TL;DR
When the buyer is a physician, a lead is not a form fill. It is a clinician in your target specialty, at a site that could buy, who took a real step toward using your product: a sample or evaluation request, a rep visit, a training signup. Behind that clinician there are usually two more decisions, value analysis and purchasing, so count leads in stages that follow all three, and report the cost to reach each stage.
Which contacts can actually get your product bought?
Device companies usually ask this as "how many leads should we be getting?" The more useful question is "which of the people who fill in our forms can actually get our product bought?" Until that is written down, every number in the monthly report means something different to marketing, to sales and to the person paying for the ads.
Before I set up tracking for a device company, I ask two questions. Who, on your side, decides that a lead is qualified? And how does a new customer buy from you today, step by step? The answers decide what gets measured. If nobody can answer them, that is the first piece of work.
Who decides: the clinician, value analysis and purchasing
A clinical product is rarely bought by one person. In a hospital there are usually three separate decisions.
- The clinician. The physician, surgeon, nurse or technologist who would use the product decides whether it is worth changing what they do now. This is the person your marketing reaches first.
- Value analysis. Many hospitals send new product requests to a value analysis team or committee, which weighs cost, quality and outcomes before a new item is added. The clinician often has to submit or sponsor the request. See how to market to value analysis committees.
- Purchasing. Supply chain or purchasing handles price, contract terms, group purchasing agreements and the purchase order.
A private practice is different. The practice owner often holds all three decisions, while an associate physician may use the product but cannot approve the purchase. That difference matters when you screen requests, because a sample request from an associate and one from an owner are not the same lead.
Your lead stages should follow these decisions. A clinician who loves your product has not bought it until value analysis and purchasing have done their part.
Lead stages to use for a physician buyer
Here is a set of stages that fits many devices and clinical supplies sold to hospitals and practices. Rename them to match your sales process, but keep one rule: each stage is defined by something that happened, which someone can confirm.
| Stage | What happened | Who confirms it |
|---|---|---|
| Contact | Someone gave their details: a form, a download, a badge scan, a webinar signup | Marketing, automatically |
| Qualified clinician lead | A clinician in your target specialty, at a site that could buy, took a real step: asked for a sample, an evaluation, a rep visit or training | Marketing checks role and site; sales accepts it |
| Evaluation | The clinician is using or trialing the product, or a demo or in-service is booked, and you know who will sponsor it inside the account | Sales |
| Submitted for approval | The product request is with value analysis, or with the owner in a private practice | Sales, with the clinician |
| Purchasing | A quote, contract or purchase order is in progress | Sales or contracts |
| Customer | First order received | Finance or order system |
Three notes on using the table.
- Keep "contact" and "qualified clinician lead" apart. Many of the arguments between marketing and sales come from counting both as "leads." Contacts are worth following up. They are not what you judge the program on.
- The action has to be a real step. A training signup, a rep visit request or an evaluation request counts. A page view, a video play or a newsletter signup does not. If you want a scoring model for engagement, the marketing qualified lead definition post covers point values and thresholds. Stages come first; scoring is a way to sort contacts inside the first stage.
- Name the sponsor early. The evaluation stage should record who inside the account will carry the request forward. That person is your clinical champion. See how to build a clinical champion strategy.
How to screen sample and demo requests without losing good ones
Sample and demo requests are where lead quality is decided. The instinct is to add questions to the form until only good requests get through. Every field you add is another reason for a busy clinician to stop, so the better approach is to keep the form short and screen after the request arrives.
| Screening step | What it tells you | What it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| Ask for an NPI number | Whether the requester has a National Provider Identifier, and their listed specialty and practice address | One more form field |
| One question about purchasing role (for example, "Do you approve purchases for your practice?") | Owner or associate, buyer or user | One more form field |
| A short call before the sample ships | Need, timing, and who else must agree | Time from a rep or clinical specialist |
| A thank-you page that says what happens next | Nothing on its own, but it sets the expectation of a call | Nothing |
| A follow-up email sequence after the sample arrives | Whether they opened it, used it, and want the next step | Setup time once |
| Routing each request to a named rep in the CRM | Who owns the follow-up, and whether it happened | Setup time once |
About the NPI check: the NPPES NPI Registry run by CMS is a free public directory of active National Provider Identifier records. It shows a provider's name, credential, specialty and practice location. The details are reported by the providers themselves, and an NPI is not a license check. It also does not show who owns a practice or who approves purchases, so it confirms the person, not the buying role. Some nurses and technologists do not have an NPI, so treat a missing number as a reason to call, not to reject. That is why the purchasing question is worth its one field.
Two things to settle with your compliance lead before you promote samples or evaluation units: who is allowed to receive free product, and how it is documented. Free items given to people who order or recommend products paid for by federal health programs can raise Anti-Kickback questions. The Anti-Kickback Statute guide for device marketing covers the basics. Follow your own company's policy.
A last point on wording. Write the call to action the way a clinician would ask for the thing. "Request an evaluation unit" or "Schedule an in-service for your team" tells a clinician exactly what happens next. "Book a demo" is written for software buyers.
What to count and report each month
A useful monthly lead report answers four questions for each stage.
- How many reached the stage this month?
- How many moved to the next stage? This is your conversion rate between stages, and it shows where the process stalls.
- How long did they sit in the stage? Evaluations and approvals take weeks or months. Knowing the usual time stops people from calling a program a failure too early.
- What did it cost to reach the stage? Spend divided by the number that reached it.
Count accounts as well as people. Three clinicians from one hospital who all request information are one buying decision, and a report that counts them as three leads will overstate the program.
Do not use the ad platform's "conversions" as your lead count. A conversion in Google Ads or LinkedIn is whatever action you told the platform to count. It is useful for bidding, but your stage counts come from your CRM, where sales confirms each step.
An illustrative example of cost per stage
The numbers below are made up to show the arithmetic. They are not a benchmark.
| Stage | Count this quarter | Cost to reach the stage (on $6,000 spend) |
|---|---|---|
| Contact | 120 | $50 each |
| Qualified clinician lead | 30 | $200 each |
| Evaluation | 8 | $750 each |
| Submitted for approval | 3 | $2,000 each |
| Customer | 1 | $6,000 |
Then compare the cost per customer with what a customer is worth to you: the gross margin on the first year of orders, plus reorders if the product is a consumable. If one customer brings in more margin than $6,000 in the first year, this example program pays for itself. If it does not, the table shows which stage to work on. Here, the drop from 30 qualified leads to 8 evaluations would be the first place to look.
What does not work
- Counting every form fill, download and badge scan as a lead. It makes the top number look good and teaches sales to ignore marketing.
- Scoring engagement without checking role. A medical student who reads every article will outscore a department chief who asked one question.
- One definition for hospitals and private practices. The buying process is different, so the stages and the screening questions should be too.
- Handing every contact straight to reps. Reps stop following up when most of what they get cannot buy.
- Paying a vendor per lead before the stages exist. You will be paying for the cheapest thing that fits a loose definition. See why medtech companies should say no to guaranteed leads and pay per lead.
Where to start this month
- Write down, with sales, who confirms each stage and what evidence counts.
- Add a purchasing-role question and an NPI field to your sample and demo forms.
- Set up CRM fields for each stage, and route every request to a named owner.
- Build next month's report on stage counts, movement between stages, time in stage and cost per stage.
- Review the definitions after one full sales cycle, and change them if sales and marketing still disagree.
If you want help setting up the stages, the tracking behind them and the report, Buzzbox Media does this as part of its medical device marketing work.