Are your Consult Meetings Designed to Fail?

Consult meetings and advisory boards are arguably two of the most important things that you do as a marketer. Yet I often see critical mistakes in meeting design that lead to brand underperformance, wasted resources and time. 

Simple test. When you want to learn how something is treated or being done by healthcare professionals (HCPs), do you sit the members of your advisory board or consult meeting together around a big table and have a discussion about it? If you do, there is a good chance that the information that you get could cause you to make critical mistakes when you are developing the messaging, strategy and tactics for your brand.

Let me tell you a story. A number of years ago, I was leading a brand that was getting a new indication. To better understand how the doctors interacted with, diagnosed and treated the affected patients, we ran a series of consultant meetings across the country.  

For the first three meetings we sat HCPs around a table and asked the group to describe how they would engage in the treatment of these patients. At each meeting the participants spoke about all the things that they did to help these patients and the treatment algorithms that they would follow. They seemed very committed to engaging with and helping these patients.

After the third meeting there was a cancelled flight and I ended up having a beer with one of the participants at the airport. After a couple of drinks he admitted to me that he absolutely hated dealing with this type of patient so he referred them to someone else as fast as he possibly could.

In our subsequent consultant meetings we changed our meeting design to better understand the actual behaviors and what was driving them. It turned out that virtually every HCP acted the same way because they considered these patients to be difficult to deal with.  If we had not altered our meeting design, we would have missed this critical insight and later wasted massive resources and time in the way that we approached educating HCPs.   

I have done literally hundreds of meetings in multiple therapeutic areas across different industries and have seen exactly the same sort of thing happen over and over again. Participants will sincerely believe what they are telling you but in reality, act differently. That could be because they want to look good to their colleagues, want to please you or because of reasons that they have a hard time admitting even to themselves.

Unfortunately, it is rare that we can sit down for a couple of beers with the members of our consult meetings or ad boards. So, if you are running one of these meetings, it is critical that it is designed to understand the conscious and unconscious beliefs and behaviors of the HCPs as well as what it is that is driving them. 

If you do not do this, you will end up pursuing strategies and tactics that do not work because they are not addressing the underlying reality.  

There are many different ways to optimize meeting design but, in my next blog, I will speak to the top three blind spots that marketers sometimes build into their meetings and what you can do to avoid them.

Until then, I would love to hear any stories that you may have about blind spots that you discovered when working on your brand. I can be reached at marc@solutionsmrc.com. I look forward to hearing from you!

Marc

Looking for someone to help you optimize the design of one of your meetings? We can help! Just send an e-mail to marc@solutionsmrc.com .

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