This past February we attended an equipment planners meeting outside of Dallas Texas for the first time. The show had been recommended to us by Cindy Juhas of Hospital Associates. She indicated it would be a great opportunity for Bovie Medical to show it's generators, lighting, anesthesia and our new mobile surgery table. The show has an interesting format. Half the time you are doing a reverse trade show, where you approach the equipment planners and talk about your products.
The other half is a typical trade show where they come around and see what is in your booth. Cindy indicated that the hospitals had cut back on their internal resources and were relying more and more on equipment planners. By attending this meeting it could get our foot in the door in places we didn't even know about. Janis Dezso our Vice President of sales and marketing and I were the Bovie representatives, which meant we had to set up the booth. Janis and I had seen the light, anesthesia and surgery table set up, but has never actually done it ourselves. Luckily, despite my lack of mechanical aptitude, I had paid attention at our recent sales training meeting. There were a lot of parts and some of it was really heavy, but ultimately success!
Now comes the surprise part of the meeting. The first equipment planner we spoke with knew the term Bovie but didn't realize it was a real company. That surprised me, because within the distribution world, they think Bovie is much larger than we are. I don't mean some of distribution knows Bovie, I mean EVERYBODY knows Bovie. So a little surprised, we sat down with the next equipment planner and he didn't know we were a real company either. This was repeated over and over again with one of them actually telling us that the day before he had argued with someone trying to convince them that Bovie didn't exist except for being the inventor of electrosurgery.
Most of the planners used a software company that was barely aware of us either. So, step one was to get our entire equipment line on their program, and we are in the final stages of completion. Step two is to get in front of these equipment planners and make sure Bovie Medical Corporation has a reasonable part of their mind share.
This is a work in process, but I guarantee you that at next year's meeting, they will know Bovie Medical Corporation is a whole lot more than just the inventor of electrosurgery.
Feel free to contact us or leave a comment below if you have any questions!
J. Robert Saron
President, Bovie Medical Corporation
