Part II | Medical Device Sales: The Rocket That Crashed Into The Moon

This article, by Charlie Johnson, originally appeared on massdevice.com, on August 17th, 2012. We published the first half of Johnson’s post on our blog, here.  Charlie is a Leadership Practice Consultant at TIGI, a facilitator of multiple Leadership Programs, and the former vice president at the United States Surgical Corp. He has worked with clients from the Pacific Rim to Europe developing and delivering Leadership development programs to over 1500 people from 40 different companies. 
What we didn’t know at the time was that GYN’s would push back against single-use products. These physicians had been using reusable trocars for years and had the benefit of a forgiving organ in the uterus, which could be easily repaired if penetrated by a newly sharpened trocar.

In 1988, a general surgeon from Nashville and a GYN colleague from Atlanta began looking for new ways to remove gallbladers. They needed a surgical clip, graspers and scissors that could be inserted through a 10-millimeter trocar to perform the surgery. They turned to U.S. Surgical to develop the devices; we created the necessary products for them to successfully perform a laparoscopic gallbladder procedure.

We presented a video of the procedure at the American College of Surgeons meeting in the fall of 1988, to a mixed reception. Most of the academic hospital surgeons considered it a dangerous procedure, but the private practice surgeons saw an opportunity: They could draw patients from their competitors if they could perform a procedure which eliminated the severe and painful incision through the muscle below the ribs.

The original procedure required a 5-day hospital stay and 6 weeks of recovery. With 4 small trocar incisions, we could get patients back to normal activity within a week.

Those early successes spurred strong word-of-mouth from satisfied patients. By 1989, we were able to produce enough instruments to satisfy the needs of this bnascent market.

Then the news about the procedures started hitting local newspapers. The story was picked up by The Associated Press, which brought a New York news crew to film an interview with a surgical pioneer in Bridgeport, Conn., where they interviewed 1 of his very satisfied patients. The story aired on the national news and went viral.

We started getting calls from general surgeons all over the country who were losing patients to minimally invasive surgeons. The general surgeons wanted safe, sharp, single-use trocars because they were operating on males and females and the disposable trocar with a safety shield made sense to them.

They were willing to pay to go to courses and buy the necessary equipment, which also included small cameras and video monitors as well as insufflation devices that pumped CO₂ gas into the abdomen to expand the operating space.

As sales grew across the country, we had to hustle to provide enough inventory and training for all that demand. We helped train 10s of thousands of surgeons over the next 2 years.

It was an incredible ride and our profits grew 50% in 1990, 98% in 1991 and 52% in 1992. During those years we all felt like there was no limit on how much we could grow the company.

Our success also bred some habits, which would eventually come back to haunt the company. For example, our demand exceeded our supply, so If a competitive account wanted to buy our Lap Chole products, they needed to sign a Prime Vendor contract and convert all of their stapling products to U.S. Surgical. We picked-up plenty of new business in our core product lines, but the materials managers were not happy.

Over time, this would prove to be a bigger problem for the company, which we’ll discuss in later posts.

Did you miss the first half of this post?  You can view it by clicking here.