Industries · Medical devices

CRM for medical device companiesHow Periti builds HubSpot around the field rep

Follow a medical device rep for a day. They’re in a hospital car park at 6:30 a.m., in an operating room by eight, covering a case for a surgeon who switched the schedule last night. Between cases they’re chasing a purchasing manager, answering a distributor in another country and trying to remember which consultant asked for the product evaluation. At seven in the evening someone in head office asks them to update the CRM. Most of what they learned that day never gets there.

18

medical device and equipment makers and distributors

66

healthcare and life sciences clients in total

10

medtech clients on bespoke implementations

6

medtech clients on ongoing support with us today

Periti Digital is a HubSpot Elite Solutions Partner and an Anthropic partner. We work with 18 medical device and equipment makers and distributors, including Kimal, Fleming Medical, Dent-med Materials, Accora, Mainstay Medical and Merz Aesthetics UK, and with 66 healthcare and life sciences companies in total. Across every sector, we’ve delivered 2,000+ projects for 900+ customers from Dublin, London, Rotterdam, Munich, Lisbon, Boston and New York.

Systems and middleware we've used for medtech companiesSAP Business OneIFS ERPOracle NetSuiteSalesforceMove MedicalPipedriveArchie CRMMailchimpCventQlik SenseMicrosoft Entra IDMicrosoft 365Google WorkspaceAWSMicrosoft AzureHubSpot Data Hub

The biggest mistake

They design the CRM for head office and expect the field to feed it

Leadership wants a forecast. Marketing wants attribution for the congress spend. Finance wants to reconcile pipeline against orders. So the project team builds forty required fields, six pipelines and a weekly reporting cadence, then hands it to reps who spend their days in operating rooms, sterile corridors and hospital loading bays. Within a week the reps work out that the CRM costs them time and gives them nothing back. Six months later the dashboards are full and nobody believes them.

We start with the rep and work back. HubSpot should be the revenue nerve center: where surgeons, hospital accounts, distributors, orders, case activity and market signals meet. Get the field right and head office gets its forecast for free.

How a typical CRM rollout's assumptions compare with how medical device sales work
AreaWhat the CRM assumesHow medtech works
Who it's built forHead office reportingThe rep between cases
Where updates happenAt a desk, at the end of the dayOn a phone, in a corridor, a car or a staff canteen
Who decidesOne contact per accountSurgeon, department head, procurement and the value analysis committee
What the rep gets backForty required fieldsOrder history, usage drops and surgeon moves

Structure

How should a medical device company structure its CRM?

Build it around the clinical buying unit. A hospital account with one contact tells you very little about who decides whether your device gets used. Medtech sales run through several people at once: the surgeon or clinician who wants the product, the department head, procurement or supply chain, the value analysis committee, and sometimes a group purchasing organization or a national framework.

So we design around accounts with hierarchy, so a regional manager can see a group and a rep can see an operating room; clinicians and key opinion leaders; buying roles on each opportunity; product evaluations and trials, because the conversion rate from evaluation to standing order is one of the most useful numbers a medtech sales leader can have; distributors as accounts with their own territories and pipelines; and order and usage history from the ERP, so nobody has to guess which accounts matter.

Example: for a mobility equipment maker, we came in after a HubSpot audit scored their portal 58 out of 100. We collapsed redundant pipelines, built an account hierarchy and attribution framework, switched on lead scoring across more than 5,000 contacts, rebuilt forecast dashboards and cleaned up dormant users and security settings. The CRM they already had started earning its keep once we took things out of it.

Capital equipment and consumables need different pipelines

A capital sale with an 18-month budget cycle and a consumables account that reorders every month are different businesses. Companies that force both through one pipeline end up with a forecast that suits neither. We separate them, and we tie consumables tracking to ERP order data so a drop in reorders shows up as a risk in HubSpot before it shows up in the quarter.

Adoption

Why don't medical device sales reps use the CRM?

Because most CRMs ask reps to do data entry for someone else and give them nothing they need in return. Reps rarely lack discipline. They’re rational, and a system that slows them down between cases loses every time. We design around three rules:

  • It has to work on a phone, standing up. We strip mobile views back to what a rep needs before and after a visit. If logging a visit takes more than a minute on the HubSpot mobile app, we cut fields until it doesn’t.
  • Every field needs a reason. If a field doesn’t trigger an automation, feed a forecast or help the rep sell, we remove it.
  • The rep gets something back. When the CRM tells a rep something they didn’t know, they open it again tomorrow.

