Push the panel harder
Raise the incentive, extend field, re-open cells you had already closed. The 180 becomes 240, slowly, and at a CPI you did not budget for.
You buy time and margin. You do not buy reach.
Use cases · Hard-to-reach sample · The study that uses all three products
Need 500 healthcare professionals in Germany?
Your existing panel can deliver 180. The audience exists. It is just not all in one place, and the 320 you are short is where the week goes: chasing suppliers who might have reach, taking their word for it, and finding out what you actually bought after the client has seen the data.
HCP · DE · n=500
Short by 320Target
500
Your existing panel
180
36% of the target, and every incremental complete gets more expensive from here.
The real question
Finding another 320 is not the hard part. Doing it inside the timeline you already promised, with suppliers you can trust and account for afterwards, is.
Where the 320 usually comes from
Every team has three answers.
All three cost you.
Nobody is short on options when an audience is hard to reach. They are short on a way to run several options at once without the coordination eating the schedule, and short on evidence about which supplier is genuinely good at this specific audience.
The scenario on this page is a worked example of a normal week, not a customer case study. The numbers are here to make the workflow concrete.
Email everyone you know
Twelve suppliers, twelve threads, twelve formats. Feasibility arrives as prose, quotes arrive as PDFs, and someone rebuilds all of it into a spreadsheet by hand.
Two days gone before a single complete lands.
Take the biggest promise
One supplier says they can cover the whole 320 inside a week. You allocate it all, because the alternative is another round of emails.
Concentration risk, discovered on day five at a 19% quality failure rate.
What happens next
Six steps. Three products.
One continuous piece of work.
Each step hands the next one something it needs. That is the whole argument: the supplier shortlist becomes the allocation, the allocation becomes the monitoring baseline, the quality verdicts become the reallocation decision, and all of it becomes the reconciliation at close.
Find additional suppliers with demonstrated healthcare reach
Not suppliers who claim HCP coverage in a capability deck, but suppliers with delivered German healthcare fieldwork behind them. The Open Network is named suppliers whose reach is evidenced by studies they actually ran, so the shortlist starts from proof rather than from who answers email fastest.
- Filter on audience, market and delivered incidence, not self-reported capability
- See completes delivered, achieved incidence and drop-off from comparable work
- Shortlist named suppliers, so you always know who is behind your data
What you hold at the end of this step
A shortlist of suppliers who have delivered this audience before, ranked on evidence.
Instead of: asking three colleagues who they used last time, and hoping the deck is honest.
Send RFQs, compare feasibility, negotiate, allocate
One spec goes to the whole shortlist at once. Quotes come back the way suppliers actually send them (email bodies, PDFs, spreadsheets) and are parsed into one comparable grid at quota-cell level. CPIs are negotiated against your target before anything is allocated, and the 320 is split across several suppliers rather than bet on one.
- One spec, one send, every supplier on the shortlist
- Quotes normalised to a comparable grid: CPI, feasibility, LOI, turnaround, per cell
- CPI negotiated to your target margin, with the exchange kept on record
- Allocation split deliberately, with no single supplier carrying the whole shortfall
What you hold at the end of this step
An allocation you can defend, with the price and the promise recorded per supplier.
Instead of: twelve threads, one spreadsheet rebuilt by hand, and a CPI nobody pushed back on.
Monitor supplier pace, incidence and quota cells
From the first complete, every source is measured against what it promised: completes per hour, achieved incidence versus quoted, cell fill, drop-off. When a supplier's real incidence diverges from the quote they won the allocation with, that is a flag on day one, not a discovery at the close-out meeting.
- Pace and projected close per supplier, against the deadline you committed to
- Achieved incidence versus quoted incidence, per supplier and per cell
- Quota cells that are filling, stalled, or about to over-fill
- Alerts on divergence, so the first person to know is you
What you hold at the end of this step
At hour six you know what the manual version finds out on day three.
Instead of: a Friday status email describing a problem that started on Tuesday.
Evaluate respondent quality in real time
Every respondent is evaluated at the entry point, before they consume a quota cell you cannot easily re-open. Fraud, duplication, automation and low-effort behaviour get a verdict in real time. Every verdict is attributed to the source that sent it, which turns quality into a per-supplier number while field is still live.
- Scored at entry, so bad traffic never reaches the questionnaire or the quota
- Every verdict attributed to the supplier that delivered the respondent
- Quality by source, live, instead of a cleaning exercise after tabulation
- Hard audiences attract the most fraud, and this is exactly where it turns up
What you hold at the end of this step
A live quality rate per supplier, not a post-hoc argument about rejects.
Instead of: finding 19% of a hard-won 320 unusable, after the client has seen the topline.
Pause underperforming sources and reallocate
Steps 03 and 04 exist to make this step obvious. The supplier running at a 22% quality failure rate gets paused; the two clearing their thresholds pick up the volume; the cells nobody is filling go back out to the shortlist you already built in step 01. The decision, and the evidence behind it, is recorded as it happens.
- Pause a source without pausing the study
- Reallocate to suppliers clearing both pace and quality thresholds
- Re-open stalled cells to the shortlist you already have
- Every decision timestamped against the data that triggered it
What you hold at the end of this step
The shortfall closes without the quality drop that normally pays for it.
Instead of: letting it run, because stopping it would mean explaining why you started.
- 06
Reconciliation
Field close · minutes, not days
Know exactly what was delivered and what you paid
At close, claimed completes are reconciled against accepted completes, per supplier, with the rejection reason attached to each one. What you owe is computed from what survived, not from what was invoiced. The same record settles the supplier conversation, the finance conversation and the client conversation.
- Claimed versus accepted completes, per supplier and per cell
- Every rejection carries its reason and its evidence
- Invoice reconciled line by line, in minutes
- Performance feeds back into the Open Network record for the next hard audience
What you hold at the end of this step
An invoice you can defend, and a supplier record that is better than it was last month.
Instead of: paying the claimed number, because disputing it would take longer than it is worth.
Why it is one platform
Three products, because the problem has three parts.
A hard audience is not one problem. It is a sourcing problem, an operations problem and a trust problem arriving at once, which is why solving one of them with a separate tool leaves the other two exactly where they were.
Open Network
Answers who
Steps 01 · 06
Finds suppliers with demonstrated reach into the audience you are short on, and takes the performance record from this study back in, so the next hard audience starts from better evidence than this one did.
FieldworkOS
Answers how
Steps 02 · 03 · 05 · 06
Runs the supplier lifecycle: RFQs out, quotes normalised, CPIs negotiated, allocation split, pace and incidence monitored, underperformers paused and reallocated, close-out reconciled.
SurveyGuard
Answers can I trust it
Step 04 · for as long as field is live
Evaluates every respondent at the entry point and attributes the verdict to its source, which is what makes the step-05 decision a fact rather than a hunch.
The wider point
Whatever makes your fieldwork difficult, SoftSight gives your team a system for handling it.
Hard-to-reach sample is the case that uses the whole platform at once, which is why it is the one worth walking through in full. The mapping underneath it holds for every other difficulty the week throws up.
Note what is not on this list: a feature count. Nobody buys fieldwork infrastructure because it has fifteen features. They buy it because a specific part of the week is broken.
500 of 500 · reconciledOne difficult audience.
One difficult audience.
One connected workflow.
Six steps, four of them running while field is live, and a record at the end that settles the supplier, the finance and the client conversation at the same time. That is the difference between a platform and a shelf of separate tools.
Bring a study you are actually short on.
The walkthrough is far more useful on a live shortfall than on a demo dataset. SoftSight runs alongside your survey platform and your existing supplier relationships, and nothing has to be re-papered to try it.