This results in cheeseburger marketing.

The reason I call it cheeseburger marketing is that, like cheeseburgers themselves, cheeseburger marketing is fun, tasty, filling, and absolutely no good for you. After not much time, cheeseburgers make you fat and sick.

Here is how to tell if you're doing cheeseburger MarCom:

1. Creative choices as to formats, colors, media, images, photography are driven by personal choices and individual opinions rather than real reasoning. This puts personal taste ahead of what makes sense for your message.

2. Messaging is egocentric. You can tell you're egocentric when you want the first line of your brochure (about a product) to be the company's mission statement. You can tell you're egocentric when every line of the brochure starts out, "We at the Acme Anvil Company …." You can tell you're egocentric when nothing in the brochure has any emotional impact on the target reader.

3. Decisions in MarCom are made whimsically, haphazardly, more with an eye to what is fun than what is useful.

4. Nobody plans. MarCom has no crisis plan, no PR plan, no strategic plan, no publication plan. Add to this no archiving of documents, no formalized procedures.

5. Nobody measures. Now this is an area where I have a lot of opinions, because some types of marketing are very easy to measure, some types are almost impossible to measure, and a lot falls in-between. So even an expert team really can never measure MarCom results to the degree that they should be measured. Everybody falls short. But in a cheeseburger MarCom department, nobody even tries to measure. This means that successes get overlooked and failures get repeated.

6. MarCom projects are based on what feels right or seems like fun, rather than what works at selling product or even what the field wants and uses.

7. Vendors are selected by who takes the staff to the best lunches and hands out the most wonderful holiday gifts. Vendors who provide good service are ignored in favor of those who come bearing gifts.

8. MarCom staff remain vigil in their quest to be uneducated about their company, their products, their technologies, and new media. Not knowing things is regarded as a badge of honor; people who understand the company's products are considered to be hapless geeks and best shunned.

9. MarCom isolates itself from other departments. MarCom players do not know other departments or issues in the company. Most MarCom members spend their time sharpening their sarcasm skills rather than their people skills.

All of these traits compare to people who would rather sit around and eat cheeseburgers and fries instead of eating healthful food and exercising. It's the mindset that favors fun and excess over discipline and health.

If you have a flabby MarCom team, you may also have a flabby Marketing team. The keys to good health follow:

1. Develop a solid understanding of what your company does, what it sells, and who else sells similar stuff.

2. Get to know your customers and your field personnel. Spend an hour or so and listen to their stories. Process this information to the point that you know what keeps your customers awake at night. (That's crucial to good marketing … knowing hot buttons.)

3. Insist that MarCom people stay up to date with new technology in their field, including social media, Internet, electronic documents and so on.

4. Make MarCom people interact with lots of other people, including scary people like engineers and software guys and gals. If your MarCom people refuse this or are panicked, you have a bunch of cheeseburgers.

5. Measure, measure, measure. Even if you do it wrong, even if your results are dubious, even if you don't know what you're doing, keep trying and keep counting.

6. Take corrective actions. Measure so you know what doesn't work and stop doing it. Measure so you know what does work: do that more.

7. Weed out the culture of "I like green." Train everyone you can that personal preferences and tastes do not matter in the creation of marketing materials. You do what the customer wants, which you determine by what works. See #6. Create a world where it is possible for a marketing director to HATE the color orange but use it effectively in marketing materials.

8. Force MarCom people to think through different areas–to look at competitive ads or review websites from other companies. Encourage them to build "swipe files," cool stuff they have seen in other uses that might be re-purposed for your marketingt.

9. Don't allow MarCom to be the idiot department. Most execs tend to regard MarCom people as dispensable clowns who can draw pictures and make up stuff. That's not because executives are dumb, it is because MarCom does not do its own branding and upgrade its image. Let MarCom market itself.

You see cheeseburger marketing in medicine every single day–egocentric messages, pretty but meaningless pictures, and badly designed pieces that cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars because teams of non-designers met for endless hours deciding on such crucial issues as line weight and fonts.
 

Even good companies can have cheeseburger marketing. So put down the cholesterol-heavy, artery-clogging fun foods and go grab an salad and hit the gym. You need to show discipline, courage, intelligence, and a lot of savvy … in your MarCom efforts. You wouldn't have much respect for a person who ate cheeseburgers all the time, talked only about himself and his pleasures, and became a big, fat slob. Your customers won't like MarCom efforts from a self-indulgent, self-referential, and self-pleasing bunch of marketers.

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LeQ Medical just got an A rating from the Houston area Better Business Bureau. LeQ Medical started in 2003 and we joined the BBB a few years later. Now we aren't really all that active in the BBB. I don't go to their meetings. They send me a newsletter, which I mostly don't read. But I do appreciate what they stand for, and we do renew our membership annually.

What does this mean to you? If you're a client, it means you're dealing with a company that is at the very highest levels in terms of customer satisfaction. Put another way, fewer people complain about LeQ Medical than other companies.

Let me inflict a few more statistics on you. Several years ago, we did a retrospective analysis of our sales data and found that  60% of the companies who did business with us came back and did 5 or more projects with us within one calendar year. We haven't updated those statistics in a couple of years, but the same pattern seems to hold. Most of the customers who use our services come back and keep using them.

