The Alchemy of How We Sell What We Sell

The voice of the customer in pharma's selling model

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

We’ve heard the stats:

·      79% of prescribers will be inaccessible to representatives by 2025 (ZS)

·      55% of physicians are somewhat or largely overwhelmed by "overtly promotional" content. (Indegene)

·       Pharmaceutical companies spend more on detailing clinicians and free drug samples than any other forms of professional marketing in the United States (JAMA)

The first two points raise the question, “so why do we still engage prescribing customers in the same ways?”

Well, the answer to the question is easy . . . it works. Hence the spends noted in JAMA.

A 2009 meta-analysis focused on promotional impact on prescribing, published in Family Practice showed that the first visit from a pharmaceutical representative increased a general practitioner’s preference for the marketed product more than 2-fold.

And what about that cherished second call?

After the second detail, drug preference increased by an additional 50%.  

It is not lost on me that this is a 2009 analysis conducted when the iPhone and Veeva were both two-years-old, Pharma had only been travelling the promotional side of information super highway for about a decade, a gallon of gas was $2.70, Sully landed an Airbus A330 on the Hudson and we still gave out pens.

I do not think for one second that we have not gotten exponentially better and data-infused promotions.

Safe and Efficacious

We have also been talking about Pill Plus and More than a Medicine approaches to differentiation beyond comparative clinicals and profiles for as long as I can remember.

So, with all these years of experience, feedback, and insights on behaviors why are we inundating customers and why are they increasingly inaccessible?   

Maybe we are still overtly brand out, living by reach and frequency models (because they work) more than we are customer out. By that I mean, we can target on all sorts of operational metrics and the knowledge of prescribing capacity and formularies, but what about perceptions, sentiment, and other signals generated by the voice and actions of the customer?

If the Next Best Action you are looking for is how to put your message in their path, you may wish to pause.

Customer Out and the Easy Button

The Next Best Action has more to do with what they are missing or seeking than what you are marketing and selling.

Medallia, was already a leading global customer experience software platform prior to our recent acquisitions and integrations of Thunderhead, who are leading real-time journey orchestration and Mindful, the intelligent callback and post call sentiment leader (check out Forrester Wave and Gartner Magic Quadrant for details).

We capture feedback and optimize engagements for many of the leading life sciences customers including B2B, B2C and colleagues.  We do so in a number of interesting ways that I am glad to chat about (message me), but the focus here is specifically the field (medical, commercial, digital and terrestrial). In many cases we gather actionable feedback during and post field engagements. The feedback from clinicians helps our customers understand and act upon what their customers feel they did well and could do better.

Across thousands of engagements year to date, patient focus, resources and education are some of the leading areas where health professional customers feel pharma could help them with their customers. It is not that understanding the science and management of the product does not matter. What they are saying is that you need to put in more time and resources to be better at helping me help my patients.

Quarter Inch Holes

We’ve all heard the ‘don’t sell quarter inch drill bits, sell quarter inch holes’ pithy adage. I get it, results – sell results. But there is not a line of people who want to buy holes. If getting to the results is peppered with breaks in the ease, effectiveness, and empathy in the experience then that hole (result) is just something for the wind to blow through. That mindset perpetuates the ‘fixing what is the matter with you’ approach versus supporting ‘what matters to you.’

It is safe to say for the right group of patients, science is on your side. What is left to differentiate on then is the experience to write, manage, get, start, and stay.

Connecting all the channels and streamlining the messages to the moments that matter can be meaningless in the absence of relevance. And relevance, to be sure requires observational and direct feedback from customers and the actions to address short comings.

The power and promise of knowing and changing the things in your control and supporting people on the things beyond it is what many doctors around the world are saying is missing from their interactions with the industry.

Alchemy

We are beyond mapping clicks, visits, and opens to impact. To perpetuate a model that is declining in impact, causing barriers between you and customers, and is rife with mysteries and inefficiencies because it works begs a discussion, maybe even a debate. Everything works . . . until it doesn’t. Plus, we have gotten to smart and have too many ways to get smarter and more empathetic to not focus on understanding real-time needs and relentlessly resolving them.

Next Best Actions derived from customer needs and actions requires alchemy - that is, taking something ordinary and turning it into something extraordinary. Next Best Action, Voice of Customer, Journey Orchestration, and Omni Channel are not disjointed efforts unless you allow them to be so. And - doing so devalues the power of each and the exponent inside the alchemy.

It disadvantages those who do not see the customer signals, insights, and actions as cyclical and symbiotic from those who do. In the absence of continuous feedback, we are all well-intentioned, but run the heavy risk of working on the wrong things.

Mostly, in healthcare, it hinders the human experience and the opportunity for people to receive resources at the speed of need.