You have a well-defined target audience; clear objectives and your content is compelling! Your budget has been carefully allocated, and your sales force has been well trained. In fact, their message delivery has been on point and market share is growing as forecasted. While you don’t want to mess with success you also know you will be expected to position your brand for continued growth in a process that will begin in late summer and culminate in a new “brand plan” this October. While it seems far away it’s always a stressful process to describe what new strategies and tactics will continue the growth of your brand.
How will you build on the current messaging in a way that is aligned with your brand identity? You have a few good ideas that are worth testing with real customers, but you don’t want to disrupt momentum or signal that the current message is no longer worth repeating (which is the furthest thing from the truth). It would be great to test ideas in real-time without causing any confusion or disruption to the current plan of action. If only there were a team of vetted professionals that have the same skill set as your field team and could provide a quick assessment of your strategy without causing disruption. It would be even better if you could test several competing ideas at once and gauge which idea creates the biggest impact with your customers. Thank goodness testing new ideas is possible with a relatively small investment.
The Solution
Market research done correctly is a very powerful tool and can often get you very close to your answers, but it can be expensive and time consuming. If not done correctly, it can yield false positives or false negatives. Customer on-line surveys are quick and can also be insightful, but they are subject to providing an incomplete picture drawn from a leap of faith. The best way to really understand customers is to engage with them directly and understand their perceptions by measuring their actions and responses in the real world. You can hire a team of sales professionals from an outsourced sales provider to test your new campaign, especially if it’s a transactional idea. It can be a small team of 3-10 people for a short period of time (3-6months).
These sales professionals may target customers that your sales force is not currently selling to because they are lower volume (non-targets). Their feedback is probably exactly in line with your higher volume customers and their challenges are those encountered in the real world, not talked about philosophically behind the hidden glass. How would these customers really react to any new program or idea that has a transactional element to it? Would the customer actually order samples or would they enroll their patients in self-care program. Would the customer welcome help from a benefits reimbursement specialist? Will your target customer need to see a representative in their office, or would they be open to participating in the same program offered from a virtual sales representative?
You may be able to test both of these assumptions at the same time and measure the impact while still only spending a fraction of what it will cost for a full-scale team rollout. You might want to make sure you have the right answers before committing to next year’s strategy and allocating a large investment which of course, is expected to deliver the brand growth already modeled into your launch expectations. Even if your assumptions were right on target, this real-world testing can help ensure that there are no holes in your strategy and you are prepared for excellent execution. Call The Caswood Group and let us take on an idea generated from your internal team or your agency of record, and create a real world pilot assessment.