So how does this happen? It really isn't just good luck and it cannot be attribute to the winning personalities of the people who work here. We have a few systems, and they are probably workable (with some adjustments) to other businesses. I never really formulated it until today but this is how I would describe it.

1. We try to do everything right, even if it takes a little extra time or some extra duct tape or whatever.
2. Being human, we are not always able to abide by Rule #1. So if we make a mistake or even if we have a near-miss, we discuss it as an office. Now we're a small office, so we have the luxury of actually sitting down and talking about what just happened. We don't do this two weeks down the road; we do it as close to the event as possible.
3. If possible, we try to figure out some kind of safeguard to put in place to prevent a future mishap. We operate on the assumption that if it happened once, it can happen again. We need to figure out how to build in more layers of security or better guarantees. ("Trying harder" is not something we would accept as a solution. Having another person check the work would be.)
4. We then discuss if the problem is a symptom of something larger that might be wrong or if it was just a one-time event. If it is a symptom of something larger, we think of it as a "lesson learned" event. That means we re-visit what the big picture is and see if we can fix that.
5. Then we immediately put our new system in place and cheer ourselves on. We don't beat up the person who made the mistake.

Let me give you an example of a problem that is indicative of something larger that is wrong. We once had a document sent to a client and the client found a couple of typos in it and got mad. Now I think people generally over-react to typos, but this client was right. There should not have been anything wrong in the document and there was. This was not really an isolated event although it was the first complaint. The problem was that I was writing copy and doing my own proofreading; that's not a good combination. It's devilishly tricky to proof your own work, and I was not good at it. Solution: after that, we used outside proofreaders.

The one "event" or client complaint could have been managed but it was really a symptom of something that was going to keep happening until we got a system in place to manage it.

Some problems are totally isolated events. We learned how to manage during hurricanes by having Hurricane Ike hit us and knock out power in this area for days. We will be much better equipped in the future (although we were only "offline" for about 24 hours) but that was an isolated event and one that hopefully will not continue to plague us year-in and year-out.

Our general philosophy for our customers and ourselves is this: anyone can make a mistake. Never penalize or berate a person who makes an honest mistake. But businesses who make mistakes need to get serious, jump on the opportunity, and figure things out.

Here are some systems we've instituted here just because of a mistake:

• We ship out dissection supplies; after some mishaps we set up an easy-to-read order form and a check system to minimize potential mistakes
• We sometimes missed emails ordering things–we now confirm receipt of orders within 1 business day as a way of minimizing accidentally missing something
• We set up and trained an outside proofreader to work with us
• We had some problems with our website and we learned how to bring most of that work in-house

Anyway, you should know we take your business seriously. And if these tips and tricks help you manage your own work, there are yours with our compliments.

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Writers, like other specialists in any field, have a certain way of working. Although your writer may be eccentric (some of us are), the work style to which I'm referring is universal. Writers approach their work a certain way, just like carpenters or accountants. So here, in no particular order, are the top 10 things you can do to make your writer go nuts–and while this may seem amusing to you, as the client, you won't get the best work from your writer.

1. Tell the writer exactly what you want written. Specify exactly what has to be in paragraph one, paragraph two, and then go down the list in excruciating detail and at times insist on certain precise wording. Figure that unless you dictate the text to the writer, he or she won't have a clue how to produce it.
2. Hover around the writer and, if possible, put your big greasy index finger directly on the computer screen as you read the words aloud. Insist that no word be written unless you can be in the room as the writer types.
3. Explain to the writer how a press release is written or how to write a clinical article or how to do an ad. This works particularly well if you have never done one but the writer has.
4. Assume that the first draft is perfect and that if you want any changes at all, the writer must be a moron who should be screamed it. If possible, throw the document on the ground and stomp on it. This works very well if you swear while you're doing it, ideally with spit coming out of the corners of your mouth.
5. Ignore all emails and phone calls from the writer with a project in progress. Assume that if a writer has any questions or needs more input, he or she must not be a very good writer.
6. Send your writer to gather input or get information from people who you know either don't know about the project or don't agree with it. Assume the writer can sort things out.
7. Don't even look at what the writer does, just pass it along but be sure that you hold the writer 100% responsible for what you commissioned (even though you did not discuss it, answer questions, or even read it when it was done).
8. Provide contradictory input as frequently as possible, such as asking the writer to make sure the manuscript is under 5,000 words but also over 10,000 words. When contradictions come up, just check out mentally and figure the writer can deal with it.
9. Insist that the writer be your typist and not a writer and then criticize the writer when your manuscript gets rejected.
10. Refuse to acknowledge any input that the writer provides, such as things like "Scholarly journals do not use little icons in the text as illustrations" and "Press releases shouldn't be 18 pages with footnotes" because obviously the writer does not know nearly as much about getting published as you do (even though the writer has been published and you can't write an email without getting yourself in hot water).

By the way, these illustrations are real.

Writers can deal with this junk–everybody's job has people who hamper progress–but you won't get your best work. Not only that, you may find you pay far more than the average person because all of this aggravation burns up unnecessary hours (unnecessary is not the same as un-billable) and some writers are known to charge their top-of-the-line rates to clients who aggravate them.

But there are ways to get great work from a writer. Here's how it's done.