For a US distributor of spine and neurosurgery devices with more than 40 reps, we built HubSpot around the surgical case. Field data that used to sit in spreadsheets and shared drives now lives on a custom Case object linked to surgeons and hospitals, with leadership dashboards on top and mobile-first training for the reps. We also assessed the integration with their case management system, Move Medical, as a second phase, because pulling case data in automatically beats asking reps to retype it.

What a rep sees on a phone

Before a visit
The account and its surgeons with open opportunities and the next step
Automatic
Recent orders from the ERP, so nobody retypes them
Alert
Accounts whose usage has dropped flagged before the quarter does it
Alert
A surgeon changed hospital a warm introduction, or a position at risk
After a visit
Visit logged in under a minute or we cut fields until it is

Don't train reps on the CRM. Train them on their territory.

Generic CRM training fails in the field. We train reps using their own accounts, their own surgeons and their own open opportunities, in short sessions that fit around their case schedule. A rep who sees their own territory in HubSpot on day one pays attention. A rep shown a demo account checks their phone.

Distributors

How do you manage distributors in a CRM?

Treat distributors as customers and partners at the same time, and decide early how much of their pipeline you need to see. Most device makers sell direct in some markets and through distributors in others, and most have very little idea what happens to their product once it leaves for a distributor’s warehouse.

Kimal, a UK manufacturer of vascular access devices and custom procedure packs that supplies clinical departments in more than 70 countries, needed HubSpot to cover four business units and two very different routes to market. We built separate pipelines for NHS sales and distributor sales, medical device fields across the CRM, forecasting dashboards for leadership, and a foundation each business unit could work in without stepping on the others.

We’ve seen device makers spend months building distributor portals nobody logs into. If your distributors won’t use it, we’ll tell you before you pay for it.

If you…Our recommendation
Sell direct in your home market and through distributors abroadSplitSeparate direct and distributor pipelinesShared account and product data, one leadership view
Rely on distributors for most revenueSplitDistributor accounts with territory, targets and sell-in from your ERPQuarterly business reviews logged in HubSpot
Need visibility of distributor opportunitiesPartner pipelineA partner pipeline or partner portal where distributors register dealsWith rules agreed before you ask them to use it
Are a distributor carrying several manufacturers' brandsPartner pipelineProduct lines and supplier on every dealReport to each manufacturer and see margin by brand
Have distributors who won't share pipeline dataFrom your ERPTrack sell-in and reorder patterns from your ERPStop chasing data you'll never get

System boundaries

Where should the CRM stop and the ERP start?

HubSpot should handle winning and growing accounts. Your ERP, quality system and case management tools should handle orders, stock, traceability and regulated records. Some medtech companies keep everything in the ERP and wonder why sales has no pipeline. Others rebuild pricing, consignment stock and complaint handling inside HubSpot, and end up with two systems disagreeing about what the customer bought. We draw the line in design and connect the two sides.

HubSpot is the system of record for
  • Hospital accounts, clinicians, KOLs and distributors
  • Marketing, congresses, education events and webinars
  • Opportunities, evaluations and tenders

HubSpot sees everything here.

Which system owns each job, and what HubSpot sees
JobSystem of recordWhat HubSpot sees
Orders, invoices and order historyERP: SAP Business One, IFS, NetSuiteOrder history and revenue by account, product and period
Price lists, contract pricing and quotesERP or HubSpot, decided in designAgreed prices and product catalog, synced one way
Consignment and loaner stockERP or inventory systemStock held at an account, where it drives a sales action
Surgical case scheduling and usageCase management systemCase volume by surgeon and account
Complaints, adverse events and vigilanceQuality management systemThat a complaint exists, routed to quality, never investigated in HubSpot
Lot, serial and UDI traceabilityERP or quality systemNothing, unless a recall needs a customer list

The rule behind that table: data comes into HubSpot only if it drives an action or a decision. Order history tells a rep which accounts are slipping. A complaint flag stops a rep walking into a hospital blind. Lot numbers tell a salesperson nothing, so they stay where your auditors expect to find them. Patient data stays in clinical systems, and HubSpot sees none of it.

Integrations

Which integrations do medical device companies need?

Start with the ERP, then case management and stock, then marketing and events, then identity and reporting. Anything HubSpot can’t see, it can’t act on, and neither can your agents. The ERP is the integration that turns HubSpot from a contact list into a sales system. See our integration approach.

