We were thrilled to watch our VP of Services Effectiveness and Innovation, Bruce Carlson, share the virtual stage with Ferring’s Global Head of Digital Excellence, Haider Alleg, and José Maria Guido Avila, Global Brand Lead HCP Marketing at Sanofi, to discuss what the future of commercial pharma will look like when the field force can once again live up to its name.
The Field is Coming Back: What Does an Effective Omnichannel Strategy Look Like Now?
In this session, we cover:
- What the rep’s role will look like after a year of pharma going all-in on digital channels
- How organizations like Ferring and Sanofi are equipping their field teams to navigate the new omnichannel world
- How pharma can become more responsive to HCP-initiated interactions
- Practical ways technology can help close the gap between brand and field
Watch Aktana, Sanofi and Ferring Present at the 2021 NEXT Normal Summit
Note: Bruce has some sound issues at the start of the session, but stick with us! They resolve themselves around 1:30.
webinar transcript
Moderator
Hello everyone and welcome to the Next Session at the Next Normal week. Today we have three extraordinary speakers, we have José Maria Guido Avila, the Global Brand Lead HCP Marketing from Sanofi, Haider Alleg from Ferring and Bruce Carlson from Aktana.
And let’s set and kick off today’s meeting. We prepare some very interesting questions for today. And let’s start with the first question, which is in the wake of the industry digital migration, what will the rep’s role look like in 2021? And how will pharma brand and omnichannel marketing strategies evolve in parallel? Maybe we can start with you Bruce because I think you have this perspective from a solution matter and a pharma company, so.
Bruce Carlson
Sure, thanks. Great to be with everyone. Thank you Dario.
Moderator
Please Bruce, go ahead.
Bruce Carlson
Yep. Can you hear me? I’m getting a little bit of background.
Moderator
Yes, we can hear clearly. So once again, in the wake of the industry, digital migration, what will have the role of the rep be like?
Bruce Carlson
I’m just getting a lot of feedback, I’m sorry.
Moderator
Maybe Haider then we can start with you. Haider.
Haider Alleg
Yeah, no worries. Yeah. So I think there is a way the question is asked, you need to put it back into the frame of this weird period we have with COVID, right. So we are transitioning in a world where now our reps are getting asked to be doing much more hospitality management for digital activities as well. So before you’ve seen the rep being one of the channels, and right now we are looking out at our front line becoming an orchestrator of commercial operations, including marketing in a way. So the interesting transformation I’d say where we are heading with this, is we are looking at sales rep and medical scientific liaison becoming much more aware of the context of HCPs, much more careful with what information, the context of the HCP is so brutally disrupted now because of the situation that now we are asking ourselves, is it the right time? Is it the right info?
Do we have the right scientific context to bring those HCPs to us? And in terms of the value of it, now I think we are much more pushing that on our our reps meaning they are really the formula one driver, I don’t know if you like cars, but I’m sure that you do. So we are still saying the reps are the formula one car driver, it just happens that now digital is giving a bit more, let’s say automated functions to the mix. But that’s where we’re heading.
Moderator
Thank you Haider. Bruce, same question for you.
Bruce Carlson
Yes.
Moderator
Yeah, please.
Bruce Carlson
Yep. So I think we believe that reps are still incredibly valuable and just a couple of data points on that, if we look at email open rates from rep versus HQ initiated emails, it’s like three times or greater when reps do it. So there’s great value of reps, we know that. But calls are very expensive and so I think one of the things that companies have learned is that there are more efficient ways to work cross channels. So I think that there is going to be a trend to maybe some Salesforce downsizing.
And so with that, and with more complexity across the channel mix, it’s going to be really complicated for reps to be able to manage and play that role of account manager, but doing it across more channels. So it’s going to be important that brands enable reps to be able to do that, but sort of meet the reps where they are and help them manage new channels. And it’s probably ultimately going to lead to also some differences in terms of the hiring profile for reps.