1. Give the writer access to everything relevant.
2. Leave the writer alone to write. Describe what you want but assume that a top writer with lots of publishing credits knows how to do the job.
3. Make changes! Believe it or not, your input can make your final project ten times better, providing that your input is sensible and thoughtful. I don't mean courteous, I mean that you really think about what you're trying to say. If you don't like something but don't know how to fix it, just tell the writer something like, "I think this is too strong" or "Can we make this sound a little less scholarly and more conversational?" The writer will do the rest.
4. Answer phone calls or emails promptly.
5. Check in with the writer periodically but don't pester. In other words, there is no harm in asking for a progress report or emailing a short message to say hello. Most writers I know finish "hot" projects faster than cold ones and a hot project is anything that a real person wants.
6. If something comes up that looks appropriate to the project, like a news clip or a journal article or some information from your company, share it with the writer. Don't just send a mysterious link. Actually communicate what it is and why it might be useful.
7. Allow the writer real time to get the work done. This is a touchy subject, but when you give a writer a deadline in hours ("Can you write this? I need it by 3:00 today") you probably aren't going to get the best work and you are surely going to pay top dollar.
8. Be a participant in the project. Take the time to read the manuscript and be sure that you can support it.
9. Encourage proofing and outside readers. Many writers do this already but you can do it on the job, too. Just get people to read the final (or near final) manuscript cold and see what they think.
10. Think of the writer after you're published. If you get published or if the ad or brochure wins an award, do come back and let the writer know. This isn't all about ego–it's allowing the writer to know what worked and allowing the writer to include something cool in his or her portfolio.

More than once, I have "stumbled" on an article or printed piece that I helped prepare (in fact, some of them were mostly my idea) that was never forwarded to me after the fact. It's always helpful to know what works.

A good writer can do a lot to articulate your vision and give you great media releases, reports, presentations, speeches, and scripts. You should take advantage of these skill sets and use them wisely–more than one top executive I know has credited some of his or her success to the fact that there was a writer working in the background for him!

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He or she is annoyed and on the cusp of getting mad.

When do we turn to manuals? We read the instructions generally when we cannot make something work despite repeated, failed attempts. We read the manual only in a last-ditch attempt to stave off disaster. The state of mind of such a person is aggravated, confused, angry, unhappy, and frustrated. Add to that the extra layer of suffering  caused by virtue of the fact that this person is a trained medical professional trying to do his or her job and there is possibly a patient involved who might be neglected, inconvenienced, or even harmed by the perpetuation of this situation.

Let’s review. Your labeling is being read by a person who is angry and trying to keep calm under pressure so as not to exacerbate an already frustrating and potentially dangerous situation.

Bearing this in mind, ask yourself: is your labeling clear? Is it helpful? Can a person in the aforementioned frame of mind use your labeling with good success?

Most medical companies write their instructions for use and manuals for regulatory bodies. It is true, of course, that regulatory bodies go through these things with a fine-toothed comb and that manuals and other labeling must meet stringent requirements.

Many medical companies (and regulatory bodies) act like it’s enough when the labeling passes muster. But it isn’t. Remember, there is an angry clinician trying to use your product who right now is practically ripping through the pages of your manual.

How clear is your manual? You ought to do some testing by having coworkers not involved in labeling be charged with finding specific information using only the product labeling and see how well they do. But enough amusements. Here are 10 ways to make sure your labeling is really helping clinicians to help their patients.

1. Put in a killer table of contents.  Never mind this auto-generated stuff or graphically attractive list. Write the table of contents (ToC) first and write it clearly and in a way that flows logically for your product. Then put in heads and subheads. Don’t be cute or clever; be descriptive. (Save your wit for your friends.) I think a manual writer ought to spend more time on the ToC than on anything else in the manual–it’s a vital navigation tool. It’s the map to the manual. The angry clinician tearing through the manual is likely going to try to get his bearings by glancing at the ToC. You have one fast chance to try to restore the flagging relationship you have with this doctor, so don’t blow it with a confusing, haphazard, or altogether missing ToC.

2. Do an avant-garde type of index. An index appears at the back of the book and allows the clinician to look up terms in alphabetical order and find out where they occur in the manual. Avoid using indexing programs unless you know what you’re doing. In fact, forget the traditional index.  Instead, do the index “backward.” Make a list of all of the things your angry clinician is going to be likely to want to look up. Put them in angry-clinician-ese. Then, using this list, match the manual sections to those topics or questions. For instance, I don’t see why more indices (that’s the plural, look it up) don’t say things like “how to turn the device on” or “how to set up the patient profile.” That’s what the clinician wants to know. Then list where to find that information. If you do a traditional index, it will just say, “Programming, device” or “Patient data” or whatever buzzwords are in the book. Think like a person.

3. Use readable type and readable fonts. Most labeling uses pretty decent fonts, but I have seen instructions for use and manuals that use microscopic type or (my personal least-favorite) pale gray type on light gray paper. Think of angry clinician. Maybe, among all of the many pitfalls of his bad day, he has also misplaced his glasses. Give him a fighting chance at reading the labeling. You don’t have to do giant print, but strive for legibility rather than whatever your designer-du-jour thinks is cool.

