What can I do to change your mind?

pharmafile | January 15, 2008 | Feature | Sales and Marketing |  pharma, sales 

Pharmaceutical industry executives charged with steering their sales and marketing business at a strategic level are by nature, it seems, metrics-obsessed. The industry is unswervingly focused on generating healthy profits by containing cost and justifying every investment.  Much of this effort is currently channelled into highly specialised and seperate disciplines such as Customer Relationship Management, (CRM) or Salesforce Effectiveness (SFE), with sales and marketing very often working on completely different models and  assumptions.  Now, as the emphasis shifts towards tackling the growing problem of market access, sales and marketing teams are once again being urged to come together.

Market access

"Sales and marketing effectiveness has traditionally involved different teams working in silos," says Claire Gillis, chief exeecutive at WG Consulting. "Marketing develops the marketing strategy, based around clinical data and global marketing, and sales develops the targeting and sales strategy. What's missing is a platform on which to build a cohesive strategy that brings together sales, marketing and medical. That platform is market access."

Market access is rapidly emerging as one of the industry's most widely considered concepts. Despite such attention, a thorough understanding of market access and the opportunities it enables remains rare in the market place. So what exactly is it?

In simple terms, market access is about creating the maximum possible access to your market for your product. In consumer markets, market access is easily defined because, more often than not, individuals make buying decisions, and customers are all in one place. In healthcare, it is more complex. The market for pharmaceuticals is fragmented and comprises many stakeholders. For the pharmaceutical industry, market access is about packaging data to appeal to the different stakeholders that influence the uptake of a product.

Traditionally, the main stakeholder group has always been considered to be clinicians, chiefly Key Opinion Leaders. As such, this has historically been where most effort and resource has been concentrated. However, the market has now evolved to a point where the clinical argument, whilst still important, is only one factor in a successful sales and marketing strategy.

"Until now, pharmaceutical marketing was a fairly linear process where sales professionals were deployed to engage clinicians – because they made the decisions to prescribe – and demonstrate to them how a drug might benefits patients. This made sense, but there is so much more to it now," says Andy Lee, Business Operations Director at WG Consulting.

NHS reforms in the past few years have led to a dramatic overhaul in how the health service in the UK is structured. These reforms have transformed PCTs into powerful, multi-faceted organisations and, in turn, have sparked a significant expansion in stakeholders and influencers. This has driven the need for a new approach from pharma. PCTs are now required to put together robust strategic plans that accommodate their wide and diverse responsibilities. Commissioning, public health priorities, service provider frameworks, primary care provision, HR and finance all fall under the remit of PCTs and require strategic planning to ensure success. Pharma needs to mirror this approach, and, in the process, this will manifest itself as a market access strategy.

"Ultimately, market access is pharma's strategic plan," says Andy Lee. It is the glue that holds everything together. Pharma companies can plan things like research, marketing and sales individually, but if there isn't an overarching strategic plan that pushes everything in the same direction, there isn't going to be a tremendous amount of synergy from them. Market access pulls everything together and gives you that synergy. If you get it right it will allow you to do your medical and research activity, but link it with your sales and marketing activities so that the end result is more coherent and stronger than its individual parts." 

Internal and external customers

Market access is about being customer-centric. As a central driver for sales & marketing effectiveness, much of the planning of market access strategies will therefore centre around developing and delivering messages to external customers. In the new NHS, external customers are manifold. They include:

Clinicians

Commissioners

Directors of Public Health

Independent Prescribers

Practice Managers

Service Providers

Payers

Business Managers

For marketers, however, an additional customer exists that more often than not gets overlooked: the sales force.

The sales team is an internal customer, and is pivotal to the success of any sales and marketing strategy. In the silo society of traditional pharma, attention paid to the internal relationship between sales and marketing has often been inadequate. This approach is underlined by a familiar marketer's riposte: "If the sales are poor, there's nothing wrong with the marketing plan – it's the implementation by the sales team. If the sales are good, it was a good marketing plan." In truth, there wasn't an integrated plan.

"Marketers should not lose sight of the fact that market access is about tailoring what you are doing not only for your external customers, but also for your internal customers," says Rick Morton, Managing Director at WG Consulting. "You can't access a market if your internal teams are not aligned with the key messages or understanding what is expected of them." 

Commercial success, therefore, hinges on the traction between sales and marketing.  "Sales and marketing effectiveness is about making sure that whatever is created from a marketing perspective is implemented effectively," says Rick. "The internal implementation of the marketing plan to the sales team is critical. Sales need to have a full understanding of why marketing has been created in the way it has, and how it has been ratified by external customers. This will give confidence that it is in line with what the NHS expects, and aligned with what their customers are interested in." 

Presently, marketing plans are predominantly driven by marketers with an often token input from 'product champions' – field-based personnel that sit on a marketing team and offer the sales perspective. More often than not, this perspective is viewed largely as a way of achieving buy-in from the sales team, and is used almost as PR to demonstrate to the wider field force that their input has been recognised. But the traction between sales and marketing can be much more productive than this.

Field-based marketing

"The sales perspective could be used much more intelligently," says Rick. "A good way to achieve this would be to identify a group of sales professionals who can take on a field-based marketing effectiveness role as part of their development. These can become the eyes and ears of the marketing team, but in a more productive way. From the front line, they can carry out marketing effectiveness projects that would normally be commissioned to market research companies. They can look at specific customer groups and assess what they are doing and how they are perceiving marketing initiatives." 