And I think the second part of the question was around how brand and marketing strategies need to evolve. We’ve heard a lot of this from some of the other speakers already today. It’s really the need to become more agile to really work across channels, but it’s much less now around product promotion, it’s more around patient support programs, really helping the reps understand how they position those programs with our HCPs so that it’s less… It’s not just around product promotion and it’s more around things like, how do I help identify the right patients? How do I see if there are patients that are responding to my therapy or help HCPs determined quickly patients that aren’t responding to the therapy so that they can discontinue them.
Moderator
Thank you Bruce. José Maria, same question for you.
José Maria Guido Avila
Yes. Thank you and apologies for the technical issues. Well, I think it’s more or less I can build upon what Bruce and Haider already mentioned. It’s all about evolving the role, but we also need to be careful not to push them too much, that they will go back into the old ways. Right? So the fear of the downsizing of the field forces, some reps are probably going to be fearing they’re going to lose their jobs. And also being pushed to do too many things at one point to manage too many variables that we risk.
I was having a conversation with some sales reps actually before the webinars in the previous weeks. And some of them already told me that they are visiting already doctors, again, with face masks and other protections. But when I ask them, “Has your activity changed?” And the answer was, “No, it was very much the same.” And I was really, really worried about that. So I started doing some digging deeper, a little bit digging deeper on this topic. And I’m going to share one slide from my key takeaways. Can you see it?
Moderator
Yes, yes we can.
José Maria Guido Avila
All right, so the first thing is I think that the best way that we can train our reps to think about what is the best way to move ahead is to teach them or to inspire them that the focus is on creating meaningful connections with the customers, because as Bruce was mentioning, it’s not about product content or the patient advocacy programs. It’s about also, how can you create this connection, despite the lack of physical interaction, right? So how can you build that connection and that trust.
And the other thing that we need to be aware of is we have different generations in the workplace. We have baby boomers, we have generation X, we have millennials, generation Y in some cases they split it. And then also we have the generation Z that is coming now.
So all of them have different expectations from the field force and from the HCPs, right? So imagine a generation Z sales rep interacting with a baby boomer doctor or the opposites, right? So all these things are also going to be in place until how are our reps going to be adapting to the new way?
The other thing is the digital fatigue, right? Because there’s so many digital content that doctors are being exposed to. But on the other hand, the reps are going to have to manage a lot of digital content too. So how to create the best connection, it’s going to be a critical. The HCPs are going to have different expectations and there’s also going to be increased demand to access HCPs. Right. And just the another thing it’s basic…
I can share this as lights later on. It’s depending on the type of contents, building on the comment from Bruce. The reps can think about what is the role that they have to play with the sales rep and the type of content they can use when… Of course, we’re going to have promotional content, which is to be educating about the brand, but also we can have educational content that is to strengthen this meaningful connection. And we can also have evergreen content that’s meant to provide a service, right? So it’s… I think this is going to be for marketing teams, medical teams, and Salesforce, to be able to adapt to this variables to evolve into the next normal.
Moderator
Thank you José Maria. Let’s move forward with the next question, which is As reps come back online, cross-channel agility will be more important than ever. We all can agree on that, right. How are you equipping your brand and field teams with the visibility to execute an authentic customer-centric experience? Let’s start with this time with you Bruce.
Bruce Carlson
I think that as we said, the reps job is getting a lot more challenging and so if you think about it, I may be inheriting new HCPs that I didn’t have before. So I need to quickly decide, are these HCPs I need to focus on face to face? Can I do a digitally? What are the key insights I need to have around them?
So with that, coupled with the shift to more multi-channel across my entire physician base, it’s really providing the reps in a real easy to understand and digest format, the key insights about their key HCPs, what the experiences have been, what they have accessed, so they can be making better, faster decisions about how they should be advancing the relationship with each of those HCPs. So I think that’s one of the key things. I think the second thing that we’re seeing is, for the past 10 years or more, I think pharma companies have really tried to create the concept of global brands.
