Case Study: A Major Healthcare Company

Maritz helped client measure impact of sales meeting and identify areas for improvement.

Maritz helped client measure impact of sales meeting and identify areas for improvement.

Situation

The Consumer Care Division of this major healthcare company had been holding National Sales Meetings on an annual basis for many years. Like many companies, their meetings were designed based on intuition and program history. Post-event evaluations assessed the attendee satisfaction, but did not provide proof that the company goals were being supported through these events.

While market conditions had shifted significantly – and the company’s audience demographic, in terms of attendees’ age and years of service, had changed over time – little had changed in the meeting format and design. Faced with the threat of budget cuts, the Client set out to see if they could better measure the impact of the event on organizational goals and provide insights for continuous improvement. They partnered with Maritz based on that company’s thought-leadership in the area of Meetings Effectiveness.

Solution

Maritz believed that the Client’s intuition and experience could be augmented using science and algorithmic data to provide the insights necessary to address the business challenges. They recommended two key components of their Meetings

Effectiveness solution – an Event Measurement Scorecard, and a Designed Choice Experiment.

• Discovery Session/Event Scorecard
  The planning process started with the identification of the company’s core business goals. A scorecard was developed to measure pre- and post-event scores against participants’ understanding, belief, or commitment to corporate goals such as innovation and continuous improvement.
  • What did they think/know before the meeting?
  • What did they think/know after the meeting?
  • Where were the gaps and how could they be better addressed?

Messaging, format and speakers for the meeting were influenced by the findings in the pre-event survey.

• Designed Choice
  In order to optimize results, participants were asked to identify the event format they felt would allow them to achieve the highest level of performance. This was done through a Designed Choice experiment resulting in a ‘build-your-own-event’ modeling exercise. Respondents were asked to choose from a list of meeting attributes ranging from venue, length of conference, and time of year – to size and length of sessions, general and breakout session speakers, and award/recognition formats.

Results

• Event Scorecard
  By comparing pre- and post-event research, the Client was able to measure how the event had impacted their corporate goals and determine what worked and what didn’t. For example:
  • Sales force understanding of the role they play in innovation improved by 12%.
  • The commitment to continuous improvement through use of newly introduced marketing tools increased by 16%.
  • Overall message absorption remained neutral to negative indicating that while the National Sales Meeting may be a good venue for communicating broad topics, it may not be an effective place to conduct deeper-dive learning initiatives.

• Designed Choice
  While it may not be practical to meet all participant preferences, the insights provided by the Decision Support Simulation tool, which is an outcome of the Designed Choice study, are a valuable input for the planning process moving forward. Key findings included:
  • Participants preferred longer than average lead time for conference ‘save-the-date’ announcements.
  • While award/recognition events were considered very important, participants preferred that they be more informal in nature.
  • Participants preferred industry experts and motivational speakers over Company Senior Management at general sessions.
  • Research pointed to the need for a mix of options for information sharing with some participants preferring small group sessions, while others preferred informal conversations with colleagues.

By applying the Maritz Meetings Effectiveness approach to planning and measuring the impact of the National Sales Conference, the Client was able to confirm the value of the event and additional funds were made available to make future events even stronger.

According to the Client Sponsor; “You can’t manage what you can’t measure. These findings provided a roadmap for planning an effective meeting – both from the standpoint of content and strategy, as well as validating that we were doing the right things logistically.”