Overview
MH Eye Care, family owned and operated, is dedicated to supplying eye care professionals and practices nationwide the medical supplies and services needed to guarantee patient care and ease of day to day operations. An established distributor since 1993, the company has expanded its product offering to include customized cataract and LASIK kits, dry eye supplies, surgical and post-surgical components, and surgical instruments. MH Eye Care is dedicated to providing high quality and customized products, efficient delivery, and exceptional customer service.
Challenge
Within business, it is essential to both specialize and diversify one’s product offering. By 2016, while MH Eye Care successfully specialized in customizing post-operative kits, it lacked a diversified product offering. Also, the overarching goal was that eventually, MH Eye Care would become a “one stop shop” for eye supplies. With this goal in mind, Genny was tasked with diversifying MH Eye Care’s product offering.
In turn, Genny realized that the next product groupings must both complement MH Eye Care’s current post-operative kit offering and enable the company to appeal to a new set of eye care practices. Once those product groupings were identified, MH would need to create relationships with the correct manufacturers/vendors, set pricing, and market the new products to both current customers and prospects.
Solution
Genny performed extensive research to identify fields within ophthalmology and optometry that were growing as well as the necessary supplies needed to treat those growing fields. After research, Genny made outbound calls to customers so she could understand if the fields she identified were, in fact, growing. Finally, Genny deduced that the best areas for product expansion were dry eye products and surgical instruments.
Genny then created and sent a survey to 200 customers in order to ascertain the specific dry eye and surgical products and brands that current customers use most frequently. After a month long survey period, she compiled and analyzed the results and identified the top products and vendors MH Eye Care should on-board. After pricing negotiations with vendors, on-boarding products into MH Eye Care’s Great Plains software, updating the website to reflect the new products, and setting retail pricing, Genny successfully added 120 new products to MH Eye Care offering. Through mailers and e-blasts, Genny created and executed a successful marketing campaigns to introduce these product lines.
Impact
Genny’s extensive research, execution, and marketing roll out proved immensely important. Since the products were added in November 2016, 58 new customers have been added to the MH Eye Care’s customer base from just the new product lines. In 2017, new customers buying surgical instruments and dry eye supplies made up about 31% of MH Eye Care’s total new customer base. That number continues to grow in 2018.
Genny Goergen 