Such a role would be well-placed to provide insights that are not just about the product, but also about the environment. This kind of environmental analysis will be crucial to the brand team and help shape its approach. "What it comes down to is having a rapid and consistent level of feedback from the field and developing a dynamic relationship between sales and marketing," says Rick. "Rather than marketing simply sucking information from the salesforce, the field-based marketing role creates a two-way process, both sides of which are supporting the same objectives. This is another critical aspect of market access." 

The successful implementation of the marketing plan is not, of course, limited to transporting information from the market back to head office. Internal communication between marketing and sales is crucial. To this effect, the way in which marketing teams brief the sales force needs to improve. Historically, sales briefing is often delivered at national conferences, where marketers simply present an overview of the marketing plan, talk through the syndicate and unveil the materials. This approach is common, but clearly insufficient.

"Too often, marketers fail to give enough thought to how marketing messages are implemented, assessed and rolled out to the sales team," says Rick. "Sales professionals need to understand the background to the plan; why are we taking this approach? What was the medical perspective that led to it? What have NHS professionals said about the marketing angle? What were the perceived strengths and weaknesses of the approach? How might we be challenged on it, and how do we handle objections?" 

Currently, answers to these questions are left to Sales Managers, whose responsibility it is to train the field force. However, by dedicating more time and thought to the briefing process, marketers can help sales by putting the marketing plan in context. Whether this is supported by the medical evidence-base, market research or environmental evidence, an informed and engaged sales force will be a much more effective one. In the process, traction between sales and marketing is maximised and market access gets that little bit easier.

A complex sell

Clearly, the market for selling pharmaceuticals is a complicated one, involving a high number of stakeholders, both external and internal. In an ever-reforming NHS, consideration must now be given to how products impact areas and customers that had previously been disregarded. How does a new therapy impact service provision? Do services need to be redesigned? Is there sufficient capacity and resource for the introduction of a new treatment? Is there a financial argument to be made? Approaching such a rich tapestry of customers requires robust and integrated planning. Bringing marketing and sales teams together to develop a market access strategy should be central to this plan.

"Success depends on creating sales and marketing plans that package the core data for a therapy, and developing a value proposition and key messages for different customer groups," says Claire Gillis. "This strategy needs to be cohesive and should relate to existing and desired beliefs around the product. Examining these beliefs as an integrated team allows a common understanding of desired outcomes and a sharing of the 'vision of success' that will be crucial to progress." 

Belief shifts as a metric

It is this 'vision of success' that allows integrated teams to understand true sales and marketing effectiveness. The end goal for market access is to identify, share and achieve the belief shifts that will enable your product to be used in the market. "Belief shifts are what market access, and with it sales and marketing effectiveness, is all about," says Andy Lee. "And they are utterly measurable. Through a process of stakeholder and influencer mapping, marketing teams can identify the current beliefs of their various customer groups. With this research, it is then a case of using your own data to help shift those beliefs to ones that will support your product. Continual environmental analysis among your stakeholders will help you measure how many customers have retained their old beliefs, and how many have shifted. This, in turn, helps you monitor how effective your sales and marketing approach is in the market, and moves away from the traditional and crude metric of sales data." 

Using agreed and identifiable belief shifts as the key measurement of success underlines the need for sales and marketing teams to work in a more integrated fashion. Moreover, it provides a common objective that helps unite two functions that have previously operated in isolated silos. That such a common objective has, through market access initiatives, been ratified amongst the NHS customer-base, means that all aspects of the relationship, internal and external, will have buy-in to the plan. As such, sales and marketing activity will be much stronger.

Whats more, such a cohesive and integrated approach removes the desire to focus on traditional customer groups and instead explores all aspects of the potential barriers to success for a new therapy. In the modern NHS, if the traditional model of focusing simply on clinical KOLs was used, this would invariably create a clinical desire for a therapy without the supporting work being done around the financial and service side of market access. As a result barriers would be created.

The belief shift approach provides a perfect platform for prioritising activities, monitoring progress, assessing implementation and evaluating effectiveness. Moreover, it enables measurement of the effectiveness of individual activities, attributing an overall effect. The twin objectives for pharma companies, therefore, should be to pursue mindset shifts not only in their key customer groups, but also in the approach of their commercial employees.

To succeed, the UK pharmaceutical industry, welded to a traditional sales and marketing model that has served it so well in the past, perhaps needs to go through a belief shift of its own.

Box: The Belief Shift

Market access

The concept of market access gives marketing and sales departments a common platform, replacing their seperate methodologies and goals. This new approach is needed in a more complex customer environment of a much reformed NHS.

Marketers – your sales team is your first customer

Don't lose sight of the fact that you are tailoring your message for internal customers as well as external customers. Make sure communication between sales and marketing is a two-way street.

How do new product launches affect NHS customers?

Consideration must now be given to how a new products introduction may affect the health service. Anticipaiting problems/opportunities for service re-design and resources will pay off.

The Belief Shift

The process of identifying the current views and perceptions of customer groups and then changing them. Mapping beliefs and your success in shifting them will also help you gauge the success of your sales and marketing strategy.

Simon Dawson is a management consultant at WG Consulting.  Contact: enquiries@westawaygillis.co.uk