4. Put in lots of line art. Some manuals nowadays use photography because, I suppose, digital cameras are ubiquitous. Photography does not work well in manuals because unless your shots are extremely well composed and taken by a professional photographer they are going to be confusing (most photographs will provide lots of extraneous information that’s hard to sort out) and not reproduce well. Line art–simple drawings showing what goes where or how something is set up–is much easier for a person to interpret. These drawings home in on only the key elements (hands opening a package, for instance) and can highlight what is important and minimize or omit what is not necessary. I could show how to open a box from a pull tab much easier in a line art drawing than a photograph. Line art requires an artist, but it makes your manual much clearer. (Remember angry clinician?) It also facilitates translation–that is, the money you spend on the artist you may save on translation fees down the road since one picture is worth… well, you know.

5. Be redundant. Many reviewers of labeling will criticize a manual as redundant if they see a subject handled in more than one place. That shows why reviewers should never be hired as writers. Nobody (except maybe a reviewer) is ever going to read your manual from cover to cover like a novel. Nobody is going to read page after page and then get aggravated because you mentioned how to set up the device on page 3 and again on page 33. But if a reference on how to set up the device would be logical on page 33 and an angry clinician is thumbing through your manual desperate for answers and does not see that information on page 33 … he goes from being the angry clinician to being the very angry clinician. Put information everywhere it seems logical, even if it appears more than once.

6. As much as possible, avoid the “see page…” syndrome. You know how this works. You write about how to program your product and you wind up saying, “set this up, see page 9.” Then you add, “to use this product with an electronic record system, see page 21.” And you conclude with, “for specific warnings on when never to use this product, see page 42.” Remember angry guy? Angry guy does not like to flip through pages. In truth, there may be times when you cannot avoid this or times when it is the more elegant solution. But remember, angry guy is not really worried about elegance. He’s worried about getting the information he needs, in clear terms, quickly. If you do use a “see page…” make sure it’s for something that nobody cares about, such as “for a list of our corporate offices, see page 202.”

7. Use the same words over and over. Your English teacher lied to you when she told you that you should avoid using the same word over and over in a sentence. In the world of technical writing, you want to be clear about what you mean. If your product has a reservoir, never use another term for it even if you use reservoir eight times in one sentence. Do not call that think a tank in one section or a storage area in another and then a well and then a reservoir. To the angry clinician, each part of your product has one name. The reservoir is the reservoir.

8. Never sacrifice clarity for style or good English. That’s right. If you have a choice between writing elegant English or even correct English and being clear, always pick being clear. Remember angry clinician? Do you think at this moment he’s worried about a misplaced modifier? No, he wants to know how to turn the programmer off or how much morphine to inject in the pain pump or where to attach the printer cable. Be clear at all costs.

9. Write in a logical sequence. Most of your writing in how-to texts should be a series of steps. Most of the time, it works best to have short paragraphs followed by numbered lists or bullet points of what to do. Make sure this goes in order. Here is something that will make angry clinician look for a gun: Step 6. Insert the yellow plug into the programmer after having sterilized the plugs and after having run through the basic programming sequences described on page 27. This is out of order. You need to say things in the order in which they are done: 1. run through the basic programming sequences, 2. sterilize the yellow plug (how?), and 3. insert the yellow plug into the programmer.

10. Hire a professional writer. Most manuals are written by engineers (scientific types), regulatory personnel (legal types), and the FDA (bureaucrats). Give your customers a fighting chance by getting a real writer involved. In my experience, these groups are not opposed to good, clear writing, they just can’t do it. It’s kind of like the way most of us feel about classical music. So hire a real writer.

Remember angry clinician! You have a chance to redeem yourself and make him a happy customer, but only if you get your labeling right.

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The taggers get extra credit in their circles for placing any of their handiwork in areas that are difficult to access. A good example of this are those taggers who place graffiti on overpasses or in high-security areas.

Content providers or people who, like me, write for money mainly for corporate clients, can also get extra credit for writing materials that reach readers who are difficult to reach.  It’s a common request I get from many of my clients: We want to reach doctors, but they get so much mail already. We want to reach hospital administrators, but they are hard to access. We want to talk to our patients, but we just don’t know how to get their attention.

So a skillful tagger gets his writing in a danger zone and a skillful content provider figures out ways to access people that are difficult to access.

How can you write something that will capture attention of a difficult-to-interest group? That is a topic that could fill a book, but here are a few pointers.

1. You have to write something that your target audience will care about. If you’re trying to capture the attention of a group for something that interests you but not them, you’re doomed to fail. You have to know your target audience and figure out (a) what they are desperate to know, find out, or learn and (b) how they generally like to get their information. That’s a job for research, not your intuition or best guess.

2. You have to offer real content which in most cases is going to mean real answers, real solutions, and real products. If you deliver fluff to your audience, they’ll be mad at you. It’s actually more productive not to reach an audience than reach an audience only to annoy it.

3. You have to be willing to get outside of your comfort zone. If you could reach these guys doing the kinds of things you usually do (working in your comfort zone), you wouldn’t have this problem. Clearly, you’re going to have to try something new. This may mean new media (video, audio, online content) and new vehicles (YouTube, Twitter). It may mean going back to old-school stuff (an offline newsletter, a classified ad). It may be a hybrid (try a classified ad that offers a free report they can get by calling an 800 number or going to a website).