  1. ERP
  2. Case management and stock
  3. Marketing and events
  4. Identity and reporting

Start here

SAP Business One

For Dent-med Materials, a Dutch distributor of biomaterials and surgical instruments for dental implantology, we moved the business off Archie CRM and built a bi-directional HubSpot and SAP Business One integration on AWS middleware, covering the deal lifecycle, product catalog sync, automatic creation of business partners in SAP when a deal closes, and margin reporting. For Fleming Medical, an Irish distributor of diagnostics, wound care, first aid and defibrillators, we designed the revenue operations architecture, advised on the SAP Business One middleware and set up HubSpot Data Hub. We’ve supported them since.

Start here

Oracle NetSuite and IFS

For Accora, a UK maker of specialist seating, profiling beds and pressure care mattresses for hospitals and care homes, we built a custom HubSpot and Oracle NetSuite integration on AWS that syncs contacts, companies and items, followed by a data cleanse and a 12-month support program. For Kimal, we brought data from IFS ERP and legacy systems into HubSpot as part of the CRM rollout.

Then

Surgical case and inventory systems

For device companies that cover cases, the case system holds the best data in the business: which surgeon used what, where and how often. We assess these integrations case by case. For the US spine distributor, we scoped the Move Medical integration as a second phase, after the CRM foundation had settled and the reps were using it.

Then

Marketing, events and congresses

For Merz Aesthetics UK, a client since 2022, we built a two-way Cvent and HubSpot sync for webinars and events, alongside a Salesforce sync, journey builds and data deduplication. For Kimal, we migrated marketing from Mailchimp. For an ophthalmic device maker, we moved data from Pipedrive, Mailchimp and spreadsheets into HubSpot and automated their conference follow-up.

Decide

Salesforce: replace or connect

We don’t always tell medtech companies to rip out Salesforce. Mainstay Medical, which makes a restorative treatment device for chronic low back pain, runs HubSpot across three domains alongside Salesforce. We built contact intake, lead scoring and routing, nurture programs and attribution reporting across both. For others, a clean migration is the right answer.

Then

Identity, productivity and reporting

For Kimal, we connected HubSpot to Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD) for single sign-on, along with Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, LinkedIn and Qlik Sense. IT teams in regulated businesses care about who can log in and from where, and SSO answers most of that conversation.

How we build them

A Zapier connection that pushes closed deals into SAP as sales orders will pass testing. Then a rep moves a deal back a stage and forward again, the Zap fires twice, and a hospital receives two shipments of procedure packs. Or an API change stops the sync quietly and an order sits in HubSpot for a week before anyone in the warehouse sees it.

For business-critical connections we build on Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, with error handling, retries, monitoring, logging and the security controls your IT and quality teams will ask about. We don’t build ERP syncs on Zapier.

ApproachWhere we use it in medtech
HubSpot native integrations and Data HubEmail and calendar logging, Microsoft 365, standard apps, data quality and syncs between HubSpot and well-supported tools
Zapier or MakeLow-volume automations between cloud tools, such as forms, scheduling and notifications
AWS or Azure middlewareERP, orders, pricing, product catalogs, case and inventory systems, and anything your quality or finance team relies on

Go-to-market data

What go-to-market data should a medical device company track in HubSpot?

Track signals from the people and accounts already using your products. In medtech, your next sale usually follows a surgeon, a reorder pattern or a procurement cycle you already have a view of.

01

Clinicians changing hospitals

When a surgeon who uses your device moves to a new hospital, you have the warmest introduction there is. When a champion leaves an account, your position there is at risk. We route the follow-up to the right rep.

02

Reorder patterns

A consumables account that drops 30% month on month is telling you something. With ERP order data in HubSpot, the rep sees it this week instead of finance spotting it next quarter.

03

Evaluations that stall

A product trial with no follow-up in three weeks is usually a lost deal. We flag them so someone acts.

04

Tenders and framework renewals

Public hospital buying runs on fixed dates. We track renewal dates on the account and start the bid process early enough to influence the specification.

05

Capital replacement cycles

Installed equipment has a working life. Knowing what you or a competitor installed, and when, tells you where next year’s capital budget conversations should happen.

06

Congress and education engagement

Who came to the workshop, attended the webinar or stopped by the stand. We tie it to the opportunities that follow, so marketing can show which events produce pipeline.

07

New sites and service lines

A new surgical center, cath lab or ambulatory unit is a reason to call. We bring them in through enrichment tools and Claude-based research agents.

