The Place of Digital in the Pharma Marketing Mix

By Mark Perlotto*

Thirty-nine years ago this past June, an article appeared in BusinessWeek that offered readers what was for its time a startling degree of foresight. Four paragraphs down, just above their first historic mention of what they called “the paperless office,” the authors of “The Office of the Future” passed along a prediction by George Pake, head of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center:

“Pake says that in 1995 his office will be completely different; there will be a TV-display terminal with keyboard sitting on his desk. ‘I’ll be able to call up documents from my files on the screen, or by pressing a button,’ he says. ‘I can get my mail or any messages. I don’t know how much hard copy [printed paper] I’ll want in this world.’”

Coming in a time when the typewriter was still de rigueur in any modern office, the first part of Pake’s prediction was far-seeing—and quite correct. The integration of computers into office environments may seem like a self-evident development with hindsight—but I don’t recall anyone predicting the future ubiquity of smartphones or social media 20 years ago. So the first part of Pake’s prediction should be considered one of the more impressive in the history of business prophecy.

Customer Engagement Isn’t Just About Physicians: It’s About Sales Reps Too

By Karl Tiedemann*

Managing the pharma sales force has always been challenging. Reps are spread out geographically, often far from corporate offices, preventing them from taking part in the on-site activities and face-to-face interactions that typically foster a connection to the company. In order to help the sales force achieve their primary goal — educating physicians — they require frequent training and constantly updated information on products, industry news and regulatory changes. Satisfying the information needs of this far-flung group is a challenge that is only exacerbated by reps’ daily schedule — they are on the road all day, then inundated with information and catch-up work when they login to their computer that evening.

Dumping informational emails and invites to mandatory training sessions on your reps after a long day of visiting busy doctors is exactly the type of “show up and throw up” delivery method that you tell your reps not to use when approaching healthcare providers. We’ve been preaching for years how they need to develop a mutual beneficial relationship with doctors in which the healthcare providers can access the information they want, how and when they want it. So lets focus on ways to enable pharma companies to bring that same level of engagement to their sales force.