Elizabeth Watson: Welcome and thank you for joining us. I’m Elizabeth Watson, principal with the Alexander Group and co-leader of our health care practice. I’m here today with Wendy Brauner, US chief commercial officer for Karl Storz. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Wendy Brauner: Thank you for having me, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Watson: So we’re here to talk about the state of health care today. And I’d love to just start and understand what are the trends in health care today impacting your commercial decision making.
Wendy Brauner: So I think some of these trends have been going on for quite some time. And they continue. Industry consolidation is significant margin compression, particularly with things like tariffs, but also just the cost of running the hospital. And the health system is increasing. So margin compression, labor shortages, the introduction of robotics into surgery, AI. There are a number of elements that intersect with our area of health care and impact everything from our own portfolio offering to how our team engages with customers in the marketplace.
Elizabeth Watson: So I was speaking to a chief medical officer of a health system, and they mentioned to your point, that there are a lot of constraints on spending. Yet at the same time, they still do have this budget for robotics. And so given some of these health care trends that we’ve just discussed, what are some of your top commercial priorities for your team?
Wendy Brauner: Yeah. So I think that we certainly are seeing a lot of budgets that are being redirected to robotics. While we have not launched the robot that came with the census acquisition, there’s still plenty of room in the space that we do operate in. Not every facility is going to have a robot in every single OR. There’s still a need for traditional video towers in laparoscopic settings, And then we operate in other sites of care as well. In particular, we’re seeing an increasing shift in site of care, provision of higher acuity procedures that fall more within our sweet spot. So the ambulatory surgery centers, which are not typically outfitted for robotics, are a place where we can certainly see some opportunity as well. And then with our on-site program, we do have some of our on-sites who are trained in taking care of the robots and operating the robots. And so there’s an opportunity there. But more broadly, from a commercial priorities perspective, I think as we see shift to AI, as we see so much of a shift to robotics, we do need to make sure that our sales reps continue to be upskilled to the highest possible level of the trusted advisor status that is expected of them when they are consulting with health systems and with surgery practices on, on how to grow their business successfully. So I would say upskilling the reps continuously and helping migrate them to the world of software-based sales, especially for AI, is going to be a significant priority for us. Taking advantage of these markets that are opened with, for example, ambulatory surgery centers and figuring out our go-to-market approach there in a unified fashion. Right now, we’re a piecemeal there. That is a significant priority for us as well. And just really looking for partnership opportunities that can help get us into spaces where we wouldn’t otherwise play or help give us some inorganic growth opportunities that surround and plug into the platform that we have and the portfolio that we have. Those are all pretty big priorities for us.
Elizabeth Watson: Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the things that you mentioned around the shifts and the site of care- we heard that a lot in our research as well. And you mentioned you’re focusing on going to market there a little bit differently in a more unified way. Can you tell me a little bit more about that and some of the things that you’d like to see shift in order to target some of those different sites of care?
Wendy Brauner: It’s a good question. I think so right now, because we haven’t had a steady migration of procedures that are relevant to where we play. We’ve not really been able to go in in a in a cohesive way. So we have some important partnerships there. For example, we have a strong partnership with Fuji where they do the video platform, but they don’t have an integration platform. So we are the integration arm. And so for GI-oriented ASCs, that’s a really wonderful partnership. We recently announced a partnership with Smith and Nephew, who are obviously a very big presence in orthopedics, consumables and implantables. We augment their offering as well with integration with ICG so that the combination of Smith and Nephew together with sports really helps to give us a strong presence, not only in the ambulatory surgery centers where they play, but also for us in the hospitals where you might have orthopaedic surgeons who are interested in being able to pull through the consumables portfolio. I think you know what I’m thinking about as we start to see urology and gynecologic procedures migrate to the ASC. How do we think as sports about what the value proposition is? We can certainly continue to go in with GI here and orthopedics here. But I feel that we’re missing an opportunity to formulate a very clear and cohesive and consistent strategy across the breadth of the company around what our approach will be to ambulatory surgery centers, or at least the subsegments that we want to specifically focus based on what is useful for them as they look to drive the growth of those centers. So that’s the work we’re undertaking now to understand, you know, where does it make sense to pull together something that is more of a cohesive offering and we’re actually just embarking on that right now.
