Cross-functional marketing leadership

pharmafile | November 1, 2010 | Feature | Sales and Marketing Nikki Atkins, WG Consulting Healthcare, leadership, marketing strategies, pharma marketing 

Building a multi-disciplinary team across a pharma company is a tough challenge – but the demands of the modern development and commercialisation process mean a cross-functional approach is essential to success.

The pharmaceutical sector has worked hard to ditch the old ‘silo mentality’ in favour of collaboration, both internally and externally.

But the challenges of resource allocations, geographic divides, stakeholder diversification and attaining management buy-in, all complicate the pursuit of cross-functional excellence. To succeed, organisations need to form brand teams that have a collective, common purpose. And, like every orchestra needs a strong conductor to drive the performance forward, a good cross-functional team needs a dynamic leader to wave the baton for the brand. That leader is the marketer.

A new world symphony

The marketer is the conductor of the brand; the bandleader and the brand leader. The skill is in combining the very best of the talented players at your disposal, whether inside or outside the company. A marketer must be able to inspire virtuoso performers from all sections of the company to unite behind the brand – in time, in tune and in harmony.

In its simplest form, a marketer’s role is to develop the ability to understand, own and ‘become’ the brand – and to communicate in a compelling way that clearly articulates the benefits it can bring to a patient. The marketer must be the most passionate advocate for the brand, driven by a desire to ensure that everyone for whom their medicine is appropriate is going to be prescribed it. A key task is to instil that same passion into each member of the cross-functional team, and to understand how their specialist knowledge can be harnessed to drive consistent messages which build a value proposition that resonates with key customer groups. Cross-functional working transcends the life-cycle of a product, from R&D through to patent expiry and beyond.

The onset of global branding in many companies has facilitated a shift in the role of the local marketer. Much of the strategic development of a brand, work which was once regarded as being a key aspect of a marketer’s role, is often carried out by a smaller group of marketers at regional level; whether Europe, US, Japan or ‘global’. This has had a knock-on impact onto the role of marketers within local operating companies who, in effect, inherit their framework strategy from the global team – with in-built flexibility to choose the most appropriate messages for their local marketplace. For these marketers, time that would have historically been spent developing strategy is now often used to develop an even greater expert understanding of the increasingly fragmented customer-base and the environment. Customer focus is a key component of a successful cross-functional brand team – but is not the sole responsibility of the marketer. It is a collective responsibility and one that will depend significantly upon the composition of a balanced, multi-disciplinary group. So what does a balanced cross-functional team look like? See box, right, and illustration, above.

Cross-functional teams should ideally be built around individual brands. Typically they will be led by a marketing manager or senior brand manager. Bigger brands may also include more junior marketers who are perhaps aligned to specific customer groups. In addition, the team will include a medic.

Ideally, the medic and the lead marketer will be the ABPI signatories. Alongside them will be the scientific adviser and regulatory affairs.

Commonly there will be representation from clinical trials – either the clinical affairs manager or a clinical trials project manager. These will be the people who have commissioned UK studies or the UK links for globally-commissioned studies, and will be there to report progress and interpret emerging themes. Cross-functional teams will typically include someone from healthcare marketing – market access marketers who are aligned to non-clinical NHS customers in the ‘new world’. The team will benefit from two further key players whose involvement is vital – from market research and finance. The market researcher will take a lead on commissioning all bespoke market research and present analysis on routine data sources such as awareness and usage and key brand message recall. In addition, market researchers often represent the objective reality of how a brand is performing against the competition. The finance person will provide the most up-to-date information on sales, market share and, crucially, how much money the team is spending.

One notable absence from regular cross-functional team meetings, although not the day-to-day work of the team itself, can often be representation from sales. This is driven by logistics and the impracticality of taking people off territory regularly for office-based discussions.

Increasingly however, cross-functional teams are using interactive web based meetings to include field based members of the cross-functional team in real time. Since sales represent any organisation’s most customer-facing resource, gaining input from the field is vital. Many companies now employ mechanisms whereby medics or scientific advisers go out with aligned sales members on the team, to capture intelligence to share with the group. In addition, marketers are increasingly being asked to spend more time visiting customers in the field – be it alongside sales professionals, or independent of them. Marketers need to develop relationships with customers that they ‘own’ – so that they can pick up the phone and ask a simple question, without feeling the need for full call objectives and ‘detail aids’. Being able to understand customers at a less intense level can reap real benefits.

Hitting the right notes

A typical cross-functional brand team meeting will assess operational performance against agreed objectives. These might focus on the following:

• Brand performance – sales versus target, market share

• Campaign performance – best practice, objections, salesforce motivation

• Competitor performance – who are they targeting and with how much investment?

• Environmental levers – what is helping or hindering customers prescribing and patients accessing the brand?