A single brand that is the same across the globe, and that’s going to continue, but it’s going to be more challenging because different affiliates have different abilities to execute on some of these aspects of multichannel. So we think the other key part of this is going to be global brands really understanding and meeting each affiliate where they are in terms of their ability to execute on multi-channel and making sure you’re equipping the reps.
So in some cases it will be more sophisticated, it could be more AI driven analytics. In other cases, it may be a little less sophisticated, it may rely more on real time rep feedback post-call to get that information that you need back to the brand team to inform the next best action down the road. So those are a couple of the key things that we’re seeing.
Moderator
Thank you. José Maria or Tony Stark, I see you have this cup.
José Maria Guido Avila
Thank you. So I think that we need to equip the reps to become flexible, because in the past it was a very simple activity, coming with messages, providing details about the product, which is why they were called detail men and the detailing concept was born. But now I was, I think that there has to be a flexibility in terms of how they go to market, right? So, and even depending on the season, I was reading some industries research that says that COVID-19 may be here to stay forever and then become a seasonality disease, for example. So what happens if during the winters we’re going to be in lockdown and in the summers, we’re going to be outdoors. Maybe this is going to… So this is also going to be reflected in the job of the rep, maybe in the winter, they will have to do a more digital orchestration and it going to be more pure play, and they will have to be adaptable to that.
Whereas on the other hand, in the summer, they will be obviously accessing face to face again and we have to show them how to become flexible to these changes in the markets. Right? This would be my first point, so making them flexible. And the second one is on the segmentation, because some things that I have seen very commonly is that sales reps normally have… Actually, I have a slide for this, so let me show you. I need a visual aids myself to be able to convey my ideas. Can you see it?
Moderator
Yes.
José Maria Guido Avila
So, it’s the same customer, right? So you look at the marketing manager and marketing calls them the competitor prescriber and medical says it’s the scientific expert. And then key account management says it’s a key decision maker. The digital team says this is a digital adopter and field force says we have ABC segments, but it’s the same customer.
So in the end, the Salesforce, the person in front of the doctor and orchestrating the experience is the sales rep. So they have to be able to connect all the dots together and have this aligned segmentation. So they have to be equipped… To say, to identify these commonalities in the segmentation. So there is no more of this is the segmentation for marketing, and this is the medical, it’s the same customer. So the more we equip them to be able to respond to these same HCPs and orchestrate those experiences, they’re going to be more successful.
Moderator
Thanks for that.
I need to say, maybe we have the quote of the day from the audience, which is ”you cannot change rep profile and job and keep him in the same old KPIs”, right? So I think this is definitely a nice one, thank you very much for that.
Next question, today, orchestrating a true omnichannel experience goes beyond coordinating the channels that we push out to the HCPs. A comprehensive strategy also needs to account for the interactions that physicians initiate on their own. We also agree on that. How can pharma meet this challenge and ensure engagements are personalized to the segment needs? Haider.
Haider Alleg
Yeah, I mean, the question is like any other companies in any other industry, if you are not at the rendezvous point with your targets, you don’t have an engagement. So you don’t actually convey a transfer of value. I think the first question is where are those conversion points and where should we be along that journey? And I think this is where the culture of being data driven is changing that perspective. So if you get your reps and anyone in the company thinking, “Where should I focus my time and my value?” Instead of just going on the CRM and checking the box to show that I’ve done my target, right? That’s not it, this is not the people we want. We want the people that want to say, “No actually my doctor calls me on WhatsApp and maybe it’s not super compliant, but I will switch him back to my compliant channel and explain on…”
So this kind of agility, building that culture of agility, I think this is where I’m quite keen to develop with the organization I have. On the other hand, I’m looking also at what are the… You mentioned KPIs, I think in this multichannel system or ecosystem you can’t just as I was reading on the chart here. Regional frequency are great, but at some point it’s like committee manager for cosmetic brand, you can’t just ask them to do regional, regional reach. You need to have some engagement going on and the same conversation I see sometimes in the other industries are coming back to our rep level. My vision will be that the rep is doing a bit of marketing and a bit of key account management where it’s needed. And the vision is that he will potentially have a territory 10 times, which is scary, but you also have the tools to help you handle this 10 times bigger territory, even if this is a hybrid territory with virtual and sometimes you’ll have to see your A segment doctors. I think that’s agility to be able to say, “Yeah, you know what? I will just record myself.” I was looking at one of the questions here called about digital fatigue. I might not just organize a meeting because this is maybe adding to the back to back of the doctor and adding stress.