Elizabeth Watson: And the other thing I loved hearing in that as well is that it’s a cohesive offering, but you’re thinking about unique and different ways as well than the traditional way that we go and in the acute space. Yeah. And I think that’s something that we see sometimes is people might just increase headcount or say there’s a lot more ASCs, let’s just add some additional sales reps. But there are different value propositions; there are different offerings to consider when going to those different sites of care.
Wendy Brauner: Yeah, I think we’re trying to look for how do we leverage what we have and put it together differently in a way that is relevant for this marketplace, instead of just throwing bodies at it?
Elizabeth Watson: That makes perfect sense.
Wendy Brauner: Yeah.
Elizabeth Watson: One of the other things that we’re seeing from the research, as you know, we get new doctors in, they’re younger, they’re looking for information outside of the in-person interaction. They’re going online, they’re going to different forums to get their information. It’s sparked this transition in marketing organizations, I think, in the med tech space to go from this more traditional, just kind of sales support, lead gen to more of a strategic partner to go out and find some of the newer generation of doctors and where they get their information. So can you tell me a little bit more about how your marketing organization has transformed over the past few years to meet that need?
Wendy Brauner: So another good question. We’re still evolving there. I will say in the specific area that you talked about, we did start a relationship with View Medi in our urology business, which is a platform where we can attract a lot of eyeballs there across a number of therapeutic areas. But that was the one that seemed to have the best sort of presence for us. That being said, we also have Medical and Scientific Affairs, which has launched a wonderful website platform called Ace Academy for Clinical Education that is oriented towards any sorts of physicians and is purely clinical education. So marketing is not playing in that arena. But view would be the outreach that was done before Ace existed by our marketing team. We’re looking at different ways to structure the marketing organization. Content marketing in particular, has been increasing significantly. We tried a number of years ago to organize most of our content around four basic pillars in the organization that everything can ladder up to and connect to as sort of the differentiators for our company, regardless of the business line vertical that the marketing group laddered up into. We’re now creating content marketing roles within those business line verticals that can really help us to develop content that not only gives us good thought leadership for those specialties specifically, but has it connected to an overarching brand that is consistent regardless of the therapeutic specialty that you’re in. We’re seeing incremental evolutions. And as you know, in our marketing organization, we are verticalized by business unit. We don’t have a lot of sort of an agnostic layer. I personally have just stepped into a role leading what a group I’ve named the Marketing Leadership Council. I’ve taken the senior most leaders of all of the different marketing business lines, and we’re coming together on a monthly basis to not only share best practices and updates about what’s going on, but also to identify certain elements of marketing that we need to evolve functionally across the organization and see what we can undertake to achieve together. It may or may not be, you know, in service of specifically attracting new physicians, because there are a lot of areas that I think we have an opportunity to grow in. But the good news is that the functions evolving, that we’re putting an emphasis on content marketing and thought leadership, and that we are trying to get some sort of layer of, even if it’s by committee of agnosticism, that we can look at building a community of shared practice and elevating the function over time.
Elizabeth Watson: That’s great. We recently did some research with marketing executives in the medtech space, and we reached out to, you know, try to understand where people are putting their investment. And one of the things that we understood is that thought leadership piece, customers are looking for that information and product knowledge. And so doubling down and investing in that space is really what those doctors are looking for and physicians are looking for.
Wendy Brauner: We really want to create an environment where we are not just pushing our brand, but that we are really creating value for providers, and we are helping them to learn about the spaces and the areas they’re seeking to navigate for their own success. Again, in order to build our credibility as a trusted advisor, as a partner who really knows the space well, it can really help them best positioned for success. Yeah.
