Pharma IT’s New Challenge and Opportunity: Deep Collaboration with Sales and Marketing
It’s well known that pharmaceutical companies have been plagued for over a decade by on-premise IT solutions that are expensive to maintain and difficult to adapt to industry change and innovation. The industry has been addressing this problem via increased spending1 on cloud-based technologies. And today, with industry-specific cloud solutions, life sciences companies can gain the flexibility, speed, and agility they need in their most strategic areas.
One of the greatest benefits of cloud is that it enables companies to quickly adapt to changes in their business—a capability that’s more important now than ever. While pharma has been trying for years to provide richer content2 to their customers, it is now also attempting to broaden3 its customer focus. This new strategy relies on increased coordination amongst the evolving roles of the Key Account Manager4, Medical Scientific Liaison5, and Medical Representative. It’s clear that for pharma’s emerging strategies to succeed, the industry is moving to tailored cloud technology that offers accurate, coordinated information across a growing number of channels. What pharma IT is challenged with now is not the availability of solutions to meet their business needs—but rather, the ability to ensure alignment across the organization and keep up with the new technology.
A coordinated, multichannel selling model necessitates a coordinated business. The more aligned sales, marketing, and IT are, the better positioned a company will be to quickly and effectively deliver new solutions to help enable new customer-facing strategies. For companies to enable these business strategies, they must secure the cooperation of sales and marketing in the following areas:
Sales and marketing must remain engaged with IT during the implementation of new technologies and provide iterative feedback on the solutions. A strategic partnership between the IT and commercial organizations can help ensure the organization has the right foundation for successful sales and marketing.
Responsibility for the change management of these solutions, including training and communications, rests with sales and marketing. These solutions are being brought on to support new or changing business processes; the new process and new solution should be rolled out as a coordinated effort.
After all teams are live on the solution, the commercial groups should contribute to a plan for future change and evolution. Sales and marketing can gather feedback from their employees, and IT will receive feedback via application support. Both sides should align on the current success of the applications and participate in assessing new possibilities to improve their employees’ experience. This is best done by understanding the new functionality delivered in the provider’s application versions, as well as vocalizing new business needs to the cloud provider so that they can be incorporated into future versions.
The pharmaceutical industry will continue to evolve, and the technology landscape will grow along with it. The better sales, marketing and IT can collaborate and iterate through the development, change management, and post-deployment phases of an application delivery cycle, the more agile a company will be at taking on new strategies to better serve their customers.
References:
1. Wallach, Matt (2014). Where Life Science Companies Say They Will Invest In 2014. Retrieved from www.veeva.com/veeva-blog/
2. Faden, Mike (2012). Pharmeceutical Commerce. Will Closed-Loop Marketing Energize the Pharma Sales Process? Retrieved from http://pharmaceuticalcommerce.com
3. Zuzanna Fimińska (2014). Volume to Value: A shift in pharma’s business model. Retrieved from http://social.eyeforpharma.com
4. Zuzanna Fimińska (2013). Yes We KAM! Why Key Account Managers are the Future of Pharma Sales. Retrieved from http://social.eyeforpharma.com
5. Ajay Khanna (2014). Keeping Up with Change: Understanding the MSL’s Evolving Role. Retrieved from www.veeva.com/veeva-blog/