Overcoming key barriers to accelerate digital engagement for pharmaceutical organizations
Digital solutions have become a core focus in the pharmaceuticals and life sciences industry in recent years, with pharmaceutical organizations increasingly keen on alternative ways to communicate and engage with healthcare professionals (HCPs).
According to the latest Veeva Pulse Field Trends Report, digital engagement resulted in 67% more HCP meetings for sales reps in APAC. While research indicates that digital engagement is on the rise, digital channel adoption varies across markets, particularly in a diverse region like Asia Pacific.
More digitally mature markets like Australia are exhibiting up to 40% use of digital channels in their channel mix, while markets like South Korea sit at 10%. On the back of these trends, there are key challenges that could explain the varying rates of adopting of digital engagement formats across different markets.
Here are some key insights shared at our recent Veeva&U APAC Community CSM event held in Singapore.
Challenges in accelerating digital engagement
One of the key challenges is the lack of an agile approach when it comes to creating the right engagement plan. Traditionally, target planning has been a sales representative-driven and bottom-up process. However, target planning needs to be a strategic, proactive process that is goal-based and flexible to allow field force teams to pivot swiftly according to HCP needs and preferences.
Most pharmaceutical organizations currently only incorporate one or two channels in their cycle plans. Across the industry, complex product-channel goals are rarely explored, which poses a challenge when companies want to explore the use of Multichannel Cycle Plans (MCCP) and increase the digital channels they can engage with HCPs on.
In addition, companies lack the data and insights that are needed to establish HCP preferences in order to tailor their experiences for successful engagement. Breadth of data and granularity are two aspects of HCP data that are critical to developing robust, up-to-date profiles to establish greater connections.
The last challenge to accelerating digital engagement relates to organizational change – taking on a digital approach is a transformational journey that takes time, a calculated approach and good change management. Translating a vision for a digital-first organization into an actionable plan across the organization and each of its functions may take time, and this includes putting this mindset into practice for field force teams. To truly embrace digital engagement, organizations need to adopt the same values, which is a process that can take months to years.
Embracing digital engagement across the organization
Putting a digital-first mindset into practice across a large multi-national company, will be a process that has to be undertaken from leadership all the way to the individual sales representative.
Novartis is one such example – the company has taken conscientious steps to incorporate digital through its new customer engagement and experience model. It aims to break the silos between field teams and digital teams by uniting them under the umbrella of delivering a customer-first experience, with its key focus areas on field engagement, content and user experience, data analytics, martech and patient solutions.
With insights from Veeva Pulse, Novartis has successfully benchmarked its field force teams for share of voice and quality of engagements with HCPs against industry standards and has also discovered hidden opportunities it can leverage to stay ahead of the curve. Underpinning its efforts is the use of data as a catalyst for change management, empowering its people with the right tools to create organic content, develop habits that continuously build a data-driven team, leverage the right data accurately and also use the science behind data to answer the tough questions they face in their day-to-day interactions.
“We’ve seen great strides in the use of digital solutions in pharma, and it will continue to be a defining factor across every step of the pipeline in our industry. Embracing the digital approach has enabled our teams to do more with less, and has provided many opportunities to better engage with key stakeholders and customers, empowering us with modern solutions that build better experiences,” says Miguel Rivera, Customer Engagement & Experience Lead, APAC & MEA at Novartis.
Overcoming barriers
The industry has made great strides in engaging with HCPs through omnichannel formats, but there is room for improvement if pharmaceutical companies want to put this into practice more frequently and with greater efficacy.
As there is no “one-size-fits-all” approach to engaging HCPs, especially in a market like Asia Pacific where certain countries are more digitally mature than others, developing strategies at the channel level, such as assigning channel weights, will allow the organization to better tailor their approach to the individual audience, and develop a more acute understanding of which activities and engagement formats deliver the most value for HCPs.
Leveraging data and science to inform the field planning process will also be critical if organizations wish to embrace data within every step of the engagement journey. Utilizing modern cloud solutions that move past the traditional, cumbersome methods of integrating and cleansing data from multiple proprietary vendors will also afford pharmaceutical companies more time to analyze insights on HCP behavior and activity at much greater detail, scale, and velocity.
Solutions such as Veeva CRM, Veeva Align and Veeva Integrated Analytics are positioned to be the building blocks a life science company needs in its digital transformation.
Get in touch with us today to find out how one can unlock the value of digital engagement.