Elizabeth Watson: The hottest topic today. I tried to purposely save it for later is really around. Of course, AI and technology. So can you tell me a little bit about how your organization is implementing AI into the commercial organization?
Wendy Brauner: I would say in some ways it’s very practical and operational. In other ways, it’s aspirational. So the practical operational, we implemented a knowledge base. We partnered with Neuron Seven to build that for both our field service operations and our HR one integration business, as well as our customer support group. That is very much around capacity growth. So it’s truly helping us get faster both in the field and on the phone with customers. So that’s been one really successful implementation for us. We also have AI in our portfolio. We have part of what we offer in the O.R. to help improve turnover management and give administrators in the hospital better visibility into how the rooms themselves are performing. I would say at an executive level, we’re leaning into looking at how we can use AI to drive growth. That’s the aspirational part. A lot of it is a bit experimental because, you know, we’re putting in these very exhaustive prompts, but you want to make sure that you’re vetting what comes out. You know, you don’t know what hallucination will be in there. We have a wonderful suite now that does hook into our own system. So it is drawing from both external and internal resources in a protected environment where you’re not giving information to the outside world. And that can go into copilot, into ChatGPT and to cloud. So lots of possible tools that we can work with, but you want to make sure it’s not overly self-referential and you’re not sort of getting agreement on strategies and ideas simply because it’s an internal source.
Wendy Brauner: So they’re still vetting that needs to occur, but we’re trying to get more comfortable with using those tools. One of the things that’s really of interest to me is how we start to, as we get more skilled in AI, bring AI into some of the things that we’re seeking to do organically internally. So, for example, we talked about marketing. Segmentation is a personal passion of mine. I think that we have a lot of room to grow and we’ve undertaken last year started a significant segmentation pilot. I would love to see how we can bring AI into that to make it better so that the segmentation is not simply referencing historical purchasing trends, but really propensity to convert, propensity to grow. So there’s a lot of opportunity that’s quite exciting for us. And then certainly, we have AI coaching modules. I’d love to launch those more broadly to the sales organization and see if we can do something in the agentic arena that really helps coach them on the fly and, and creates not only capacity in our management layer but allows the team to build some skills and the managers to orient towards other skills. So, there’s a lot of excited about, there’s some that is in practice, some that is aspirational and some that I’m just trying to figure out how to marry to what we’ve already built.
Elizabeth Watson: It sounds like you guys have quite a roadmap that you’ve built, and as you mentioned, aspirations to continue that forward.
Wendy Brauner: Yeah. In some areas, I would say unequivocally yes. And in other areas, I think we’re sketching them out. Yeah. Makes sense.
Elizabeth Watson: Last question. We’re here together at Alexander Group’s Women Revenue Leader conference. Any takeaways from today or the overall conference that you know that might help enable your success?
Wendy Brauner: So I loved the keynote today by Katy from Microsoft and got some, I think, actionable takeaways from some of the things that they’re doing around AI. I love the notion of the persona acceleration. That was great food for thought. Thinking about, okay, how can we sit down? Of course, I went straight to my sales organization in my mind, but sit down with the sales organization and understand the parts of the sales motion that slow them down the most. And are there agentic applications for that? So I loved that persona acceleration. We do seem to rotate a lot onto the process pieces when we think about AI right now. So that was just particularly interesting for me, because I hadn’t really considered it in the way that she articulated it before. And then the other thing that’s just reassuring, particularly in the realm of AI is just that even at Microsoft, they are in the process of learning. Yeah. They are still learning how to use this. They’re learning how their teams can use this, that we are not alone in that. When I said, we’re still working on the map. Yeah, we’re not alone in that. The tech leaders who are powering our AI are also in the same boat. And so this is really a learning journey we have to be, but can be on together was a great takeaway. So that was a wonderful keynote. Great. Yeah.
Elizabeth Watson: Well, thank you so much for your insights today and for spending time with me.
Wendy Brauner: It’s always a pleasure. Thank you, Elizabeth.