4. You can’t give up. Rome was not built in a day. Those who reach tough-to-reach audiences do so because they tried lots of different things and were willing to give themselves permission to fail. Permission to fail means having some money and time that you are willing to risk as you try to achieve your goal. Just learn from your mistakes along the way.

5. Find ways (before you start) to measure your success. This may be a clicker on a website or a coupon or some kind of direct response. Work with your marketing guys to figure out a way to measure results and determine in advance what might be considered successful. Then track your numbers.

6. Encourage your writers to learn, learn, learn. Groups that are hard to reach are hard to reach because they do not find much useful in the usual places. This means that the usual approach to writing is going to turn them off. In most cases, this writing is not useful to them because the writers do not offer useful, valuable, practical, realistic information. The way to achieve success is to offer information that will help these people; give them information that they not only want, give them the stuff they are desperate to know. This means that writers have to do lots of research. Don’t keep your writer in a cubicle and expect them to address a difficult audience effectively. Let me them out to roam and learn the nuances of the market.

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The fact is: intelligence, when defined as “what’s going on,” is vital to your career and valuable in your marketing efforts. Plus, it’s more fun than doing spreadsheets. So here’s here are our best ninja spy tricks for 2010.

1. Set up some Google Alerts. Google employs an army of robots that regularly sweep every nook and cranny of cyberspace and, in so doing, they offer a nifty little free service. If you want to know every time a certain word or phrase comes up, they’ll notify you. Just Google “Google Alerts” and follow the prompts. Google will email you every 24 hours and tell you when your name (or your company’s name, your competitor’s name, your product, or whatever) came up.

2. Just Google. Periodically conduct searches for your own name, the name of your boss or colleagues, names of competitors, and so on. Another interesting thing to do is to pick your product or service and Google it and see who appears on the right-hand side. Those are people who pay to appear on the front page for certain keywords (in other words, ads).  Just who is advertising for your medical device or drug keywords (hint: sometimes it’s a lawyer).

3. Find out what they’re paying to advertise. There are lots of roundabout ways to do this, but the quickest and most fun is Spyfu.com. Just go there and type in the keyword (your product or keyword) and you’ll get a short report of how many entities are paying for advertising for that keyword and what they’re paying. You can also see their ad budgets in a nifty bar graph form. This is just for the free introductory Spyfu part–you can get even more information if you subscribe to the service.

4. Want to know who is on your website the most often? (Hint: it’s your competitors.) You should have a chat with the IT people who can pull up statistics in terms of how many hits you got each month (or even each day, if you want to drill down like that), the main locations of these folks, the keywords they used, and the sites they came from. This won’t be too specific but it will confirm that your site’s main visitors (especially to the in-depth technical pages) are your competitors.

5. So now you have to see how these competitive websites are doing. Actually, you can see how just about any large website is doing. Go to Alexa.com and you can get some stats. This does not cover every website–just the largest ones. Compare yourself to the other main sites in your field.

6. Ever wonder where your main web visitors come from? You can get stats from your IT guy but that just covers your company. Pick your industry keywords (ibuprofen, back pain, diabetes, atrial fibrillation, whatever) and go to Google Trends (just Google “Google Trends”) and enter the keyword. You get a nifty graph showing how popular these terms are. Scroll down a bit and you’ll see the main countries that hit these keywords, the main cities, and the main languages of the people interested in the material. It’s an eye-opener. For instance, India is the top country for seeking information based on the keyword “pacemaker.” And “chronic pain”? Tampa, Florida.

7. Need statistics? This may not seem “secret” but you can uncover some amazing information if you spend enough time at the motherlode of all statistical information: cdc.gov. Just go to the site and search for whatever term you want and statistics (obesity statistics, kidney disease statistics). Many marketing people do not know even the basic statistics in their field, and that’s a shame. There can be good information there. For instance, obesity is much more common among Hispanics than other ethnic groups in the United States. Could that help you better market your obesity-related products and services?

8. Venture into foreign-language sites. Many medical companies have branches, offices, distributors, or associations with foreign offices developing or marketing their products. If you can grab a foreign-language brochure or some foreign-language web content, you can get it translated to get the scoop on a product that may very well be coming Stateside soon.  Here is a hint: Babelfish and other automatic translation services do not work well. They work well if you’re translating “cat.” They do not work well on complete sentences, words that might have more than one meaning, and complex texts. Hire a real translator.

9. Attend scientific sessions in your field. I have seen so many marketing people go to a medical convention as waste the opportunity by treating it as a schmooze-fest. Now if you make money schmoozing, that may be fine. But scientific meetings are great places to learn about cutting-edge therapies and–this is the best part–hearing real-world physician objections to these approaches. Most scientific sessions focus on problems, challenges, shortfalls; the doctors get together to share their troubles, not boast about new opportunities. Sit in on these meetings and you’ll learn a lot because doctors think they are talking just to their peers (not industry). Listen up and you may hear what doctors really think about morphine infusion pumps or direct-to-consumer ads for that purple pill or a new electronic records software system. You’ve got to attend a lot of sessions to get good stuff, but you can find real gold here. In many cases, what doctors say in these settings is more honest and valuable than what comes out in even well-run focus groups.

