The pharmaceutical sales force is not the industry’s sole ambassador in the field. With companies seeking to improve operational efficiencies and capitalise on available resources, marketers and medics are increasingly being deployed in more customer-facing positions. But how much do you understand the benefits of a cross-functional approach? Karen Westaway puts the developing role of the field-based medic under the spotlight.
The battle to become customer-centric continues to drive global business strategy in the modern marketplace. As the saying goes, if you’re not thinking about the customer, you’re not thinking. For the pharmaceutical sector, the pursuit of customer-centricity remains a complex and unusual challenge; while the majority of sectors continue to find customers in short supply, the drug industry faces a problem of a different kind: it has too many. The rapid proliferation of healthcare stakeholders and influencers in recent years has given pharmaceutical companies a split customer-base – loosely defined as clinicians and payers. As a consequence, the challenge to be customer-centric is a difficult one.
A key component of a truly customer-focused organisation is the culture of collaboration. Customer-centricity and cross-functional working go hand in hand. The product-oriented sales culture that characterised too many historic business strategies and led to a territorial approach where information was rarely shared across organisational silos is dying. Today the silos are being broken down and the smartest companies are tailoring solutions to suit customer needs, built upon linkage and cooperation across all internal business functions. The glue for cross-functional working in a customer-centric culture is marketing. But, for pharma, without the collective intelligence of the sales and medical teams, the glue just won’t stick.
Marketing guru Philip Kotler describes marketing as “the homework your company does to figure out what people need and what your company should offer”. Moreover, he says that marketing hopes to understand the target customer so well that selling isn’t necessary. Clearly then, strong marketing should not only be the lifeblood of any customer-centric organisation, but the vein must run ceaselessly across all business functions. Marketing does not begin with the product, it begins with the customer.
A bigger playing field
So what does all this mean for medical sales professionals? Traditionally, the field-force has been considered pharma’s most valuable customer-facing asset. Arguably, this may still be true. But it is not the only one. Nowadays, the industry deploys a wide range of field-based personnel. There has been significant growth in the number of field-based medical and marketing professionals, with the wider aim of developing a more comprehensive and holistic understanding of individual customer groups and their needs. These insights are fed back through the cross-functional brand team and used to develop products and services that can help customers meet their objectives.
This proactive approach is a far cry from the traditional methodology whereby R&D would develop a product then pass it across to marketing who would, in turn, conjure up a few messages and throw them over the fence to the field force and hope for the best. Cross-functional working within customer-centric organisations is based on an integrated, collaborative approach across medical, marketing and sales. It begins with the customer, rather than the product, and it lasts throughout the customer life-cycle.
Well, that’s the theory. The question is, just how cross-functional are you? How much insight do you have into the roles your colleagues from other business functions play – and, indeed, how what they do can impact on your customer interactions? In this short series of articles looking at cross-functional working, we explore the three distinct business disciplines that must successfully integrate if the goal of customer-centricity, and subsequent commercial gain, is to be achieved; medical, marketing and, of course, sales. We begin with the medical team.
Developing the medics
The idea that the medical department is a critical component in the commercial operation of every pharmaceutical organisation is no doubt an anathema to the vast majority of those who work within it. Historically, medics have played a discrete supporting role in the commercialisation of products, allowing sales and marketing professionals to focus on selling drugs. But in an era driven by health economic imperatives and HTAs, medical departments are increasingly being called upon to take more responsibility for the commercial performance and market access of pharmaceuticals. Marketers are urging medical teams to maximise the interactions they have with their customer-base – engagement that cannot be promotional, but can have an undoubted impact on the success of a product.
Despite the widespread need for companies to generate and present cost-effectiveness data to payer customer-groups, the value of strong clinical data has never diminished. The effective communication of such data can deliver significant long-term benefits for a product, but this process is not the sole responsibility of the sales force. It begins, long before sales teams start taking commercial messages to market, with those important early interactions between medics and customers.
How? Well, medical teams can influence the speed at which a clinical trial recruits patients through effective engagement with key investigators. Medics have been performing this valuable role for years, but many are unaware of the commercial gains that can be made if a trial completes recruitment ahead of schedule. Equally, medics also perform a vital role in talking to potential customers in the months between the completion of clinical trials and regulatory approval. These interactions can neither be promotional or solicited, but the quality of these dialogues can be critical to the eventual success of a product.
The interim period between the presentation of trial data and securing a license can often equate to a considerable amount of time – dead time if companies are not making the most of available data. For example, in cases where drugs are likely to achieve fast-track licensing, there can be a gap as long as a year between the original data presentation and the award of a license. During this time, companies can be leveraging the data and preparing potential customers to use the product once it becomes commercially available.
