PharmaTimes magazine | Katrina
Megget*
The future of pharma's salesforce has been a
hotly debated topic for years. Now we wave goodbye to one-size-fits-all and
embrace a field force fusion
It has been a turbulent few years for pharma's
salesforce as the industry has tried to find its feet amid a shifting
healthcare landscape. For all intents and purposes, the sales rep should be
dead, yet the role remains, and largely intact – albeit head count has reduced
and other roles and job titles have sprung up. Indeed, the salesforce of the
future is beginning to take shape. And there's even a place for the sales rep,
experts say. That's because the new salesforce will be a blend of roles and
capabilities.
"The salesforce is changing," says Alan
Kidd, business development manager at CHASE. "It's becoming increasingly a
mix – an educational and promotional mix, which includes digital and
e-detailing, other roles and even health outcomes consultants."
This is echoed by Ryan Wooller, business development
director at Star. He says the salesforce of the future will be made up of
different role types, deployed in different geographies with messages tailored
to reflect the requirements of the local health economies. "The days of
the one-size-fits-all national sales team are numbered," he states.
Salesforce shake-up
For several years now, pharma's salesforce has been in
a state of upheaval after austerity hit the NHS and prescribing decisions
shifted from healthcare professionals to the managers holding the purse
strings. As the sales rep's influence began to wane, the headcount reduced and
pharma introduced a raft of new roles, from key account managers to NHS liaison
managers.
Meanwhile, medical science liaisons emerged from
nowhere and other roles have since popped up, with service re-design
specialists, analytics experts and change management specialists, all thrown
into the commercial mix. But despite this new landscape and these new roles,
pharma is still looking for ways to work effectively in the marketplace, notes
Kidd.
It hasn't been an easy transition – as the industry
knows, the role of KAM has been highly debated, with initial teething problems
around rebadging and upskilling. But there are now indications of what the
future salesforce will look like and how this heterogeneous mix of roles and
skills might work.
It comes amid a set of developing trends: the need to
communicate a medicine's value proposition, especially in relation to pathway
optimisation; the expanding availability of information via different channels;
and the consumption of this information based on personal preference. These
factors will determine how the salesforce will interact with those in the
health system.
Importantly, though, what hasn't fundamentally changed
is what payers and healthcare professionals want – namely, robust evidence,
engaged discussions with people who know what they're talking about, who know
the brand, the competition, the disease area and the local issues, who will add
value to the conversation and the healthcare system, and who they can
trust.
Take KAM, where there is now an onus on the role to
step up. "Rebadging a hospital rep and giving them a new KAM, PRAM, RAM,
TAM, LAM, SAM job title and an account plan template isn't enough
anymore," explains Gary Killington, managing director at PI Partnership.
"Now there is a real and justifiable customer expectation that our
commercial teams need to be able to not just deliver key messages with a hint
of a value proposition, they need to have a clear value-based discussion and do
it with authority and presence."
But more than that, KAM has become "the
gatekeeper", Kidd says; the role that "acts as a catalyst" to
get the right people in front of each other, which might be a medical science
liaison to communicate the science or a health outcomes consultant to discuss
the health economics.
As such, the consensus is these KAM roles – based on
the management of accounts with specific characteristics and needs – are
fundamental and, as Wooller says, can make a significant commercial impact. The
caveat, however, he says, is that KAM must be implemented in the right way and,
adds Kidd, with the right person in the role.
Death of the sales rep?
Although many could argue that sales reps are becoming
obsolete, the belief is that there will still be a role for them in the future
as part of the salesforce mix. Kidd points out that doctors still need
information on new medicines and many prefer a face-to-face interaction or
Skype call rather than sourcing this information via an e-detail. He also
mentions incidences where doctors have called pharma companies to organise a
rep visit.
Likewise, Wooller believes sales reps still have a
place, but he says the real question now is what are we asking them to do?
"The impact these individuals can make is predicated on a pharma company's
commercial strategy being sound and the value proposition of the medicine they
are promoting aligning with healthcare stakeholders' needs," he says.
"There are more nuanced ways to add value and achieve a commercial return
than what we would describe as 'traditional selling'." For instance,
value-added services around service re-design or educational programmes may end
up the primary driver, he says, with 'traditional selling' becoming a
by-product.
This is an important point, Kidd agrees, as the sales
approach will depend on the disease area, the medicine and the health bods
involved. "In some occasions an MSL will add value but in others the
salesforce will be sufficient or even e-detailing may be the preference,"
he says.
Fundamentally though, regardless of job title, Kidd
believes that providing information is still effectively a sales conversation.
"Whether it's a rep or an emerging role it's still a sales conversation,
uncovering needs and the doctors' issues and giving information about the drug
and showing how the drug can meet their needs. Selling," he says,
"will be at the core of these interactions and it will not necessarily be
a rep on every occasion."
Killington puts it another way, saying the way selling
will be done in the future is evolving to become customer engagement. "For
me, it's not about the job title, it's more about do we have a cross-functional
team that is able to communicate and work at all levels with a diverse
healthcare system?"
A new
approach
Of course, market access has to be thrown into the
mix. Kidd warns against deploying a salesforce before market access has been
granted. "If you don't have market access, there's no point having a
salesforce – doctors won't want to talk to you." He says pharma needs to
understand the timing of when to deploy a salesforce, which might require
differential resourcing across the UK depending on where market access has been
obtained. "That is a different approach to the past and that's a big
challenge for the industry; figuring out what level of market access is market
access. It really needs to be more than NICE approval – it needs to be on the local
formulary."
Being flexible in your approach is key, adds Wooller.
"The overlap of your medicine's value proposition with the market
environment will define the strategy; the strategy defines the activities
required, which in turn allows capability and capacity requirements to be
locked."
The rules around the salesforce are being all shook up
and expectations from healthcare are high. What is clear is that pharma needs a
range of experts and a range of channels to provide information. The future
salesforce won't be the one-size-fits-all model of old. Instead, content,
channel and skills will be a mix based not on what pharma wants but on what
healthcare needs.
* Katrina Megget is the former editor of
PharmaTimes Magazine and has written about healthcare and the pharmaceutical
industry for more than eight years. Katrina is now a
freelance journalist specialising in the pharmaceutical industry
