What the Grass Looks Like from the Pharma Side
When I left my sales role at WebMD over 4 years ago, I assumed it was my curtain call to the vendor side. I mean, an offer to work for Big Pharma meant that I had made it, right? But, that decision didn’t come easy. While I had told myself that I would one day trade my sales role for a marketing one (that’s why I had pursued an MBA, right?), it was still a surprise when it happened. I was in the midst of a successful year with no real thoughts of making a career transition. But sometimes, when Opportunity knocks, you have to answer the door and invite them in.
Opening that door forever changed my path, and the 3 1/2 years that I spent in marketing roles at Lilly were the best investment for my career. In my previous sales roles calling into pharma, I had mostly worked off of fantasies of what it is like to be on the other end of my email or phone call. Meaning, these folks were “just waiting to hear from me” and the excuses of “not having time or budget” were unfounded — the nerve!
Fast forward to 2018, 3 1/2 years after that fateful day when I first stepped into my new marketing role, I found myself at a fork in the road with Opportunity knocking again. This time the decision was even harder, but I ultimately decided that the leap of faith I was about to take would likely prove to be a move that would further contribute to that investment in my career.
The difference, however, between my previous sales roles and this new one that would put me back on the vendor side, was that I was now armed with perspective, empathy, a more strategic mindset, and a much greater appreciation for the pharma marketer.
Five months in at Outcome Health and I use that insight every day, whether it be in client meetings or outreach, or when having internal discussions about pricing, program development or strategic approach. I make the effort to be thoughtful and considerate about client challenges and how I and Outcome Health can help to address them. While I could literally list about 575 things that we should be cognizant of when working with pharma clients, I have cherry-picked a few that I always try to keep top of mind now that I am back on this side of the table.
1) Keep the Patient Top of Mind
Outcome Health was founded on the premise of driving meaningful engagements and positively impacting patients at the moment of care. Patients are at the core of why we do what we do. That focus on patients is a great place to start when initiating conversations with pharma clients, because amid everything that’s on their plate (revenue goals, spreadsheets, MLR meetings, budgets), the patient is the primary reason for doing what they do. So next time you’re off to a client meeting, instead of kicking off with thoughts of making the sale, remember that there’s a patient out there that needs us and will ultimately be impacted by the work we do.
2) Demonstrating Value to the Busy Marketer
That final year on the pharma side was exhausting. Like many pharma companies, we had an organizational focus to drive efficiency, do more with less and embrace the heavily regulated, volatile and ever-changing world that is pharma. Most days, I went from meeting to meeting, and then came home to address the pile up of emails that had entered my inbox throughout the day. That said, it is critical to ensure we are demonstrating value for our clients at every interaction. The best vendor partners were the ones who came prepared to the meeting, proactively laid out an approach to help us achieve our strategic goals, asked a lot of questions and made their products seem relevant and almost critical to our brands and the audiences we were trying to reach. We have a valuable offering at Outcome Health, but we will majorly miss the mark if we lead with the greatness of our products and network rather than seeking to understand how our offerings can help address the strategic challenges facing our clients. By not taking the latter approach, we risk being seen as simply screens in the doctor’s office…
3) Content is Key…But it’s a Work in Progress
Content marketing is all the buzz in the world of pharma, and brands are on a constant mission to develop content that will resonate with their target audiences. From an article by Robin Robinson in PharmaVOICE, “More than half (58%) of the pharma/biotech industry is spending more than $50 million in content development every year…but only 11% of pharma/biotech marketers reported they have a clear content management strategy…” How great is that for Outcome Health? Considering we have a strategic focus to deliver meaningful, empathetic and engaging content, the opportunity is ripe to show brands that by aligning with us, we can support their own content marketing efforts.
4) Data, Data, Data…Did I mention data?
Anyone hear about AI or machine learning? How about data-driven marketing? These are all hot topics in pharma right now, and data is driving decisions and how brands are executing marketing campaigns. While Outcome Health has the ability to provide delivery results and partners with the leader in healthcare analytics to deliver Rx impact reports, we find that brands still want more. For each client, it is important to understand how data is used to make decisions, including which vendor partners they select. Many third party vendors are able to provide their clients data and insights about engagement in real time over the course of a campaign, and this data is then used to optimize the campaign or trigger next steps. As we think about how to evolve and innovate our own devices and networks at Outcome Health, it will be critical to consider things that will allow us to demonstrate deeper, active engagements and then deliver this back to clients in real time.
5) Failure is not Rewarded
The irony here is that failure is actually a very common occurrence in pharma. Molecules being researched to treat conditions in early phase trials fail quite often (according the FDA, only 5 out of every 5,000 drugs that enter preclinical testing progress to human testing), and drugs that were believed to be the next cure can get denied approval in the final stages. Perhaps, however, this failure is what lends to heavy pressures and high expectations for the drugs that do come to market. And for the pharma marketer responsible for ensuring a drug’s success, failure is not an option. That said, the common approach is to take the more reliable and predictable path to marketing a brand. Year over year, they will stick with the tactics and solutions that are tried and true and have low risk of failing or not driving positive impact. Changing that mindset is hard. Having an awareness that failure is a valid fear for many brand marketers is the first step. Then the goal is to effectively demonstrate how we can be valuable partners and help to drive brand impact alongside them.
There are certainly many more insights that I could share from my experience — I’ve only just scratched the surface. The real intention here was to share perspective from the other side, and hopefully, impart the importance of understanding our customers — what drives them, what challenges them, and what is meaningful to them. By having empathy and understanding for what a pharma marketer does and how they do it will ultimately lead to trust, partnership and loyalty between you and them. Sound familiar to the approach we are taking with patients?