10. Read. Medical companies are like doctors in that they like to read and put words on paper. This is a big advantage for competitive intelligence. Monitor journals, the web, and get field force team members to get copies of product literature from competitive companies. Now there is a very secret trick to make this technique work that a lot of people don’t bother with. Don’t just collect the stuff. Read it. Analyze it. If your competitor just launched some new widget, gather all that information together and sit down and study it. Most marketers read competitive materials haphazardly, if at all. Bring it together and start to sift through it in a meaningful way.

Those are 10 ninja spy tips. But there are a still a few more. You should also spy on yourself. Is your own company really doing all it can to market its brand?

• Go outside the company and, for grins, call in and pretend to be a doctor-customer with a problem. See how quickly you get to the right person to help you.
• On a random day, take a tour of the facility. What does the lobby look like? What are conference rooms like? How is the cafeteria? Break rooms? Rest rooms? Parking lot? If you have customers who visit your facility, these things all matter.
• On another random day, check out the links on your website. You can do this yourself or get somebody to do it. (You can even build your own software to test it automatically.) The point is that links break–don’t ask me why. Check your website by clicking through at random, here, there, and in a few more places. If there are broken links, report them to the webmaster and consider running more in-depth tests. (Remember, the average visitor to your site who encounters a broken link will just leave; they won’t try to work around it or report it to you.)
• Send yourself a letter or package and see how long it takes to get to you. Some companies handle this like champs and in others, incoming mail has to go through the equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle. If your mail service is lacking, run and document a few more tests and then discuss it with your receiving department.
• Pick key people in your department and search for yourself online. You’d be amazed how many young professionals have knuckleheaded Facebook pages set up. Talk it over with human resources first, but then have a heart-to-heart with these young pups who think that funny half-naked pictures are good for business. (Many people who seem web-savvy are actually amazed that other people can find things online. These guys may think that their Facebook or other pages are “private” or too obscure for other people to find. Prove them wrong.)

As you can see, these things are not really spying. They are just information gathering techniques. But the thing that separates great marketers from mediocre marketers is often just a simple matter of research and extra legwork.

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Step one involves talking to them. I know many marketing people who take a perverse pride in never, even stepping foot outside the marketing department (or cafeteria). These guys realize that other areas of the company are populated by people who like math better than music and do not always have good social skills. But you can’t have good marketing success unless you get to know these people. Visit their departments; ask to sit in on relevant meetings that are run by “their side”; make every effort to call or sit down with a scientist whenever you need something explained.

Step two involves patience. You won’t get everything you need in the first sound bite of information. That’s why you need to do your best to create a relationship with these colleagues; you need some “name recognition.” They need to know who you are, what you do, and why you keep asking them all of these weird questions. Give your relationship some time. This is particularly vital since many engineering and scientific types live in the world of patents and proprietary knowledge. This makes them super-secretive by profession, and they’re usually already shy by nature. It can be tough to get one of these guys to share any information, so your best bet is making sure they at least know who you are and that you’re one of the “good guys.”

Step three: explain marketing to them. As much as Kaplan-Meier curves or polymer molecules or hermetic seals are a mystery to you, marketing is a black art to them. The best way to convince a scientist that marketing is good is to create a strong immediate link to sales, which is a world of numbers. Show the scientist sales figures and point to specific marketing endeavors that helped bring those numbers up. You may win an ally if you can persuade a scientist that talking to you will help the company translate his knowledge into sales.

Step four may involve instilling some controls, with which you may be uncomfortable. Most scientists are deeply distrustful individuals (scientist and skeptic just kind of go together, don’t they?) and they no doubt imagine you’re trying to hoodwink them. It can be useful for your relationship to include a scientist in a review of marketing materials, to show him or her interim drafts of materials, or to allow other access to “materials-in-progress.” You may not like this and it may be against your boss’s better judgment, but if you can swing it, it can really work. It helps the scientist see that you’re not out to con him.

Step five is the one you thought should have been first: research. You need to do some homework before you talk to scientific types. Now don’t go haywire. You’re not going to out-engineer the engineer. You just need to know what they’re working on and how they do things.

Last but not least, in step six, ask questions. Think of yourself as a reporter trying to dig out a story from a mad scientist. When in doubt, ask, “How does this work?” And if the scientist comes back at you with jargon, come back with more questions. “What does that mean?” You can even enlist his or her help: “How can we explain this kind of technology best to a physician?” or “What does a patient need to know about how this new device works?”

The weird thing is that scientists and clinical experts and all of these other people are mostly very interesting individuals. They’re usually a lot of fun and can greatly add to your expertise and help your marketing productions. The only thing is: you have to cultivate the relationship. In all the years I ever worked in marketing in medical device companies, I never saw any of these guys linger around marketing. You’re going to have to go to them.

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One of the most important responsibilities of the marketing department is to equip the sales rep for this 10 seconds.  In a lot of ways, medical marketing departments are like the companies that make bullet-proof vests for law enforcement officers or soldiers. It is not our job to fight the fight or go into battle, but it is our job to give the valiant hero who does go face-to-face with the opponent every conceivable chance of success.

So what do you do to equip your sales reps to turn those golden 10 seconds into success? Here are 10 things that you should be doing to help your sales reps in those precious 10 seconds.

