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Jackie Steinwall, a sales and marketing executive in the life sciences industry, was first introduced to KeyOps while working as the commercial head for a top global pharmaceutical company. Charged with improving sales for the company’s gastroenterology portfolio in the Canadian market, Jackie was seeking out physician feedback when she met Dr. Sam Elfassy – a Canadian gastroenterologist and KeyOps co-founder.
After sharing his thoughts on the company’s products, Dr. Elfassy mentioned another way Jackie could connect with a growing network of gastroenterologists: Partnering with KeyOps to gather physician insights.
“I think it was through fate that we learned more about KeyOps,” explained Jackie. “Unless Dr. Elfassy had mentioned the company, I don’t think I would have done any research on new and innovative ways to gather physician insights. We would have gone with a more traditional market research route, which would have been incredibly expensive and time-consuming.”
In the years since this chance introduction, Jackie has partnered with KeyOps to transform the approach to market research at two different pharmaceutical companies, impacting multiple product lines.
THE PROBLEM:
As the commercial head for a global pharmaceutical company, Jackie knew that physician insights would be key to understanding why her gastroenterology product was losing ground to the competition. But her options for gathering applicable market research needed to make key business decisions were limited.
Her employer didn’t have any existing research available, so the only option was going to her global colleagues for help. At the corporate level, the company had a contract with a traditional market research firm. So the next steps would be organizing a large, global market research project that would include a quantitative study and qualitative interviews. From Jackie’s perspective, this approach introduced two significant problems:
The process of developing, approving, and conducting a new market research study would take months to execute – delaying the company’s ability to make the meaningful changes required to meet its business goals.
A global study would not accurately reflect the realities of the Canadian market.
With these challenges in mind, Jackie believed there was a strong business case to pursue a new and different approach to market research. By engaging KeyOps, her goal was to quickly gather insights from a targeted group of gastroenterologists – the physicians who mattered most to her product portfolio.
The Process:
During her first meeting with KeyOps, it became evident that the team understood the pharmaceutical industry – including the requirements of working with these complex and highly regulated businesses.
“Because the company’s leaders have experience working in the life sciences industry, they speak the same language,” said Jackie. “That made it very easy to share our needs – from administrative and contracting processes to survey design and implementation.”
In the pharmaceutical industry, it can be notoriously difficult for companies to bring on new vendors. But KeyOps worked directly with the company’s procurement team to seamlessly navigate the compliance and procurement process – with no effort required on Jackie’s part.
In less than six weeks, KeyOps was approved as a vendor and ready to gather insights. So with the administrative work behind them, the team worked quickly to understand Jackie’s unique business needs.
She assembled a cross-functional team to share her business goals. Then, KeyOps interviewed the key stakeholders to gain a deeper understanding of the related objectives. As a result of these discussions, KeyOps uncovered the specific data required to help meet the company’s business goals. Those insights were used to build the first survey, and additional topic areas were identified as potential follow-up engagements.
“In my experience, market research can be very tactical in nature,” said Jackie. “What I appreciated about working with KeyOps is that they approach projects from a more strategic perspective.”
The Outcome:
After building each survey and gaining internal approval, Jackie’s team had access to completed physician insights in about a week – a dramatic difference compared to the months-long process of engaging in traditional market research efforts. In one survey, the team received an 80% response in less than 48 hours.
Not only did KeyOps deliver insights faster than traditional market research methods, but Jackie could be confident that her team's feedback was from the right group of physicians – those responsible for prescribing the company’s product to patients. As each survey was being built, she provided a list of target physicians to the KeyOps team, who could verify that 80% to 90% of the doctors included were already part of the company’s growing physician network. That level of specificity was a key selling point for her leadership team.
“KeyOps has created such an easy platform for physicians to use, and you can tell by the response times,” said Jackie. “Your questions are only sent to qualified physicians, and they can pick and choose the surveys they want to respond to right from their phone.”
According to Jackie, this type of on-demand access to targeted physician insights made a significant impact to her business in several ways:
She could quickly test her company’s messaging and strategies to learn what resonated with physicians – adapting the sales and marketing approach if needed.
From a budgetary standpoint, a substantial amount of money was saved by testing messaging and patient support programs before anything went in-market to physicians.
KeyOps data helped “quiet the noise.” Sales numbers alone don’t always tell the whole story. But having access to real-time insights ensured business decisions could always be defended – since they were based on timely market research.
If KeyOps data uncovered a unique insight or finding, it was easy to build and send a follow-up survey to gather additional information. There was no need to wait until the next “wave” of scheduled research.
“KeyOps offers a different way of looking at market research,” said Jackie. “You know you’re going to get a rich return on your targets, and you’re going to get it back in less than a week.”
Traditional market research methods, such as engaging research firms and advisory boards, can take months to gather any useful data. That’s why we founded KeyOps: To reduce the time-to-insight for life science companies, while creating a better experience for physicians. To learn how KeyOps can help reduce your time-to-insight schedule a demo today.