Cross-functional teams can also cover portfolio development, discussing brands that are in the pipeline and some years from launch. As datasets for these brands improve, early discussion between clinical trials and regulatory personnel can help the team understand what the data is saying, and enable marketers to consider whether it might present clinical benefit or help secure reimbursement and/or NICE approval. In tandem, medics can offer feedback from customers as to whether the benefits coming through are likely to be in areas of unmet clinical need.            

Moreover, early data analysis and discussion between all stakeholders can help determine whether, for example, the team should consider applying for an Expanded Access Programme for patients to use the drug pre-license.

Staying in tune

Stakeholder Management is a vital skill-set. How do you enliven all the members of your cross-functional team so that they play together in time? A marketer needs to combine a passion for the brand with clarity of message. Creating objectives around which the whole team can unite, requires understanding of the different perspectives of every team player and what drives their work. Medical and scientific team members expect you to demonstrate accuracy, and understand the responsibilities that go with marketing promotion in the pharmaceutical sector, and professional credibility beyond passion and enthusiasm. Moreover, the team will expect ethical leadership – with corporate and ethical governance central to its work.

Stakeholder management is not, of course, restricted to communication within the cross-functional team – there are key stakeholders who sit outside of it. One major internal stakeholder is the ‘above country’ team – the global strategists who, more often than not, have developed the plan from a regional level, but may not have current insight into local issues you may be facing. Here, your biggest challenge as a marketer is likely to be how you go about stakeholder managing your global strategist, before they even think to ask you. It’s about being proactive.

The paying audience

The other obvious skill requiring continual development is gathering broad and authentic customer insight. The external environment has been increasingly complex for several years and looks likely to remain so – but for a marketer, grasping the salient points for your brand is essential. The discipline of marketing is all about understanding customer needs so that you can meet them with your brand – but environmental intelligence can no longer be a solo responsibility for the marketer. A balanced cross-functional team should be well-placed to provide robust customer insight, each from their own slightly different professional viewpoint. To this end, the cross-functional team should be highly customer-facing – meaning that the marketer should not be considered the sole customer voice on the team.

Once again, the marketer’s role as the conductor is underlined. Your job is to fine tune the timbre of the full orchestra, and to ensure that, as a team, you’ve got the right information at the right time and are in a position to make decisions that hit all the right notes. As a conductor, you can orchestrate what is happening – but you cannot do it all yourself.

Orchestral manoeuvres in the dark

Marketers cannot play all of the instruments on their own, nor indeed can the cross-functional team itself take on all the work without compromising quality. The industry is accustomed to outsourcing – clinical research, sales, medical communications, advertising, PR/medical education etc. are all disciplines where pharma has looked outside its core for expertise and considered carefully the role of resource allocation.

Making decisions based on robust customer insight has always been a source of true competitive advantage for brands. Making orchestral manoeuvres in the dark is a recipe for disaster. As a marketer however, you now also need to be sufficiently tuned into your brand to understand what requires a response, and what is simply background noise. And with a myriad of new policies consulted on and implemented to varying degrees on pretty much an ongoing basis, it is an impossible task to track progress in real time.

For example, what does the new NHS White Paper mean for your brand? How does it affect the autonomy of your key customer group to commission and provide services?

What will be the impact of the new Outcomes Framework? Does your disease area become more or less of an NHS focus? What will be the impact on the patient pathway and experience?

Marketers cannot be expected to do this efficiently on their own. A marketer’s job is to drive brand performance, it is not to be an expert on the NHS. In the current market, industry manpower is under sustained pressure as companies downsize but seek to eke out every possible bit of internal resource and place it behind brand development. A widespread strategy to increase efficiencies and productivity is, in fact, driving the need for a cross-functional approach. Today’s marketers are faced with broader responsibilities than ever before, and are bedevilled by constraints on their time and resources.

The challenges of understanding a rapidly-evolving, complex customer environment are such that companies no longer have the internal resource to fulfil this requirement efficiently. Is it the best use of a marketer’s time to monitor the environment when it is not their primary area of expertise? There are more cost and time-effective ways of achieving results than trying to do it all yourself. Finding the right partner and making them a key component in your cross-functional team could make all the difference.

The overture

The role of the marketer as leader of a cross-functional team is critical. Marketers must be prepared to conduct the extended company orchestra through a true ensemble performance. Knowing which instruments to use, when to bring them in and when to rest them, requires leadership, delegation, passion, and a common purpose. It also depends upon developing an ability to engage, enliven and enthuse.

It’s time to strike up the brand.

THE MAIN PLAYERS

A strong multi-disciplinary team led by a marketer will normally comprise the involvement of the following:

• Medic

• Scientific adviser

• Sales

• Regulatory affairs manager

• Clinical trials project manager/clinical affairs manager

• Market access

• Health economics

• Market research

• Finance

Nikki Atkins is management consultant at WG Consulting Healthcare Ltd. website: www.wg-group.com

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