For medical device, diagnostics & healthtech producers
Your device is already proven.
Spain will make you prove it again.
I took a medical device into Spanish public primary care and pushed it to 90% of its category. By 2024, Iberia was that company's largest market in the world. The first of those years I sold nothing — that year is the one you don't have to repeat.
What I do: work out whether Spain is worth entering and at what cost, design how you enter it, and stay through the execution — in three phases, each ending in a decision you can stop at.
Madrid. You work directly with me — no juniors, no hand-offs. English, Spanish or Slovenian.
Why plans slip here
Spain is not one market. It is seventeen — eighteen, once you count INGESA.
I have seen the same story many times: a good product, a fair price, one distributor — and two years of silence. It is almost never the product. These are the six things that break the plan.
You don’t sell to Spain. You sell to eighteen health systems.
Seventeen autonomous communities run their own health services, plus INGESA for Ceuta and Melilla. Below them the Ministry counts 173 territorial health-management units, and beneath those roughly 2,700 basic health zones. Some communities buy centrally — Madrid has a purchasing agency whose frameworks bind every SERMAS centre. Others split it: the Basque Country buys about half centrally and half through the local service organisation. A launch plan that assumes one buyer is already wrong.
Spain has 848 hospitals. Only 387 of them are public.
The rest are private — more than half the hospitals, but under a third of the beds: 46,552 against 113,127. Counting hospitals overstates the private market; counting beds tells you where volume is. And a tender win is not one thing: some award the right to supply up to a quantity over years, and every real order is still won afterwards, hospital by hospital — others buy in one shot, and the winner takes all of it that day. Either way the decision sits with a committee far wider than the clinicians: finance, economics, innovation, services, the clinical directorates, and IT — which approves the integration into the health record and the security review, and can stop you on its own. A pitch built only for the clinical case loses in the other five chairs.
The distribution model is the decision.
Selling direct, or through local or national distributors, is not a logistics detail: it sets your negotiating power and the weight your portfolio carries inside someone else's catalogue. And each route — public tender, pharmacy, parapharmacy, retail chain, online — comes with its own margin, payment terms and decision-maker. Your own active part in building the market is what shows up in the results.
In primary care, the nurses decide how far you go.
The specialist takes the first meeting. The nurses using the device every day are the ones who drive wider adoption — and wider adoption is where the biggest contract is. Most foreign manufacturers spend their whole first year talking to the wrong chair.
Foreign evidence opens the conversation. Spanish evidence closes it.
Your CE mark and your German trial data get you a hearing. What moves a Spanish purchasing committee is evidence generated here, with clinicians they recognise. Building that takes a year you have not budgeted — unless you start it before you need it.
The clock is longer than your plan says.
Ethics review, centre conformity and contracting run on published timelines that first-time sponsors routinely under-budget by half. Knowing the real ones is not a detail; it is the difference between a plan and a wish.
Territorial figures: Ministerio de Sanidad, Ordenación Sanitaria del Territorio (SIAP, 2024). Hospital count: Catálogo Nacional de Hospitales 2025, data at 31 December 2024.
How we go
In phases, with a decision at the end of each.
Nobody should sign a two-year entry into a market they do not know yet. So every phase has its own deliverable, and a point where we can calmly stop.
Market research and a potential assessment
Whether Spain is worth entering at all, and at what it would really cost. If the answer is no, that is a result too — and a far cheaper one than finding out in year two.
What you leave with
A written market read: category size and structure, a named competitor and price map, who sits on the purchasing decision community by community, the channel recommendation with its reasoning, and a costed entry budget.
Decision: enter, or do not.
Entry strategy and a three-year P&L
How you enter, and what it earns. Built for a market where the buyer is a committee, the evidence has to be Spanish, and the clock runs longer than your plan assumes.
What you leave with
An entry plan you could hand to your board: channel and partner profile, the price and communication position, a sequenced timeline with the real regulatory and contracting clocks, and a three-year P&L in a spreadsheet you keep and can edit.
An entry strategy and a basic three-year P&L.
Implementation
I stay for the execution, or your team takes it from here. Both are fine — the strategy is yours either way.
What you leave with
A shortlist of vetted partners with the terms to negotiate, the first key-account plans, and a written operating rhythm — the meetings, the numbers reviewed in them, and who owns each one.
Monthly collaboration, or execution in your own hands.
Who this is for
Three cases.
- A producer with its own proven product, established at home and in the region, and now ready to take it into Spain.
- A company that already tried Spain through one distributor and it did not work out — usually because the wrong channel was chosen, not the wrong partner.
- A team with nobody who knows Spain from the inside, that does not want to pay for its first year with its own mistakes.
And one thing that matters more than all three
Timing — and two different moments both work. If Spain is already decided and you need it executed, that is the most straightforward version of this work. If you are still choosing your next market, now is the moment, while the decision is open — once another country is chosen, Spain is arguing against a decision already made. The only case I would rather postpone is a company with no window in sight at all. Tell me when yours is, and I will come back then.
Still proving it clinically? Start with the Spanish clinical foundation instead.
Just as important
What I don't do.
- I am not an agency, and I do not take over your brand.
- I do not sell entry into a market that does not pay. If the assessment shows Spain is wrong for this product, that is a result too.
- I am not a regulatory consultant, and I do not prepare your technical documentation.
- If I am not the right person for your product, I tell you in the first conversation.
Proof
Two legs, not one.
Depth: ten years of medical devices in Iberia — public tenders, clinical evidence, health economics, and a distribution network built account by account. The hardest channel there is.
Breadth: before that, eighteen years in consumer goods, drinks and media — including a portfolio with Johnson & Johnson, Durex and Scholl. Pharmacy, parafarmacia and the retail shelf behave differently from the hospital, and I have sold through both.
The focus is medtech. The breadth matters because devices increasingly cross that line — into pharmacy, into retail, into direct — and the question stays the same: which channel, which partner, at what price, in what order.
share of automatic ABI devices in Spanish public primary care — with 85% penetration
Iberia's share of the manufacturer's global revenue in 2024
sides of the table — I have worked as the manufacturer and as the distributor
Both figures can be traced through published annual reports and Spanish public-tender records. I would rather you checked them than believed me. The full story, including the first year I sold nothing.
Not entering Spain right now?
Two other places companies get stuck.
You're still proving it clinically
You need Spanish clinical evidence before Spain will take you seriously — and you don't know who to ask, or what it costs. I bring the societies, investigators and hospitals together and hand you a protocol, a role map, a plan and a costed budget.
Spanish clinical foundation Once you are inYou're growing and the machine is breaking
Money is about to be spent on growth you cannot yet repeat — new hires, new markets, a bigger funnel. The engine needs building before the money goes.
Scaling machineryHow this starts
Start with a first meeting. You'll leave knowing how it works and what it costs.
An hour, free, and confidential — under an NDA if you want one. We work out what you actually need to enter Spain, I show you how I work, what happens in what order, and how I charge. Nothing is generic: by the end you know whether Spain is your next move, and whether I am the right person for it.
If we both think it fits, you get a written offer — a working plan with deliverables, milestones, and who is involved on your side and mine.
- · Free, about an hour
- · Confidential, NDA on request
- · You leave knowing how I charge
- · No obligation, and no follow-up sequence
Prefer email? Write to primoz.verbic@scale-craft.com — I answer within one working day.
Spain isn't next for you yet?
Then this is the wrong month, not the wrong fit. Tell me roughly when you'll be deciding your next market and I'll come back to you then — not before.