1. EDUCATE THE REP. Most companies want to educate physicians, some reach out to educate fellows, a few want to educate patients … but who thinks to train the sales reps? Every new product, every launch, every new change in your industry should be a cry to get training materials out to your rep. The quickest way to shoot yourself in the foot is to call this “Mandatory Training” and make it be a bunch of boring online stuff with a quiz. Reps, like the rest of us, hate efforts to school them. So create launch and news materials for the rep that play on emotions (like his desire to earn, his desire to present a hot new product, his desire to counter objections to his product line). Depending on your field force, you may want to do periodic live meetings, webinars, as well as rep-facing brochures. A membership site built for your reps can be a great idea, particularly if you keep it well-stocked with tips that really help the rep earn more money. Most people don’t mind listening to lessons if they can see an immediate and tangible benefit.

2. OFFER A VARIETY OF TOOLS. Many companies like to promote their products with certain specific vehicles: a selling sheet, a trifold or “slim jim,” a big full-color brochure, a folder stuffed with journal reprints, or whatever. However, if your sales force is larger than one guy or gal, you are likely going to need different types of materials. Some sales reps work well with a pocket card; others need a glossy brochure; somebody else will make her own folder with an assortment of “leave behind” materials; and a third will want to bring in a laptop with a short presentation. Instead of trying to make everybody do the exact sames sales presentation, recognize that good reps play to their strengths and will do better with one tool than another. Offer a big basket of tools for reps to choose from.

3. BE COHERENT. Make sure your online messaging matches the marketing collateral your sales reps show doctors. As easy as that sounds, it’s a common shortfall. The reason is that many companies produce web content separately from marketing materials (sometimes in different departments!) and those people may not talk to each other. Also make sure all of this matches your messages at scientific sessions and advertising.

4. INCLUDE TECH SERVICES. Docs talk to reps because reps have an annoying way of getting their foot int he door. But docs talk to your Tech Services team because they want information, have a problem, need advice, or just do not understand something. But Marketing is notorious for not talking with Tech Services. Tech Services should get launch kits, be aware in advance of marketing messages, and see every piece of marketing material and product labeling that a physician customer could conceivably see. This assures that a doctor who talks with Tech Services is going to get at least reasonably close to the same message from Tech Services as from the sales rep.

5. GET REP INPUT ON MARKETING MATERIALS. I have worked in Marketing long enough to know that many sales reps are difficult, opinionated, obnoxious individuals. While some reps do need anger-management training or charm school, companies are increasingly putting their foot down to tyrannical outbursts by sales reps (and hallelujah for that). Despite the occasional wild-eyed rogue of a sales rep, a good marketing person will also find reps with insight and ideas about marketing materials. Keep your mind open when reps propose these things. Every now and then you’ll get a winner.

6. WHEN IN DOUBT, COUNT. One of the best ways to see what marketing pieces work and what ones don’t, get a tally from your literature storehouse. Everybody may love your award-winning brochure, but if reps do not order them, it probably was not worth the money. On the other hand, if you can’t keep humble spec sheets in stock, that is clearly an effective selling piece.

7. MAKE IT EASY FOR THE DOCTOR TO GET MORE INFO. There was a time when reps liked to build a firewall around “their” doctor and keep the whole world, including the rest of the company, out. That does not benefit the company or the doctor,  who may need more information when the rep is not available. Put stuff online. Collect email addresses. A lot of companies do not allow doctors to order materials, but why not? Why not publish a small catalog of proof sources, brochures, DVDs, training materials, and other items that a doc can order directly from the company?

8. ENTER BEARING PATIENT MATERIALS. Most doctors do not do as good a job at patient education as they would like and–truth be told–this nags at many of them. A smart company will help fill in this gap by developing the kind of patient materials a doctor would be most likely to want to share with patients, whether by placing them in the waiting room (popular these days) or handing them out to specific patients. Reps who offer these materials usually have something the doctor genuinely wants. I would imagine that a great patient campaign supporting a new product launch would find some resonance among physician-customers.

9. PROOF SOURCES ROCK. This may seem counter-intuitive, but one of the strongest marketing pieces in your arsenal is not the slickest. Proof sources are very compelling to physicians and they do not even need to be slick or presented in some snazzy folder to be effective. Doctors do not expect you to show up with a peer-reviewed article that endorses your product. What they might enjoy is having you present them targeted, focused articles on the conditions your product treats or something related. It’s a kind of combination testimonial plus “soft sell.” You’re not marketing … you’re informing the doctor and the reason you’re informing the doctor is that you work in that same field, in that you represent a company that treats that very condition.

10. PAPER, PAPER, PAPER. The world is going paperless so every good contrarian is going to realize now is the time to start producing more words-on-paper. Traditional print is so out now that it’s trendy. Most docs are bleary-eyed from reading everything online. While I am one of the big advocates for having things online, I recognize that there is power in the unexpected and traditional brochures and leave-behind pieces are almost novelty items. The best printed pieces today are those that use print to do things that online stuff cannot: think die-cuts, embossing, metallic inks, glued-in items, perforated pull-outs, and so on. These make great leave-behind, particularly for fellows and other young guys who may have never seen an expensive glossy high-end medical brochure.

Help your reps in their few seconds of face time so that they can drive the sales that drive the company.

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Most companies hire lots and lots of people with fancy degrees and pay them big salaries and let them sit around far away from the battle. Meanwhile, they pay other people with far less education very little money to deal more or less non-stop with the company’s customers.

