Learning from your Customers – The Link Between Marketing and Product Development

An interview with
Sanjay Shrivastava
Director, Global Marketing
Vascular Therapies Covidien

Interviewed by Sam Narisi






As Director of Global Marketing in the Vascular Therapies business for  Covidien, Sanjay Shrivastava is responsible not just for promoting the company’s products, but also for engaging with customers to make sure products are developed that truly meet their needs.

Frost & Sullivan recently spoke with Sanjay about how marketing and product development teams are closely linked at his organization and what he’s learned from his R&D background and his customers in the medical field.

Tell me about your role with Covidien.

We market to physicians. My business unit markets products to neurointerventionalists and interventional radiologists primarily. We develop the portfolio strategy, determining what the disease states and the unmet needs are, and, from there, determine where best to invest our dollars and develop products in those spaces. Once the development process is completed, we begin the product launch process. For that, we reach out to customers to build our relationships with them and understand their needs. For example, we would engage our customers through trade shows, events and clinical work.

The healthcare market is very different from consumer markets because we’re often marketing to a very small group of physicians who are highly specialized. Our work involves a lot of one-on-one interaction by educating physicians on techniques to use our new products and conducting clinical studies to demonstrate the safety and efficacy of these products. We use clinical data, sponsor clinical studies and show how physicians can do procedures faster, better and safer when using our products, or how they could treat a disease that wasn’t treatable before. Clinical data and one-on-one interactions play an important role in our marketing and education efforts.

What are the biggest marketing challenges you’re facing right now?

Competition is always there. The competition can be more lean and agile sometimes if they are smaller companies. Larger companies  have brand equity that needs to be protected, certain quality criteria that need to be achieved, and certain compliance procedures that must be followed which may be more rigorous than for smaller companies. So probably our biggest challenge is to match the nimbleness of smaller start-up companies in bringing new technologies to market.

What are you doing to overcome that?

We scrutinize our own internal processes to see which steps are absolutely necessary for us to develop high quality products. We look for the areas where we can be more efficient in our product development and product launches while providing the highest quality and most reliable products. It’s a matter of identifying and scrutinizing our own internal activities and the steps we take and then strategizing on how we can streamline them.

Before moving into your marketing role, your background was in R&D and product development. Does that give a different perspective that’s valuable for marketing? Do you think it creates any challenges?

I was very active in R&D for many years, and prior to that I did a little bit of manufacturing as well. Having led different functions in R&D, I found that R&D is really a cross-functional effort, rather than just product development as may be typical elsewhere. There are regulatory affairs, clinical affairs, quality, process development, manufacturing, engineering, and other functions that support R&D projects. So as an R&D leader, I oversaw these cross-functional teams or the managed the managers who oversaw those teams.

In the cutting edge medical device field, leaders of R&D need to interface quite often with their customers to understand the unmet needs and know what’s working from a product standpoint and how it can be improved. I had very strong relationships with many customers which had resulted from providing them with high quality products, training them, and/or seeking their feedback during various stages of the development process, so coming into this role was a smooth transition in that regard because I was fairly customer-facing to begin with.

I think the advantage of having worked in R&D for many years is primarily in being product-savvy. What R&D can offer to marketing is an additional eye for how to improve those features to serve the next-generation needs, so I think that skill set helps me engage physicians. Rather than going at it from a purely sales perspective, I engage them from a critical and analytical perspective.

Is there a downside? There can be if some personnel are too much into engineering, where they are always looking at improving features or capabilities of the product without focusing on conveying the value of the current features. Marketing requires a good balance between highlighting the features that exist and a keen eye for improving on them. The latter aptitude is key to developingthe  strategy for next generation products that can meet the currently unmet needs, which is vital for business growth and the patient.

Do you have any advice to share with marketers from a more traditional, less product-focused background?

I think people shouldn’t take things for granted. They need to understand that things are not black or white, but usually somewhere in between. I think marketers need to have that perspective, especially in our field. I would definitely encourage them to question the current process, challenge it, and understand what else can it be or how else can it be done. Don’t just take somebody’s word.

Physicians who advance the field and/or invent new procedures or devices have a strong sense for knowing what’s not working or what can be better. I think for traditional marketers who just say that what they have is the greatest thing may learn that is prudent for them to know what could be a better way to improve the device.

Tell me more about the connection between marketing and product development at Covidien.

In our organization, Covidien thinks of the patient first. Marketing plays a big role in the product portfolio strategy. Marketing represents the customers and their needs, and R&D represents how and whether those needs can be fulfilled. We sit down quite often to review our portfolio to see where we can add new products and projects as well as drop some that no longer make sense. Once a project is a go, a marketing person works in the product development team to represent the customer side. They contribute to product specifications and design; then we bring customers in as needed to seek their feedback. By the time we’re done with the product development project, we make sure that we are not separated from the customer. We’ve obtained their feedback to be confident that this is something that our customers need and what we have is something that fulfills that need.

In our field, we work hand-in-hand with the clinical community to develop products. So marketing is not really just marketing to physicians, it’s also developing the right product at the right time. That’s almost a bigger role than the actual marketing. If we invest our resources in developing the right technologies that fulfill some unmet need, then the product markets itself. We spend a significant bit of time ensuring that we make the right investments. Physician input plays a valuable part in our investment decisions. Marketing plays a big role in establishing those relationships, knowing how to seek that input, and developing a portfolio strategy based on the information input received. Covidien is at the leading edge of different aspects of our business, not just the sales aspect. That, to me, is what makes this job so very interesting.