Prior to launching a field team to address the product need, it is critically important to assess the effectiveness of the field strategy as it could result in a significant, potentially unnecessary, budgetary hit.

1. What is the goal?

Start by understanding and having internal alignment on the target metrics and/or outcomes. While it is everyone’s intent to get a 100 percent response from customers, unfortunately it is not always possible. Knowing the product and the customers, the team needs to develop a realistic target percentage of responders. 

For the remaining non-responders, activate a contingency plan that follows industry best practices and complete three contact attempts per consignee. Beyond total response goals, it is important to consider outlining goals around total product returned. After outlining the goals, an organization needs to determine the best strategy for achieving them.

2. Identify Mission Critical Accounts & Map it Out

While it may be tempting to automatically start booking flights, the “hit every account now” strategy is a difficult one to execute.

If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.

One of the largest costs of a recall are the expenses around the deployment team. In Novasyte’s experience, clients requesting S.M.A.R.T. services have shared that approximately 50 percent of the overall costs with their past recalls are spent on travel (e.g. airline and hotels).

When in high-alert recall response mode, cost can be somewhat overlooked when the primary focus is on achieving quick remediation. That said, there is logic to apply when deploying a field team to help reduce costs.

Novasyte recommends a tiered-approach that has worked successfully for managing thousands of consultants across a variety of programs – including Contract Clinical, Field Technical and S.M.A.R.T. Programs.

Mapping out the accounts is a simple way to provide a visual. To determine a tiered-strategy, organizations must agree on where to start (from one of the following):

• The most profitable account? 
• The IDN with the most units? 
• The greatest opportunities? 
• The densest geographical areas?

By analyzing the accounts geographically, organizations can determine account location, proximity and regional density. From here, the team can determine the timeline and the required field resources needed to complete the task.

The Novasyte Way

Novasyte takes it a step further and following a full analysis of the consignee list, they identify opportunities to improve efficiencies with every deployment. After the strategy is secured, they determine the schedule of the field teams and can manage the expenses appropriately.

By doing this, Novasyte has been able to reduce overall expense spend to as low as 25 percent of overall cost (as compared to 50 percent identified above).