January 14, 2025/Aktana/Blog, Field Sales, Medical Affairs

This blog post expands on insights from our recent webinar, “From Product to Practice: Field and Medical Intelligence,” the first in our Product to Practice series. For those who couldn’t join, you can access this session and explore other insightful discussions on omnichannel innovation by clicking here.

In this session, Derek Choy, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Aktana, and Bruce Carlson, VP and Head of Advisory Services, shifted the focus from Aktana’s product innovations to the practicalities of implementing intelligent omnichannel engagement in the field.  

This blog post will give you a glance into the key takeaways, including:

  • Using AI and data insights for smarter call planning, improved productivity, and reduced costs.  
  • Supporting field teams in delivering personalized, omnichannel HCP engagement.  
  • Streamlining product launches while managing portfolio priorities.  
  • Future-proofing CRM decisions while prioritizing key customer engagement strategies.  
The Life Sciences Landscape: Challenges and Shifts

The life sciences sector is at a pivotal moment, navigating:  

  1. Cost Reductions: With mounting pressure to deliver more with fewer resources, teams must modernize commercial approaches to maximize efficiency.
  2. Product Launch Pressures: Numerous product launches call for robust go-to-market and defense strategies.
  3. CRM Roadmap Disruption: Technological transitions are necessary but challenging, sometimes stalling innovation.

To meet these challenges, many life sciences companies are turning to experience-driven customer engagement platforms (CEPs) that go beyond traditional CRM systems. Even conventional Next Best Action (NBA) systems often need to catch up to support true omnichannel engagement. For meaningful results in 2024 and beyond, life sciences teams will need to focus on:  

  • Intelligent Automation: Simplifying strategy execution, managing dynamic content, and optimizing physician interactions using AI.  
  • Strategy Orchestration: Aligning brand strategies across channels for consistent execution.   
  • Scalable Systems: Building flexible, future-ready platforms that integrate seamlessly with evolving CRM ecosystems, without forcing life sciences teams to be ‘locked in’ to one choice.  

These principles can help teams move from product to practice more effectively, ensuring seamless omnichannel engagement.

Achieving Omnichannel Excellence Across Disciplines

Achieving success in omnichannel engagement requires seamless alignment across field, brand, and engagement teams, each playing a vital role in enhancing HCP interactions and improving ROI.

  • For field teams: Field intelligence and orchestration that improves call planning, enhances HCP interactions, and reduces administrative tasks.
  • For brand teams: Brand strategy execution that accelerates HCPs up the adoption ladder–  advancing real-time KPI management and increasing adherence to brand strategy.
  • For Personalized Omnichannel Engagement: Real-time, personalized journeys that engage HCPs, boost digital channel usage and reduce customer acquisition costs by optimizing personal channels for high-potential outcomes.

Empowering Field Teams: The Key to Omnichannel Success

Field sales are crucial to any omnichannel strategy, bridging brand strategy with market impact. By integrating intelligent orchestration into their workflows, field teams can enhance efficiency and focus on high-impact tasks. There are several ways to enable this:

  1. Intelligent Suggestions: Daily, goal-aligned recommendations for field reps—supported by context-based insights— reducing reliance on outdated lists or misinformed perspectives. 
  2. Effective Pre-Call Planning: Comprehensive dashboards replace fragmented systems, allowing access to relevant data and insights all in one place. AI assistants provide support in real-time to enable painless pre-call planning.
  3. Automated Call Logging: AI-powered tools enhance accuracy, reduce manual work, and improve real-time feedback loops.

These tools ensure reps stay aligned with organizational goals, improving patient outcomes and maximizing resource efficiency.

Transforming the Product Launch Lifecycle  

Field teams and Medical Science Liaisons (MSLs) are crucial throughout the product lifecycle, from pre-commercial to post-launch phases. When we talk about intelligent orchestration in the field, here’s what implementing it across the product lifecycle might look like:

  1. Pre-Commercial Phase
  • Building Advocacy: MSLs engage with key opinion leaders (KOLs) to disseminate clinical data and address adoption barriers. AI helps MSLs stay informed on clinical trials, build stakeholder relationships, and drive market impact.
  • Market Insights: Real-time feedback from stakeholders via MSLs can inform launch strategies, HCP segmentation, and messaging. Personalized segmentation enables MSLs to tailor HCP interactions more effectively, enhancing market impact.
  1. Launch Phase
  • AI-Driven Insights: Dynamic targeting and content personalization help reps navigate challenges like limited face-to-face access and multi-channel complexity. ROI-maximizing high-impact actions and insights give field reps a competitive advantage during this phase.
  • Integrated Feedback: Real-time data from field teams and digital channels refine targeting strategies, call planning, and engagement.
  1. Post Launch and Portfolio Management
  • Optimizing Resources: With orchestration capabilities, balancing resource and time allocation across multiple products becomes easy. By optimizing resource allocation, teams can ensure consistent performance across the product portfolio, maximizing ROI over time.
  • Avoiding Pitfalls: Better coordination across touchpoints prevents inconsistent messaging and wasted resources and improves overall brand strategy execution.

At every stage of the product launch phase, intelligent orchestration and AI guidance can help transform innovation into tangible, actionable strategies. Pre-configured widgets that seamlessly integrate with brand strategy and custom KPIs can improve field rep workflows. AI-generated dynamic insights can guide reps to prioritize high-impact actions while enabling them to contribute their insights for real-time tactic tweaking and feedback. AI assistants can help automate repetitive tasks like call logging to save time for strategic activities.

From Product to Practice: The Path Forward

Next-generation orchestration combines ROI maximization across all channels and AI-driven personalization to simplify the complex priorities of today’s life sciences teams. By embracing advanced tools and practical strategies, organizations can empower field teams, align brand objectives, and drive measurable outcomes.  The journey from product to practice starts with actionable intelligence and centralized orchestration—key elements of a future-ready life sciences strategy.

Want to dive deeper into these strategies and see them in action? Watch our webinar From Product to Practice: Field & Medical Intelligence for a deeper dive into practical implementation and Aktana’s platform capabilities.