Strategic Transfusion Alliance: Reaching the Customer's Customer

When your "real" customer — the end user — is not your "direct" customer — the person you sell to — convincing the market and stimulating demand can be a considerable challenge. Without direct access or influence, companies often miss the mark with their customer's customer. It is a challenge being addressed by the Fenwal Division of Baxter Healthcare Corporation.

Fenwal's community blood center customers are frequently more experienced at "providing" rather than promoting. At the same time, they must convince their price-sensitive customers — hospitals — to accept new products and services that may be better, but also more expensive.

To resolve this issue, Fenwal and its public relations agency, Public Communications Inc. (PCI), created the Strategic Transfusion Alliance (STA) program to offer blood centers the tools to use in marketing to their hospital customers.

STA provides a model approach that can be used by blood centers to market many of the products and services they sell to hospitals. Blood centers immediately signed on for the Strategic Transfusion Alliance program as they were introduced to it by Fenwal sales representatives. The roll-out is being accelerated by Fenwal-sponsored workshops on STA to acquaint larger numbers of blood centers with the program.

When your "real" customer — the end user — is not your "direct" customer — the person you sell to — convincing the market and stimulating demand can be a considerable challenge. Without direct access or influence, companies often miss the mark with their customer's customer. It is a challenge being addressed by the Fenwal Division of Baxter Healthcare Corporation.

Fenwal's community blood center customers are frequently more experienced at "providing" rather than promoting. At the same time, they must convince their price-sensitive customers — hospitals — to accept new products and services that may be better, but also more expensive.

To resolve this issue, Fenwal and its public relations agency, Public Communications Inc. (PCI), created the Strategic Transfusion Alliance (STA) program to offer blood centers the tools to use in marketing to their hospital customers.

STA provides a model approach that can be used by blood centers to market many of the products and services they sell to hospitals. The goal of STA was to motivate blood centers and help them educate the influencers in the buying decision about the benefits of buying products and services from them.

To develop STA, more needed to be known about the blood center-hospital sales relationship and how each would react to a marketing campaign involving various products. A focus group of blood center and hospital blood bank executives was held to explore issues such as cost versus benefit and the merits of various products.

Marketing components were created to give the program a cohesive, professional look and to take a consistent message to the various audiences. They include:

• A how-to manual and slide program for use by Fenwal sales representatives to present the Strategic Transfusion Alliance concept to their blood center customers.
• A flip chart presentation and hand-outs for blood centers to use to introduce the program to hospital management.
• A slide program and hand-outs for blood center medical staff to use to educate physicians about the benefits of specific products or services provided by the blood center.
• A compendium of clinical research documenting the benefits of specific blood products.
• A roundtable proceedings booklet based on a discussion by experts in the blood banking field on current attitudes regarding blood products sold by the center.

As soon as STA became available, blood centers immediately signed up for the program through their Fenwal sales representatives. Fenwal is accelerating the roll-out by staging workshops on STA to acquaint larger numbers of blood centers with the program.