product and the features, but they don't really understand like how that solves the problem for the prospect and look at it through the prospect's lens. And there's some psychology behind that, obviously it's emotional intelligence. Oh, it's even beyond that, right? It's using emotional persuasion dialogue, or emotional persuasion messaging, in a way that attracts. What does that mean, emotional? Like we do social engineering in cybersecurity, which is sort of conning people using some of these techniques. I'm just curious, like emotional, I think you said emotional persuasion dialogue. Yeah. So emotional persuasion dialogue has to do with tonality, the words used, and the total framework of the sentence of the questions that are being asked, and the conversation that is being enacted with a prospect, right? Because they're not really a customer until they buy. And once they're a customer, then the goal of that company is to turn them into a client, right? Customers buy once, but clients buy over and over again.