Navigate the New Pharma Prescriber Network with 3 Guideposts

In the not so distant past, life sciences sales and marketing teams only had to worry about interacting with prescribing physicians, but the dawn of a new commercial reality means they now must engage a range of stakeholders. Today,  pharmaceutical “customers” are a broad and convoluted group that can include physicians, approving committees, and organizations like integrated delivery networks (IDNs).

Life sciences companies are working to most efficiently and expertly support each of these new influencers and decision makers. Sales reps, key account managers, and network managers are finding ways to deepen their understanding of precisely who the influencers, payers, and prescribers in the network are, and how to deliver value to each of them. How do you engage with and influence these groups effectively to get your brand on formulary for a particular indication(s)? How do you ensure it gets reimbursed? And prescribed?

While there’s no silver bullet for adapting to a highly complex landscape, coordinated multichannel strategies can help pharma interact with stakeholders much more effectively. Fully leveraging different channels to provide greater value to customers requires strong planning and orchestration. This includes increasing attention to developing tailored, individual messages for each of the different ‘customers’ in the new prescriber network, especially key opinion leaders.

Companies can start by taking a look at their strategy for customers, channels, and content, and how these components work together.

1)    Customers – To best contend with the complexity of the new prescriber landscape, retool your customer strategy by making it both broader and deeper. You will want to consider where a particular HCP falls within a wider network of influence, for instance, while also thinking about what information is most relevant for that individual—and how the customer wants you to communicate with him or her.  Is she constantly on the go, with a preference for looking at content between meetings on her smart phone? Does he like to review material in his own time, going over drug information and ordering samples through a web portal? Static lists of HCPs and contact information aren’t helping you gain the comprehensive visibility you need into customers’ affiliations and channel preferences.

2)     Channels – Organizations have been executing multiple channels for years, but coordinating customer interactions across channels, and capturing the right insight from them, is a bigger challenge. Orchestrated properly, these channels can yield better insights and help pharmaceutical companies operate seamlessly across all channels.

3)   Content – Sales and marketing teams can collaborate to find out what customers need, and gain leverage and scale globally by creating a repository of content that can be tailored by customer and channel.

For a deeper dive into how to understand and interact with more complex networks of customers effectively, and capabilities needed for success across the three ‘C’s, read my article in this month’s Pharmaceutical Market Europe.

 Jan van den Burg is vice president commercial strategy at Veeva.