Nanosonics protects more patients with Salesforce

Nanosonics is an Australian-based company that aims to improve the safety of healthcare workers and patients globally. The company’s focus is on infection prevention and it provides healthcare clinics with education and innovative technologies that deliver improved standards of care. These technologies centre around trophon®, a high level disinfection solution for ultrasound probes and AuditPro™, an infection control workflow compliance management system.

With trophon, Nanosonics has been helping to protect 75,000 patients a day in healthcare settings such as hospitals, private practices, women’s health centres, and ultrasound clinics. Nanosonics has turned to Salesforce to increase that number by transforming its commercial operations and deepening customer engagement.

“Salesforce is fundamental to Nanosonics driving commercial insights and acumen across the organisation. Sales people continue to represent around 60% of our marketing spend so making them as effective as possible can only help us drive better outcomes, not only for business but ultimately for our patients,” said Renee Salaberry, Chief Marketing Officer at Nanosonics.

“Our growth to date has been fueled by having great ideas and great products, but to reach more customers, we needed to scale rapidly and adopt an enterprise structure to support our global footprint,” said Jodie Gunns, Global Digital and Connectivity Lead at Nanosonics. “Salesforce is a core part of our digital transformation and is helping us provide commercial efficiencies through the customer journey and across the entire organisation.”

One of the drivers for Nanosonics' transformation has been to build new and deeper relationships with customers, including hospitals. Hospitals have many different departments using ultrasound and each needs to protect against risks like cross-contamination.

For Nanosonics to reach all these departments across hospitals, it has had to increase the efficiency of customer engagement. This has included using Salesforce to build in automation across the customer journey and execute programs more rapidly. Gunns shared that using Salesforce also helps the company better collaborate with customers to achieve organisation wide improved patient protection.

“Salesforce allows us to connect a number of different customer data points allowing us to better understand customer’s needs and work with them to solve problems more efficiently than ever. For example, we may have a customer working in a radiology department and by learning more their hospital through connected data, are able to collaborate across the organisation and ensure the needs of the entire facility are supported and solved efficiently,” said Gunns.

The use of Salesforce is already helping Nanosonics increase engagement across its digital channels and this engagement has improved further following the refresh of Nanosonics’ global websites. As part of this refresh, Nanosonics built in more direct response forms to capture more leads and feed these right into Pardot for prospect nurturing and extended retargeting engagement programs.

The data points captured in Salesforce include information pulled in from Pardot and Social Studio which Nanosonics is using to push out educational campaigns and track engagement. Nanosonics has undergone significant global expansion and completed the rollout of Salesforce to 17 countries in 19 months. All teams are aligned on business activity, pipeline management, lead generation and management whilst being supported from its new digital capabilities.

“We have worked closely with our Salesforce partners on building sales and digital capability globally. We feel we are optimally placed to continue to drive global expansion and support more customers in more regions,” said Gunns.

While building out its digital ecosystem, Nanosonics has also driven significant efficiencies across its sales and operations. Leads captured in Pardot are automatically funneled to sales reps or distributors who have more information than ever to support them in their role. This includes online training as well as marketing and clinical information which is held in Salesforce Knowledge.

Distributors access this information through online communities. Built on Experience Cloud, the communities are also used by distributors to share their sales and pipeline data with Nanosonics. This helps the company to better manage its manufacturing capacity and ensure that stock is ready when distributors need it.

Chris Proctor, Head of Commercial Effectiveness, said that the company had initially used Salesforce primarily for providing quotes. However, by connecting new capabilities and data, Salesforce has become more central to the business and is now helping to drive decision-making. It has also helped to improve sales cadence and during the 2020 financial year, with COVID directly impacting customer access, Nanosonics increased the number of trophon solutions installed in the market by 13%. It is also now protecting over 78,000 patients daily!

“Salesforce gives us a fundamental view of our business globally, so we can see how we’re performing and also forecast and accommodate customer needs. This visibility and the efficiencies gained also improve significantly as we complete the rollout of Salesforce to each country,” said Proctor. “The improved accuracy of our pipeline has also allowed us to take on a lean manufacturing model and dramatically reduce the amount of inventory we need to store.”

The increases in efficiency across Nanosonics’ business have helped it respond quickly to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, the company has been able to rapidly share new data as it emerges concerning the efficacy of trophon against COVID-19. This information and related marketing collateral is distributed internally through Salesforce Knowledge while Pardot is used to provide digital updates to healthcare prospects and customers globally.

Nanosonics has additionally extended its use of Tableau to help protect employees. The company had already been using Tableau to visualise the location of current customers as well those healthcare facilities not yet using trophon devices. Early in the pandemic Nanosonics added another visualisation to show areas where COVID case levels are too high for sales reps to visit in-person. In these areas, Nanosonics has continued to support customers remotely. It has also set up a program to temporarily loan out trophon devices and charge customers only for consumables.

Gunns commented on the rewarding nature of the work that Nanosonics does and how the company’s digital transformation has made a difference. “It has been a paradigm shift for the organisation, but the changes have had an immediate impact to the efficiency of the business. For those who work in healthcare, anything we can do to improve patient safety is tremendously rewarding, so to see the impact we’ve been able to make with Salesforce is really quite exciting.”