So how hard would it be to train the folks who answer your phone? Or pay them a little better so that you got the very best people for the job? Well, most marketing people never ask that question, but they should.

Training the phone folks need not be all that hard. When these people are first hired, there should be a training program aimed at introducing them to your company, your products, your markets, and the sort of inquiries they are most likely to get by phone. They should get an organizational chart and a thorough understanding of what departments exist, what they do, and what kinds of questions or calls are likely to come for which groups.

You have to assume that the person you just hired to spend all day with your customers does not know your industry. This introductory training should be very basic and ramp up to cover the nuances. In other words, if your company makes ablation catheters for atrial fibrillation, you may have to go over the very basics of atrial fibrillation, explain what a catheter is, talk about what ablations are, and then move on from there.

But introductory training is just that–the beginning. Your phone people should get regular training “booster shots” by getting information about new products, new services, new departments, new hires, and the momentary issues that your company is dealing with.

Include your phone staff in your launch memos–you can even give them launch kits or maybe abbreviated mini-launch kits to help introduce them to new products and services. (I know some marketing types are thinking this is a big waste of time but remember, most of the phone people spend more time in one day chatting with your customers than you do–so why should you deny them information on your latest launch?)

Your phone people are the ones who are the “voice” of the company. You may think that your executives are the voice of the company, but it’s the phone people that most of your customers interact with. You want them to be informed and high-energy and enthusiastic. So how do you drum up enthusiasm? I think one good way is to include them in certain marketing meetings (particularly ones about big changes and rah-rah ones) and to be sure that they regularly get marketing goodies like the new T-shirts or coffee mugs or logo pens. Again, I know marketing types who would say this is a waste of time, but shouldn’t your front line people be happy to be at work and excited about your latest product?

I once worked at a company that had just launched a major product. We were testing our phone service at that time and when one of my shills called the main number and asked about the new product, the person answering the phone had never heard of it.

That was not her fault. Her job kept her in a cubicle off the main floor, far away from the marketing and other departments and nobody ever thought to give her information or include her even on email distributions. Furthermore, I would imagine that it was embarrassing and disconcerting to her not to know what was being asked and that made her answer seem curt and even hostile.

If you have marketing guys in your company who resist including phone people in the information loop, you need to start asking yourself: are those the right guys to be in marketing? It costs so little to take your phone front-line people from mediocre to outstanding–and why would you want to keep anybody (especially the guys and gals who answer your phone) in the dark about your company’s products?

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Most medical companies I know do not do focus groups very often, and they have good reasons. Focus groups take up a lot of time, they are difficult to set up, you need to do a ton of preparation, and they cost too much.

Well, who says you have to do a focus group right? I don’t mean to do one blatantly improperly, but there are lots of ways to get the benefits of a focus group without investing a whole lot of money. True, these may not be the purest forms of focus groups. But they still work.

Here is how to do a focus group on the cheap (and easy):

1. Does your company ever host meetings or training sessions for doctors (or nurses, technicians, others)? Why not carve 10 or 15 minutes out of that training session to treat the body as a focus group? To do this well, you need to work with a marketing professional who ca help you maximize your time. Find out what you want to know, arrange a test or experiment, and collect the data. This might involve showing the group of clinicians a series of ads and asking for input; it could involve having them browse through several papers (then take them away and ask which ones they remember); it might involve them watching two 30-second DVDs and stating the one they preferred.

2. Does your company have employees that fit your patient demographic? For instance, if your company makes female birth control, you could pick employees in your patient demographic (who are not in the marketing department) and have them review different patient-facing ads for you.

3. Do you attend trade shows and conventions? You can often get good survey participation in these meetings by offering a prize. That’s already great data. But let’s kick it up a notch.  Why not occasionally set up times when participants can join your “focus group” at the convention booth? Spell out what you want (10 minutes of time to help us pick out our new TV commercial), offer some kind of incentive to participate, and then keep the meeting brief and to the point. Again, it is best to work with a marketing or statistical person to make sure you maximizes the opportunity and get meaningful data rather than just rambling input.

4. Do physicians, clinicians, or sales reps visit your facility? While most focus groups are groups, there is nothing that says you can’t conduct a serial focus group and meet with individuals. Set up your focus group scenario and then when a visiting VIP shows up, ask if you can sit down with them for 15 minutes to go over some ad concepts or get their input on a new brochure. The key to this (like the other ideas) is to have your part completely choreographed so that you’re not wasting their time and you’re getting the right input.

5. Does your company have a physician’s advisory board? When they meet, arrange to get some “focus group” time on the schedule. You don’t have to call it “focus group.” You could call it “New Ad Presentation” and you present a couple of concepts and collect input. You could call it “Brainstorming” and you show three brochure comps and let them add their ideas. You could call it “Website Presentation” and show some new things you’re thinking of adding to the company’s site and asking for their input.

Focus groups offer great insight because they give you fresh eyes and ears to look at your project. Most focus groups have the annoying quality of catching you flat-footed, in that they can often pinpoint obvious shortfalls in your project. They may surprise you, too. At any rate, you can’t really have too much data when it comes to marketing and there are ways that even the most frugal enterprise can benefit from some “focus group” activity.

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