OnFulfillment Blog | Print Fulfillment

Anyone who works in sales or marketing within the medical device industry understands that they must deal with numerous challenges and restrictions that impact their ability to do business effectively and efficiently.

Over the years, a number of regulations including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and the Anti-Kickback Statute have been imposed to protect patient privacy, ensure quality care, and prevent fraud within the healthcare system. While these regulations do a great job of achieving their goals, they also add several layers of bureaucracy and security to what used to be a fairly simple and straightforward sales process.

While this can be frustrating for marketers, there are ways to navigate around the system to overcome—or effectively avoid—many of these roadblocks. It requires a more “old school” approach that features a return to basics and a revival of old skillsets that will take many back to the early days of marketing fulfillment.

Trade show season is in full bloom.  The calendar is full of events—everything from industry-wide trade shows sponsored by corporate marketing to regional conferences and local seminars staffed by local sales teams and admins.

Lots of exposure and networking opportunities lie ahead.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is, you’ve been tasked with coordinating and overseeing these events nationwide—literally hundreds of shows coast to coast for which you must provide banners, signage, pop-up displays, collateral, and promotional materials.

Even if you were equipped to manage multiple vendors over several months and across multiple time zones to secure the necessary materials for each of these events, that’s only half the battle.  Once the deliverables have been produced, there remains the challenge of getting them all delivered where they need to be, when they need to be there.  That means boxes need to be packed, shipping labels printed, and detailed delivery instructions provided.  And since many of these items are reusable and need to be shared by several different groups, you also need to organize shipments between events and venues, often with razor-thin margins of error.

As an online merchant, the software tools you use to conduct transactions are absolutely critical to your operation.  

The ability to successfully process payments is obviously a must.  Safety protocols such as fraud protection and Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption must be built into your e-commerce system to protect both you and your customers.  A user-friendly interface that makes purchasing items easy, intuitive, and seamless is mandatory, lest your customers abandon their shopping carts out of frustration.

We are now officially halfway through 2023. That seems like a good time to pause, reflect a bit, and take a look back at how the year has unfolded so far.

Even in today’s online world, marketing collateral management—the production, storage and distribution of printed materials that promote a company’s products and services—is still a critical discipline. While these materials can take many forms—data sheets, brochures, white papers, technical documentation, educational tools and many more—how you manage them must be consistent, organized and logical to ensure they convey the right message about your organization.