To capitalise on the opportunity, medical and scientific staff are being encouraged to evolve beyond their traditional mindset. In the spirit of customer-centric, cross-functional work, marketers are urging medics to develop commercial competencies and become agile thinkers. Field-based medics must develop a greater understanding of the impact their dialogues with customers can have on the uptake of a product. Further down the line, the benefits to sales professionals are obvious.
Ensuring compliance
The process does not, of course, come without risk and regulation. The ABPI Code of Practice provides strict governance around this sensitive area.
Pre-license, companies cannot proactively seek customer engagement about their products – they can only engage reactively following a customer request. What’s more, once in situ medics must talk about a drug in a generic sense and present information based only on clinical papers and clinical data. Glossy branded materials and leave-pieces are strictly prohibited by the Code.
Despite these strict guidelines, opportunities to raise awareness do exist – so long as the fine line between education and promotion is understood and respected. For example, if a medic is with a customer discussing a clinical trial, providing they stay within the rules of the Code, there is nothing to prevent them delivering information about other ongoing clinical trials, or having a broader discussion about their company’s pipeline. This may help drive faster patient recruitment to a trial or compassionate use programmes. Moreover, dialogue between medics and customers provides a powerful opportunity to build advocacy in the lead up to launch.
In an environment where healthcare budgets are reducing and businesses are seeking operational efficiencies, pharma companies are now looking to make the most of available resource to drive commercial advantage. As a consequence, the evolution of more commercially aware medical teams is gathering pace. Marketers are working more closely with medics to help improve competencies such as communication skills and objection handling. Proactive brand teams are developing ‘Engagement Guides’ to provide medics with a framework for how to communicate during calls. There is an increased emphasis on driving a greater understanding of how specific aspects of a clinical paper can be presented in ways that have the most positive impact on the commercial uptake of a product in the future.
On the broader stage there are increasing examples of companies convening pan-European medical team meetings where medics discuss pipeline products and their projected market size if licenses are successfully achieved. Presentations are focusing on the importance of medics achieving outcomes and actions from every customer interaction. Their over-riding rationale is to drive trial recruitment, accelerate time to market and facilitate quicker approval and faster uptake. Their collective purpose is not promotional – it never can be – but is about improving efficiencies, capitalising on early interaction with key customers and, ultimately, helping ensure patients gain quicker access to beneficial drugs.
The role of the field-based medic is, therefore, taking on broader horizons. There is now a steady emergence of Clinical Engagement Managers being deployed by pharmaceutical companies to talk about clinical data in an engaging and communicative fashion. In the process, these medical teams are now playing an incredibly powerful role in preparing customers for their products once they have been licensed.
Benefits to sales
The long-term efficiencies that can be gained from more effective medical engagement are significant. And nowhere will these benefits be felt greater than in the sales force. The key to success, of course, is in sharing information, understanding customer insights and using it to develop messages that align the individual needs of all the key stakeholders and influencers in your marketplace. These can be crafted as part of a collaborative effort by the brand team, and will ultimately lead to sales teams being equipped with the most effective and resonant product messages to present to customers.
The sales force may be the industry’s biggest collective customer-facing body, but the vital commercial interactions it has at the sharp end are greatly enhanced by the field-based work that takes place elsewhere within each organisation. Employees at every level and in every division need to nurture a deep understanding, not only of customer needs, but also of the important role others around them play within an organisation – in particular those who have key touch-points with customers.
For the sales professional, it is important to understand that, despite the apparent solitude of your field-based role, you are not alone. The commercial imperatives of marketing pharmaceuticals are a collective responsibility that began long before your brand won its license.
Delivering a cross-functional approach that ultimately generates a truly customer-centric culture requires the right attitude and a commitment to pool expertise, share information and collaborate effectively. Communication, a core competency of every sales professional, lies at the heart of a cross-functional approach. The interactions you have with peers and colleagues from across your organisation will have a major impact on the dialogues that take place between you and your customer. Being customer-centric means aligning the resources of your company to the ever-changing needs of customers and, in the process, building mutually profitable relationships. It is a mindset, and it encompasses every aspect of an organisation.
Next month, we will look at the role marketing plays in a cross-functional brand team.
Karen Westaway is Joint Chief Executive of WG Group. WG provides a range of bespoke services to improve market access opportunities for pharmaceutical companies in the UK. For further details, please visit www.wg-group.co.uk.
