The pharmaceutical sales industry has undergone a massive mind shift towards customer and patient centricity. While there are many success stories, some pharmas are still stuck in old habits and are struggling to execute this mindset practically and nimbly. Today, pharma sales methodologies are expected to center on building value-driven partnerships with healthcare professionals (HCPs), equipping them with sharper knowledge and detailed proof to deal with a more educated patient who wants the best medical care available.
In an attempt to better engage with HCPs, Qstream recently hosted a webcast to spark conversation about how pharmaceutical sales, marketing, product and medical affairs teams can break down departmental silos and work together to put HCPs — and their patients — at the center of focus. Michael Connolly, director of enterprise sales for Qstream, was joined by the following panelists:
The panel and webcast participants discuss strategies to fully understand the patient mindset. This includes customer and patient needs discovery and messaging personalization. Much can be gained by approaching each HCP interaction holistically and reading signals from multiple data sources. That could be sales data, marketing data, clinical research, or patient data (all within the boundaries of regulatory compliance). To learn more about these strategies and more, tune into the webcast.
To truly get to the root of customer need, pharma sales reps need to approach each sale with curiosity, precise knowledge and well honed discovery skills given they may only have 6 minutes to engage a HCP. On the webcast, Bargiel explained how, more often than not, HCPs are overworked and overwhelmed dealing with overly-informed patients, which leaves them with little time or interest to work with a sales rep that doesn’t know how to specifically help them. This is where MSLs have an opportunity to step in with a service mindset, and ask the right questions to determine an HCP’s needs and that of their patients. A curious culture helps MSLs optimize their time with the HCP and opens them up to listening.
In the pharma world, the product is the carrier of a solution. Gathering the right insights regarding what the patient and HCP are looking for is imperative to personalize product messaging to meet patients’ unique needs. Working with product and medical affairs colleagues, pharma reps should be intune with their customers needs before, during, and after a sales interaction to personalize the transaction and deliver the most value to an HCP.
Looking at an individual situation is not enough to gain a full understanding of the HCP/MSL interaction. Moses discussed how community-based insight provides a more comprehensive analysis on HCP engagement by establishing both qualitative and quantitative data. This allows MSLs to confirm assumptions and check biases that may have been gathered in a more skewed insight-collection methodology. She believes a cross-department tractable matrix containing attitudes and perception research on a population — as well as individual anecdotal insights — can provide the information needed to add the best value to each HCP interaction. It can be difficult, though, to capture and analyze less structured feedback data.
Qstream helps pharma sales teams build stronger relationships with HCPs and better serve the patient through continuous reinforcement of knowledge, skills, and behaviors. By incorporating scenario-based sales training in the form of microlearning into the daily flow of work, reps can quickly learn how to apply proven new strategies like conversation tactics, personalization and holistic information gathering into their sales process, which will not only improve their performance — but also support HCPs in improving patient outcomes.
If you’d like to learn more about how to inspire HCPs during the sales process watch the webcast. To learn more about how Qstream’s mobile microlearning platform can help pharma reps and MSLs better engage with HCPs, contact us.