Editor's note: Alice Lieberman is director of customer insights for Medtronic’s surgical business, where her team drives strategic research through innovative programs for executive decision-making. She brings more than 10 years of B2B market research experience, holds a degree from University of Colorado at Boulder and is pursuing her MBA at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. Find Alice on LinkedIn.
Medtronic’s customers – surgeons, hospital administrators and operating-room staff – are foundational to every decision we make. Yet gathering direct B2B customer feedback is accompanied by familiar challenges: they are geographically dispersed, time-constrained and constantly in demand. The resources needed to obtain their insights continue to increase.
Our goal was to create a mechanism that still lets us hear our customers, reliably and repeatedly, while also minimizing disruption, improving turnaround times and controlling costs.
Our answer to this need was an experiment rooted in internal partnership. Rather than defaulting to external research vendors or large-scale studies, we took a step back and recognized that our sales force already sits at the intersection of customer behavior and business realities. They observe operating rooms. They manage concerns firsthand. They hear perspectives at the scrub sink. They see what works, what breaks down and what is changing often before those signals ever reach a corporate dataset. That is how Field to Function (F2F) was born.
The approach: Sales turns into research strategy
In partnership with our U.S. surgical sales leadership, the customer insights team designed a quarterly program that taps into that powerhouse of frontline expertise.
The model is intentional and simple:
Once per quarter, our team invites stakeholders across strategy, marketing, R&D and product development to submit research questions. These are not academic exercises; they are time-sensitive questions tied to real business decisions.
From those submissions, we select the three topics that offer the most significant business impact.
We work with the topic owners to design an impactful three-to-five-question survey with precise screeners to ensure reliable input and to prioritize the most relevant sales reps within our quotas.
That questionnaire then goes to a national panel of approximately 400 sales reps, who are given two weeks to respond with their feedback.
At the close of fielding, the customer insights team rapidly synthesizes the results and shares them back with the topic owners and the broader F2F community.
To encourage participation, sales reps earn points to put towards a reward as part of Medtronic’s peer-to-peer recognition program. But more importantly, we positioned F2F as a formal mechanism for amplifying both field and customer voices into corporate decision-making, giving their perspective an official seat at the table. The program allows reps to amplify not only their own experience but also the voice of the surgeons and hospital staff they support every day.
Early results and feedback
Even before launch, stakeholder response was overwhelmingly positive. One leader shared, “Thank you for the creation, invitation and collaboration on Field to Function. This is a great initiative that delivers market insights and seller perspectives in a timely and cost-efficient way.”
At the close of the first pilot wave, the results exceeded both participation and impact expectations.
Nearly half of our eligible salesforce responded – an exceptional outcome for an internal, first-of-its-kind program at Medtronic. More importantly, the quality of feedback consistently mirrored the insights we typically observe in far more expansive external studies.
Now, after two waves, momentum continues to build. Business leaders are actively using the findings to shape discussions, inform priorities and pressure-test assumptions. Early cost comparisons suggest that the first wave alone replaced more than $60,000 in traditional project spend.
What we learned
Our greatest challenge was initial buy-in from the sales reps who have full schedules and strict priorities. Framing matters most. Initial adoption required reframing the program from "another survey" to "your voice influencing headquarters." Emphasizing their unique value to our team and to Medtronic, and how their input can lead to addressing real customer concerns, led to a sense of ownership that translated to participation. Reps already make an impact on their designated accounts every day and F2F provides them with the opportunity to influence Medtronic decisions beyond their traditional territories.
Following that language shift, we discovered that while monetary incentives played an important role, the opportunity to see feedback directly influence decisions was just as motivating. In the second wave, we introduced a structured follow‑up process to track the outcomes generated by the input and report those results back to the sales reps, making visible what changed because they chose to engage. This closed-loop structure keeps reps engaged long-term.
Lastly, because this approach relies on reps as a proxy for the customer voice, question design requires additional discipline. Working with topic owners, we focus on practical, observable inputs – what reps can directly see and hear in the field – rather than on their interpretations of customer sentiment.
Why it works
F2F works because it balances two essential elements:
- Discipline: A structured process with vetted questions and succinct analysis.
- Democratization: Field teams have genuine influence and business teams have ready and reliable access to field-based insights, decreasing hurdles for customer-centric decision-making.
It also reinforces something Medtronic believes deeply: rigorous market research must remain central to business strategy and delivering on our company’s mission.
What comes next
We have now completed two successful waves and are moving forward with a quarterly cadence. Our longer-term ambition is to make Field to Function a standing component of our research portfolio and expand from the U.S. to Medtronic’s broad global footprint.
We anticipate that F2F will continue to complement traditional voice-of-customer programs while giving leaders a fast signal when time and resources are limited.
As the model matures, we will explore automation and selective qualitative extensions, such as optional post-survey conversations between business partners and reps, to add context without sacrificing speed.
Embrace experimentation
Field to Function demonstrates what is possible when insights teams lead with partnership and embrace experimentation. Strategic clarity doesn't require perfect data. It requires listening early, learning fast and staying anchored in the customer by making smart use of existing resources. Progress belongs to organizations willing to test, adjust and scale quickly with cross-functional teams equally committed to getting closer to the truth.