Act on them sooner

Our GTM Engineering team builds outreach, enrichment and AI agents on your account and order context.

Compliance and regulated data

How do you handle compliance and regulated data in a medtech CRM?

Keep regulated records in the systems built for them, keep patient data out of the CRM, and design HubSpot so your compliance team can see how your people interact with healthcare professionals.

Device companies work under rules on how they engage with clinicians, from industry codes of ethical practice to transparency reporting on payments and transfers of value. A CRM that logs meetings, meals, sponsored training and congress support in a consistent way makes that reporting easier.

The bigger risk is scope creep. We’ve seen companies start logging customer complaints in Service Hub because it’s convenient. A complaint about a medical device can be a reportable event, and your quality management system is where it has to be recorded, assessed and closed. HubSpot can flag that a complaint exists and route it to quality. It should never be where the complaint lives.

We design permissions so commercial teams in different business units or countries see what they need and nothing more, and we build GDPR consent and retention rules in from the start. We don’t put patient data in HubSpot, and we’ll push back if your team asks us to.

AI with Claude

How can AI agents help a medical device sales team?

They give reps back time, catch signals people miss and make head office’s data better without asking the field for more typing. Through our Anthropic partnership, we build Claude automations that reach context HubSpot can’t see and bring it into the CRM in a structured form:

  • Pre-visit briefs. Claude pulls an account’s order history, open evaluations, recent cases, complaints in progress and news into one page before a rep walks into the hospital.
  • Voice-to-CRM visit notes. The rep talks for 60 seconds in the car park, and Claude turns it into a logged visit, updated opportunity and next step for the rep to confirm.
  • Account risk monitoring. Claude watches ERP order data for reorder drops and flags them to the rep with the context they need for the call.
  • Tender and proposal drafting. Claude drafts tenders and proposals grounded in your previous bids, product documentation and clinical evidence, for your team to review and finish.
  • Clinician and account research. Claude watches key surgeons and hospitals for moves, new service lines and published work.

Put any of these on a CRM full of stale contacts and missing order history and they’ll give reps confident, wrong answers. We build the context layer first for that reason.

Groups and roll-ups

One CRM across the business

Private equity and trade buyers are consolidating device distributors and specialist manufacturers, and every acquisition brings another CRM, another ERP and another sales team with its own habits.

We help groups build one CRM across the business, with a repeatable playbook for bringing each new company, brand or country into it. Shared definitions, a shared product and account model and consolidated reporting let leadership see revenue, account overlap and cross-sell across the group. Kimal’s four business units now work in one HubSpot environment with a shared foundation.

Multi-brand group · Franchise Brands

1,200 users

The largest HubSpot implementation in EMEA.

  • BeforeMultiple brands and countries on SugarCRM, Zoho and several marketing platforms
  • AfterOne HubSpot environment, with the operational systems each brand relied on connected

When we tell a medical device company not to buy

Some companies ask us for a full CRM rollout before they have a commercial team to use it. If you’re still waiting on FDA clearance or a CE mark, with two people selling and no orders yet, you don’t need a multi-hub implementation with ERP integration. You need a clean contact base, a simple pipeline and a way to run your launch marketing. Other companies want HubSpot to fix a field team that doesn’t have territories, targets or a clear sales process. Software won’t fix that either.

When that’s the case, we say so. Sometimes the right first project is a few weeks of design work. Sometimes it’s LaunchRight, our fixed-scope onboarding package, which a Finnish orthopedic implant maker used to go live with an industry-specific setup without a long project. We’d rather sell you the smaller project that works than the bigger one that doesn’t.

Who works on your project

Senior people who've done this before

Every Periti project is run by a lead consultant who has delivered at least 50 projects. They own the design, run the workshops with your sales leaders, marketing and reps, and make the hard calls. Consultants handle configuration, migration and testing.

When a project needs integration with your ERP, case management or other business systems, we assign dedicated engineers rather than stretching consultants into developer roles. Our directors review the work and hold every project to the same standard.

How a project runs

From design to growth

01

Design and Strategy

Spend time with your reps and sales leaders to understand how deals move through hospitals and distributors. Design the account and clinician model, pipelines, boundaries, integrations, permissions and AI.

02

Build

Configure in sprints and demo to real reps early, so the people who will use HubSpot can correct course while changes are cheap.

03

Migrate and integrate

Bring in the data that serves a purpose, connect your ERP and other systems, and test against real accounts, orders and scenarios.