Maybe I will record myself, shoot that video through whatever system the doctor prefers and it is asynchronous, he can read it when he’s going, coming back home. And that’s a way to also differentiate. That’s also a way us pharma to be smart enough to say, I’m not adding to the pile, I’m not competing against an HCPs association with this webinar. I’m trying to basically fit to see whether the value is the best for the target.
Moderator
Thank you Haider. José Maria?
José Maria Guido Avila
Yeah. I mean, coming back to the point of KPIs, I completely agree Haider this is… It’s really important that we go into… We’re talking about customer experience, right? So my dream is that at some point the reps even have customer experience scores as part of their incentive, imagine that we could measure customer experience to score a specific territory and then say, “Okay, your customers were five”, and then you need to hold it to four, six, and seven.
So that their reps are truly focused on providing this customer experience that you were mentioning, right? So being flexible to adapt to those needs, that would be my dream. Right. And coming back to your… And actually this is connected to one of the points in the chat was also about the digital fatigue, right? So customer experience, it’s based on solving this digital fatigue, because if we focus on providing our customer experience, then we will not be piling up to the amount of webinars that are in the market.
And again, briefly, I’m going to show you something I did for this event specifically, because this also has to do with our internal mindset, right? So for being responsive to HCP initiated interactions, sometimes our own internal focus doesn’t let us be responsive to that. If you look at the left side, you look at the typical Apple product versus a Google product versus your company app. Right.
It’s completely different, right? And then on the other side, that tsunami of webinars that the pharma industry has created, right. It’s enough. It’s too much, right? So let’s say going back to equipping the reps to empower them to be advocates of the customers, train them to become experts in customer experience, measure customer experience coefficients, and net promoter score by territory. This is going to help us to enable what I call the democratization of the customer experience.
Moderator
Thank you José Maria. Bruce?
Bruce Carlson
Yeah. I’ll just add two real quick things. I agree with everything that Haider and Jose Maria had said. I think that the vision is clearer than some of the barriers to make this happen. And I’ll just say two of them, we still see tremendous silos between sales and marketing and medical and analytics. And until we can break those down as an industry and really get more integrated and move faster, it’s going to make it very difficult to realize that vision of trying to really get quick in meeting the HCP where, where he or she is. So I think there’s a lot of work to be done there, both from an org design perspective. And I agree with the KPI issues, we had one client when the pandemic first hit, they reassigned two product managers with the sole responsibility of repurposing content and they had a specific KPI that they had to do two per week.
And that was just enough of a shift that they were able to very quickly change a lot of their use cases from field visits to virtual. And that’s just one example of how you can use KPIs to do that. I think the other one is around content creation. Pharma has outsourced a lot of that and I think a number of companies are re-looking at how do I have to start re-insourcing some of that so that I can be a little more nimble. So I think those are some of the tactical challenges that are in the way of realizing that true omnichannel experience.
Moderator
Thank you, Bruce. And last question for our session.
Haider Alleg
Dario, can we address one of the interesting points in the chat because I think we don’t take the time to really go down to those questions sometimes and give credit to them. So Yans here is asking, how do we measure customer experience? And usually you use NPS, trashed in the conversation pretty often. On my side, what I can share is that I’d like to identify journeys that are changing behaviors, whatever they are. You need to define brand per brand, life cycle after life cycle what is a proper behavior you intend to change. Then for me, once you understand that, for example, the behavior change is changing by 50% the intention to prescribe. You are not in e-commerce, so don’t dream about tracking down exactly how much pills you are selling, that’s not true, but you could track the intention to believe in what you are selling.
