Barcelona 2015

Mar 24, 2015 - Mar 26, 2015, CCIB, Barcelona

Your Customer is in Charge.

Transforming big pharma sales by building a genuine KAM culture

What do you do when you see your business under threat? Respected consultant, Rob Halkes talks about what he learnt over the course of a pioneering big pharma KAM project between 2007 and 2014.



When Rob Halkes and his big pharma client recognized that developments in the healthcare market had begun to pose a risk to the sustainability of its business, they responded by seeking to create added value beyond the basic price and utilization of its products. However, they were convinced that this couldn’t be done without a closer relationship with selected healthcare provider centers in order to promote better care for their patients.

The solution was to develop superior care processes in collaboration with partner accounts – and this meant the organization needed to find ways to collaborate with those accounts. So, from 2006 onwards, a development project explored the potential of creating better solutions for specific accounts to help them enhance healthcare provision.

Key lessons can be derived from this activity but, inevitably, the project at the time seemed anything but straightforward. “In hindsight, several phases of the process can be construed to give an overview of the process, but the real effort was muddling through all kind of issues around external and internal factors that were influencing its success. It was a highly dynamic but effective undertaking,” Halkes recalls.

Today, he recognizes four distinct steps that were fundamental to transforming the organization’s KAM model: these span the skills, structure and approach of the multidisciplinary account organization, as well as the actual choice of the accounts themselves.

Step 1
The first step involves finding the right talent for the account team. “My first principle would be to set up a very skilled account team – not just a rep team that has been renamed as an account team – but an account team in which account managers really understand what the difference is between selling things and finding solutions for the actual needs of the client.”

“So they would start from the client needs and then merge that with the interest of the company – and that’s a difficult step in itself. There were not a lot of people who could do that.”

This involved ensuring team members were able to analyze, communicate, build account plans and negotiate on actions to develop healthcare processes or support for patients, instead of just detailing products or inviting physicians to their profession-oriented training courses - a distinct add-on to sales training activities.

Step 2
The second step involves defining the customer set that should be engaged by what is inevitably a high-cost resource. It is important to be able to define your top customers based on certain qualitative criteria beyond just selecting them according to their possible financial contribution. Potential for success is a key differentiator.

“I would really want to understand the qualitative criteria around which we could make a distinction regarding the accounts with the highest probability of success for us,” Halkes explains.

Such criteria include, for instance, whether another company is occupying the space and working with the prospective client in your therapy area. “It will be very difficult to reach a connection and engagement with a client if they’re already working with another pharmaceutical company; your chances of success when your competitor is there would be diminished.”

Therefore, both quantitative and qualitative criteria were used to segment the key customers with the best chances of success.

Step 3
The third step relates to how the organization sets out its solutions, and this comes out of the process of defining what customers are looking for. Knowing this, it then becomes a question of how different departments within the organization can collaborate to create these solutions and to deliver them tailor-made to customer organizations.

In particular, it requires working together – in partnership – with the customer to find and define solutions that actually deliver improved care for patients. Such solutions probably extend to working together with the customer to deliver therapy and support programs.

Thus, patient centricity is a key component of this approach. Eventually, the partnership can lead to co-creation of care processes between the account team and the client.

Step 4
“The fourth step would then be to integrate it all, to make a more sustainable business by not always looking at the short term for what could be the next solution for our accounts, but the long term.” This involves understanding what the development phases could be as part of a broader picture or longer-term account plan for the years to come. 

Learning by experience

So how did he come to these conclusions? Halkes takes his evidence for the success of his approach from a multi-year project creating a key account organization– one capable of responding to the all-too-familiar market pressures that are eroding prices and driving the commoditization of products.

“If you are determined not to erode your price, the only place to go beyond that is to find a ‘better way’ – in added-value services, in the things that we do beyond just delivering the drug and, I guess, some information on its efficiency such as, how it works and how it should be administered.”

Halkes set out to find this better way as part of a mission to make the sales engagement process more effective and more closely aligned to customer needs. He explains: “We had two principles: 1) to look at intensifying the relationship with our customers, so that we could work together with them on their needs and find solutions; and 2) to offer those solutions in a way that both groups would profit from them.”

Understanding exactly how to work closely with customers was an important breakthrough.“The professional doctors were interested in ways of helping them to help their patients better, just really supporting to the very core activity that they would do, day in, day out: optimizing therapies, getting better support to patients – for instance, helping them with aligning different primary care disciplines with one other. It’s about what the pharmacist is doing, what the doctor is doing, and how they would relate with their colleagues in the hospitals. It also came down to the fact that we had experienced nurse practitioners helping our customers to set up the therapy process which would help them deal with their patients better.” 

Multifunctional approach

As part of the project, he came across the problem of how to convince the wider internal organization that the value-based KAM approach was the right way to go. “We came to the conclusion that it was very difficult to make other departments see the relevance of the process that we were doing with sales. It was a very challenging job to convince people of the prospect of having better relations and delivering better solutions to patients’ and customers’ needs, the medical professionals’ needs.”

However, he found a forward by engaging the help of cross-functional teams with the project and discussing account problems with them. “They became enthusiastic about the details of what was going on and wanted to jump into that and help the accounts to ‘get better’. So, through this multidisciplinary account planning, we found a way in which we could transfer the need from the account towards a different department, and the effect was that they intended to work better for that account.”

Conclusion

What were the key lessons that he learnt from the original transformation process? “My starting point would be the awareness that the necessary change wouldn’t come easily.” Pharma routines and ways of operating are so entrenched and strongly regulated that “it’s difficult for a lot of people to think that we could do our work differently in the market – so this is a hard change.”

Beyond that, the key is to follow the four steps that Halkes sets out above. “The thing that would be very much different from the first trial that we did is the process of searching out what would be the right steps. My conclusion now is we have the right principles; we know what should be done in the implementation, and we would go straight for that.”



Barcelona 2015

Mar 24, 2015 - Mar 26, 2015, CCIB, Barcelona

Your Customer is in Charge.