04

Enable

Train reps on their own territories, managers on their dashboards and marketing on their campaigns, in sessions built around field schedules.

05

Grow

Agree a roadmap so the system keeps pace as you launch products, enter markets and acquire companies.

Where to start

Five ways to work with us

Most companies

Design and Strategy

Most of our medtech engagements start here. You leave with a design your leadership team agrees on, whoever builds it.

Fast start

LaunchRight

Our industry-specific HubSpot onboarding package. A low-risk way to go live quickly on a proven setup, well suited to device companies preparing for commercial launch.

Ongoing

Customer Success

Ongoing support from a team that knows your portal. Six of our medtech clients are on it today, and Merz Aesthetics UK has renewed every year since 2022.

Ongoing

Embedded RevOps

An experienced Periti operator runs your revenue operations as part of your team, without a full-time hire.

Growth

GTM Engineering

Outreach, enrichment and AI agents built on your account and order context, for device companies ready to grow into new territories and specialties.

Companies we work with

18 medical device and equipment clients

Our implants and surgical devices clients cover orthopedic, vascular access, ophthalmic and neurostimulation devices and procedure packs. Hospital, care and mobility equipment makers are an equally large group, followed by medical device and laboratory distributors.

We also work with 48 more healthcare and life sciences companies, including clinics, dental and aesthetics groups, healthtech software companies, pharmaceutical businesses and care providers.

Medical device and equipment clients, by segment
  1. Implants and surgical devices5
  2. Hospital, care and mobility equipment5
  3. Medical device and laboratory distributors4
  4. Diagnostics and digital medtech2
  5. Medical aesthetics2

Questions

Medical device CRM FAQs

Yes, for manufacturers and distributors with field sales teams of roughly 10 to a few hundred people. It handles accounts, clinicians, opportunities, marketing and service well, and reps adopt it faster than heavier platforms. Orders, stock, traceability and complaints stay in your ERP and quality systems, connected to HubSpot.

Make it fast on a phone and give reps something back every time they open it. We cut fields until a visit takes under a minute to log, bring in order history from the ERP, and train reps on their own territories. Adoption follows usefulness.

Yes. We've built HubSpot integrations with SAP Business One, Oracle NetSuite and IFS ERP for medtech clients, usually on AWS or Azure middleware. The first design decision is which system owns each record, and we settle it before building anything.

No. Zapier is fine for low-volume automations between cloud tools. ERP syncs carry orders, pricing and customer records, and a silent failure or a duplicate order costs far more than proper middleware.

Model distributors as accounts with their own territories, targets and pipelines, and pull sell-in data from your ERP. Ask distributors to register deals only where they'll do it. Where they won't, reorder patterns tell you most of what you need.

Yes. We've built custom Case objects linked to surgeons and hospitals for a spine and neurosurgery distributor. Where you already run a case management system, we integrate it so reps don't enter cases twice.

No. Complaints about a medical device belong in your quality management system, where they can be assessed, reported and closed under your procedures. HubSpot can flag that a complaint exists and route it to quality so the rep knows before the next visit.

We don't recommend it and we don't build it. Device companies sell to clinicians and hospitals, and the CRM doesn't need patient information to do that job. Keep it in clinical systems.

Sometimes. For Mainstay Medical we run HubSpot alongside Salesforce with attribution reporting across both. For others a full migration makes sense. We look at what each system does for you today and recommend accordingly.

Use separate pipelines with different stages and forecast rules. Tie consumables accounts to ERP order data so a reorder drop shows up as a risk for the rep before it shows up in the quarter.

The most useful ones write pre-visit briefs, turn spoken notes into CRM updates, flag accounts whose orders are dropping, draft tender responses and watch key clinicians and hospitals for change. They depend on good context in the CRM, so we build that first.

Yes. Kimal runs four business units in one HubSpot environment, with separate pipelines for NHS and distributor sales. It takes careful design of permissions, teams and reporting, and we bring that design from rollouts as large as Franchise Brands' 1,200 users.

With a Design and Strategy project. We map how your reps, distributors and marketing team win business and design the account model, integrations and reporting before anything is built. Companies preparing for launch can start faster with LaunchRight.

Talk to us about your medical device business

You might be replacing a legacy CRM, connecting HubSpot to your ERP, bringing distributors and acquired companies onto one platform, or trying to get your reps to use the system you already pay for. Tell us where you are. We’ll tell you how we’d get you there, including the parts you might not want to hear.

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