And I think this is where once you define this is what the complexity is. On one hand, you can go very quickly, to answer Bruce’s point, try to take 10 of your sales rep and make them do the best email and landing pages that marketing will think it’s an agency that is doing them just by using some stupid MailChimp template. You will see that marketing will look at them like, okay, now we have the sales team doing marketing on our behalf.
That’s the one hand of the spectrum. On the other hand, you have that very complex omnichannel story to build. And it takes time. It’s like building a story with trees that are going on many directions and tagging, connecting those stories together to identify those customer journeys and the milestone of those behavior change. That is what differentiates the small game of getting out quickly with a landing page to a truly connected multi-channel synchronized story that is wired for behavior change and to answer specifically one of the question there, you could then…
No one is preventing you to ask to directly to a doctor after one, two, three touch points, have you changed your perception about our drug? If you get consent to talk to a doctor, no one is preventing you to capture data. Sometimes I have like miss where you can’t do it, but actually if you get the permission to contact them and to ask this question, why not? Usually we have an army of lawyers to protect us to do the right thing here. But I’m just saying from a marketing standpoint, it’s always good to ask that question directly.
Moderator
Thank you Haider. We are left with three minutes, so quick reply on the last question which is, what role does tech play in closing the gap between brand and the field? Bruce, let’s start with you.
Bruce Carlson
Yep. I’ll be quick. I think there’s two key points. The quarterly or trimesterly POA I think is losing relevance. We’ve all said we have to go faster. I think technology and one of the things we’re trying to do is create more of an open platform kind of concept. So whether it’s our analytics or the client’s analytics or a third party vendor’s analytics, being able to deploy those flexibly, but really being able to translate those quickly to the field is really important.
And the second point is around… I started talking about the relationship between reps and HCPs. The other important thing is the change management of the field. As you’re going through this exercise, you really need to be thinking about engaging the reps so that they really understand what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, otherwise they’re not going to embrace the way that we want them to.
Moderator
Thank you Bruce. José Maria.
José Maria Guido Avila
Yeah. I think your technology, it’s an enabler of their personalized engagement, right? So it has to be helping us to provide this a more customer centric and more customer responsive experience.
To give you just one example, we had an idea last year to develop content from a Congress and we were able to produce the content in four hours, since the moment the lecture finished until we were able to deliver it. And one of the countries that was there participating, after we deliver the content, they took seven days to program the red triggered emails. And that’s because the system was placed like that. So it’s either it can be completely well and be amazing and they deliver the experience or it can even be a barrier for you if it’s not properly deployed.
Moderator
Thank you. And Haider?
Haider Alleg
Yeah. So I think concretely speaking, this is a journey, right? So it starts at different levels for everyone in a company, even in my company, I have to say China and Canada and Russia was quite ahead of that transformation because of the nature of the country. So I think moving forward, we’ll have to get a pretty good understanding of what good looks like.
So I can tell you that what my good looks like is very different what José might do or Bruce can with his clients, right? So I think this is where we’ll have to identify those journey steps very carefully to not try to catch a train that is going too fast for some of the reps that are in the front line or the MSL as marketeers, but also as a company. So I think that’s also what I would recommend people to be mindful. It’s good to be inspired. It’s a different thing to have your pace and be happy with the achievement that you have achieved.
Moderator
Thank you Haider, José Maria, Bruce. Amazing session. Of course, we’ll publish this on YouTube. Last but not least, please meet Aktana because they will be hosting a Q&A live at their booth tomorrow during the networking break. So, gentlemen, again, thank you very much and stay safe and negative of course, for Covid, right.
Bruce Carlson
Thanks.
Haider Alleg
Thank you guys.
José Maria Guido Avila
Thank you.
Haider Alleg
Bye.
