Four Ways to Digitally Enable Field Teams
Pharmaceutical commercial field teams are in the midst of an evolution in customer engagement. While provider access has been diminishing for years, the issue is exacerbated by COVID-19. Critical success factors are shifting to speed, flexibility, and visibility into the impact of field team changes. And data is revealing that HCPs are accepting and preferring digital engagement over face-to-face interactions 1.
Pharmaceutical companies need an agile and flexible approach to sales planning and digital enablement for field teams to succeed.
Considerations for Digital Enablement
When building a digital sales strategy, there are four key considerations:
- Segmentation is still critical as you need to understand your customers and how best to engage with them.
- Compliant, digital content that is fresh and tailored for each channel is key for teams to have meaningful engagement with customers.
- Define key metrics and how to measure the effectiveness of engagements. Consider redefining metrics if you are adopting new digital channels.
- Create a plan for change management as your field teams need training on both content and technology. Field teams that understand the “why” behind a shift to digital channels as well as the “what” and “how” are more likely to adopt new operating procedures.
Once your field teams are educated and technically able to conduct digital engagements, it’s time to start optimizing their approach.
Four Ways to Optimize Digital Enablement
- 1. Select the right Digital Channels for Targets.
Channel preference can help balance activity goals between face-to-face calls, Veeva CRM Approved Email, and Veeva CRM Engage Meetings. If you aren’t already tracking channel preference, teams can look to past attainment across each channel to inform future channel plans. Considerations for email include sent or open data, or for meetings, planned or executed status.
- 2. Adjust Targets to Increase Reach
Shifting to digital engagement means taking a strategic look at capacity. Traditional engagement is governed by how many accounts a rep can visit in one day based on their territory and travel time. With digital channels, the question is what’s an appropriate cadence given the content and duration of the interaction. With digital enablement, capacity is increased, and field teams can increase their reach by deepening decile or segment criteria when defining targets. Veeva Align allows you to easily change your target criteria by segment, channel, and product, and gives you modeling capabilities to compare new ideas before selecting the right path forward.
- 3. Consider Cycle Timing
With the current rate of market changes, it’s important to balance your cycle plans. If you started 2020 with a 6 or 12-month cycle plan, it was necessary to respond to the pandemic and complete a major change mid-cycle. With an in-house, end-to-end sales planning solution like Veeva Align, teams can shorten the cycle timing to quarterly or even monthly. Align lets you clone previous cycles, present plans to the field team for feedback in Veeva CRM, and publish the new plans quickly. Agility to shift your approach throughout the year is a major benefit as you adopt digital channels and your cadence of engagement increases.
- 4. Iterative Improvements
One of the key benefits to digital enablement is insight into performance and understanding the digital channel capacities to improve the next cycle. Teams can understand the HCP response to each touchpoint, and which providers responded to the tactics or inquired about content. This feedback can be incorporated into the next planning cycle for each channel to identify fatigue, adjust, and re-launch.
2020 has been a year of digital acceleration for life sciences, and when approached with a strategic mindset, field teams can drive meaningful engagement with their customers.
To read more about digital alignments, read our latest eBook here.
