Coloplast – Share Your Care

Challenge
Coloplast Wound Care develops products that treat chronic wounds. This area of development is driven by new launches of highly technological products, and the brunt of the sales force’s resources are targeted toward the launch and sales of these new products. These leave the more mature products – which give the largest percentage of sales – to themselves.

Therefore, the activity needed to prove that it could be used to establish a dialogue with – and sales from – non-visited practitioners. It also needed to prove that, if successful, it also could be used on visited practitioners.

So the challenge was to develop a go-to-market model that could:

1. Establish and build up a relation to the non-visited practitioners
2. Maintain this relation
3. Ensure increased sales
4. Maintain and develop the sales of mature products

To evaluate the effect of the communication itself, the dialogue was conducted without use of incentives. To isolate the result in existing sales- and marketing analyses, the test was conducted in regions throughout Spain – where Coloplast had not yet visited. It was arranged according to the geographic areas that these analyses could eliminate, in terms of ability to document the dialogue’s sales effect.

A target group that doesn’t buy just anything…
Doctors and nurses are known to not involve themselves in campaigns/activities that openly endorse industry products. Thus one of our challenges became generating interest without openly promoting Coloplast. Another challenge was that knowledge of Coloplast in this group of non-visited hospitals was very limited. At the same time, they’re a much-desired professional group to enter a dialogue with because they have great influence in which products are bought.

Solution
The dialogue’s focal point: A wound care guide helps you choose the correct treatment

Practitioners and doctors in hospitals have 800 different choices in how to treat chronic wounds. And because the area is typically of low interest and treatment of chronic wounds doesn’t happen every day for all practitioners, it’s not expected that they be fully updated. This usually means that treatment choices are based on habit and former experience over more thorough, well-thought out choices that would best benefit the patient.

To help doctors and nurses choose the right treatment, we developed the Wound Care Guide. This guide comprises a simple chart that the doctor or nurse can use to look up what treatment method would work best. The guide also gives information about how to assess, treat and evaluate individual patients.

Focus on an impartial treatment tool
To make the guide as theoretical and impartial as possible – and thereby ensure the recipient’s willingness to use it – we chose to keep all Coloplast product information on the back page. This way we purposefully underplayed our own role by acknowledging that there are also other suppliers in the industry. But the one treating the wound can also see in the chart what Coloplast’s products are called within the various treatment types.

It was vital for us that the guide could be used as a significant tool in treatment situations. So we produced it in various, easily accessible formats: A pocket guide for the doctor’s coat, a poster for the medical cabinets and a desktop icon with a link to the online version.

Share Your Care dialogue: An exchange of experience between professional wound specialists
To ensure involvement from doctors who had previously not been visited by Coloplast, we made sure that the Wound Care Guide was actually developed by doctors. We then sent it out to non-visited doctors and used a testimonial from other wound specialists as a segue to a dialogue:

“The most important thing is that I feel secure in the treatment I choose”

From analyses and interviews with practitioners, we knew that there was a mutual concern about ensuring the correct patient treatment from among the many offers on the market. We chose a testimonial for two reasons:

1. To build a bridge over the lack of familiarity with Coloplast in Spain.
2. To explore the hypothesis that doctors would rather share their experiences with other doctors than with the industry. Coloplast then needed to act as a catalyst for information sharing – not as a medical company.

An info dialogue in 8 steps
Under the concept “Share Your Care” we developed a dialogue in which doctors and nurses shared their views and experiences of the guide and wound treatment in general. In a comprehensive survey (9 pages) we also asked what challenges they had with their own patients and invited them to test Coloplast’s treatment solutions and share these results with colleagues. Those who treated wounds could choose themselves whether they would rather fill out a hard copy survey or one online. In the online version we started out with a little relation-building video in which Coloplast’s Spanish sales and marketing director spoke about the background for the dialogue and motivated them to participate.

The dialogue consisted of 8 emails in which we asked questions, offered the Wound Care Guide in its variants, had it evaluated and started up product tests. To motivate the target group even more to participate, we let them know already in the first communication that we would send a summary of the colleagues’ opinions and experiences within wound care to them afterward.

• Communication 1: Invitation to the dialogue
• Communication 2: Reminder
• Communication 3: Individualized thank-you letter for answering, with guide
• Communication 4: Email with link to online desktop icon
• Communication 5: Email with link to online survey regarding use of desktop icon
• Communication 6: Package with test kit for patient test at each individual practitioner’s office
• Communication 7: Follow-up of patient kit
• Communication 8: Individualized summary to respondents (and a variant to non-respondents) of the division of views and experiences toward wound treatment as well as experiences of the completed patient tests

Continued dialogue via online Wound Care Guide.

A treatment tool and sales tool in one
The main purpose of the dialogue was to sell the Wound Care Guide in as a tool in treatment situations, because it would then work in the sales of all of Coloplast’s wound care selection – both mature and new products. The online version of the Wound Care Guide would namely be able to ensure a continued dialogue and give the possibility to introduce new products. That’s why, throughout the dialogue, we also offered the Wound Care Guide to those who hadn’t yet ordered.

Results
Throughout regions in Spain that had never been visited by Coloplast consultants, we received a total response of more than 11.92% without the use of incentives. Response was more than doubled via online sign-up and the “tip a friend” function. In total, the Share Your Care dialogue has generated a response equivalent to 27.1% of the target group, as many signed up online after hearing about the Wound Care Guide.

• +9% sales increase in areas in which patient tests had been conducted

• In the areas where at least 1 patient test was conducted, sales increased by 9% compared to before. After the 6-month long test period, sales were still up 9%! (on average for the entire test period!)

• +5% sales increase in areas that had received the dialogue (Communications 1, 2 and 8) but not participated in the patient test

• “The Wound Care Guide contributes to better wound treatment and saves time”

• 9 out of 10 practitioners deem the Wound Care Guide very useful. The non-visited market is much larger than the visited. In Germany, for example, Coloplast visits only 2,000 out of 60,000 practitioners. Sales increases of +5% and +9%, respectfully, give an idea of what consequences this go-to-market model can have for Coloplast. Or as the director of Wound Care in Spain put it when he singled out the south side of Mallorca as one of the test regions and simultaneously forbade us to use incentives in his market:

“If you can make it here – we can make it anywhere”
and after the test:

“It worked in remote areas, not visited, with little or no awareness of Coloplast and with no incentives. It will work anywhere.”