Power to our people

Power to our people

It is an undisputed fact that businesses who master the process of change, and fast, are those who prosper. And so it is with Pfizer.

For when the NHS started its own transformation, so the company foresaw the implications. In fact, the way Pfizer approaches customers has changed to address the needs of the evolving marketplace.

Across its field force, the skills of Pfizer’s field-based team are continuously honed. Richard Beckwith, National Account Director, was delighted with the response to a comprehensive training programme to develop world-class account management capabilities and innovation. “The feedback from our account managers has been incredibly positive – it is clear that this is making a real difference and will really help us in our goal to meaningfully engage with our customers to deliver more value.”

These are the people who know the marketplace in all its guises best. They have broken down the Strategic Health Authorities into smaller chunks and created Local Health Economy (LHE) plans. These give a detailed picture of every region in the country. It is these local plans that drive the business and deliver value for customers.

Pfizer is rapidly establishing a reputation as being a customer-led organisation. Knowing the objectives and drivers of each region of the country has now been cascaded down further – to individual customers.

Living a shared agenda with customers

The company is now driven by a new mantra: living a shared agenda with its customers. And its people are empowered to get creative, at local level, in assisting customer organisations to achieve their own targets.

In one recent case, a newly-created NHS service took advantage of local marketing support and transformed its performance, seeing many more patients come through its doors.

More creative thinking from another Pfizer employee has led to the mapping of inequalities in access to certain medicines across the country. This has become a powerful tool for customer organisations who use this information in their drive to treat more patients.

For individual Pfizer employees, the chance to make a real difference to the lives of patients is becoming a greater reality every day – and they are relishing the opportunity.

Walking in our customers’ shoes

Sometimes, the level of trust can develop to such a degree that Pfizer employees and customers are even swapping places! For example, over a six-month period this year, a senior director from a Primary Care Trust gave up one day a week to work at Pfizer. In return, an Account Manager, Jojo Godson, spent a day working for the NHS.

Both were in trusted positions, responsible for key projects with the potential to bring real benefits to patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), and also to both the health service and Pfizer. In Jojo’s case, she played a central role in driving service change for COPD. She created a stakeholder group, representing all interested parties, which mapped out a set of objectives and prepared a business case. Funding has been secured for this and the focus is now on recruitment and implementation.

“Occasionally I visited the PCT on one of my ‘Pfizer days’, and I made this absolutely clear,” she said. “On my PCT days, my focus was 100 per cent on the COPD service redesign, and Pfizer wouldn’t even feature in the conversation. This role clarity allowed me to feel like, and be, a key part of the team.”

The benefit seems to work both ways. According to the NHS director who spent time at the company, the experience enabled him to see how Pfizer and the NHS really can work together.