We are the champions

We are the champions
Taking ownership of the market access call strategy

Have you got what it takes to be a field-based market access champion? WG Consulting’s Simon Dawson and Elliot Rosen look at how the field force can play a crucial role in shaping market access call strategies. It’s all about taking responsibility.

Throughout last year, Pharmaceutical Field (Pf) looked at the pharmaceutical industry’s increasing reliance on developing market access strategies to improve the uptake of products across the NHS. Driven by the unrelenting rise of cost-effectiveness as a mandatory consideration in the development and introduction of new drugs, and underlined by the rapid emergence of non-clinical stakeholders as key industry customers, the need to understand market access has long since moved beyond being an option. Nowadays, it’s obligatory.

For Pf readers, such appreciation of market access philosophy culminated last November with a detailed look at how the industry could develop a Market Access Call Strategy for its customer-facing staff. The call strategy guide set out to help market access field-based teams understand what is a complex customer matrix and to identify the different spheres of influence around each customer, enabling them to establish the best order in which to approach them for optimal impact. In the process, we looked at how developing a robust understanding of your customer environment can help sales and marketing teams generate messages genuinely tailored to customer need.

The last few years have marked a significant watershed for market access, with companies across the sector slowly but surely beginning to embrace new ways of thinking and to adopt sales and marketing methodologies to match the evolving marketplace. As such, market access call strategies are at varying levels of implementation among a wide number of companies and they are already beginning to generate positive results. The challenge now is to build on that success and, for the field force, to take the market access call strategy to the next level.

Taking ownership

Undoubtedly, companies that have developed a market access-led call strategy have found that their field-based teams have begun to work in a more effective manner and have identified the most productive ways in which to engage with their key customers. But how can this be enhanced in a way that will bring about true field-based market access? The answer for the field force is all about taking an increased level of ownership.

“To move the market access call strategy to the next level, it’s important for field-based professionals to take responsibility for it themselves,” says Simon Dawson, Management Consultant at WG Consulting. “Companies need to find leaders within their field-based market access teams who can capture the right information from the marketplace and communicate it back up to head office so that it can be used in a cross-functional way by medical, marketing and sales teams to inform and drive strategy.”

“Too often, strategy is considered to be the preserve of management and is simply handed to sales professionals, rather than being developed with them”

Shaping strategy

At the moment, customer call strategies are often devised at head office. The process will normally involve research into the kinds of customers with whom field-based staff will need to engage, along with information about those customers and an overarching strategy detailing how to interact with them to co-ordinate the use of a product in the longterm. This is a sensible approach and, more often than not, it will reap its rewards. But it could easily be improved.

Even with such a considered approach, it is not uncommon for marketing messages to be developed without the input of the people who spend most time with customers: the field force. The research phase that guides the strategy, although considered to be ‘cross functional’, often fails to accommodate the voice from the field, which itself, represents the voice of the customer.

“Too often, strategy is considered to be the preserve of management and is simply handed to the field force, rather than being developed with them,” says Elliot Rosen, Management Consultant at WG Consulting. “The best success will come when pharma culture allows those working at the coal-face in the marketplace not only to influence strategy, but to drive it. The opportunity is there for the industry to appoint field-based market access ‘champions’, who can take ownership for collating information and communicating it back to the office in an appropriate way and by appropriate processes. This will help ensure that materials and messages developed for future use are even more focused towards specific customer need. In the process, it will help build stronger relationships with the key customers and influencers.”

Currently, the industry is divided on how it approaches ‘market access customers’ – often referred to as ‘payers’. Some companies have adopted a Key Account Management approach, while others are deploying more specialist market access field-based teams. Whatever the approach, it’s important to remember that although the primary customers in any market access call strategy will loosely be payers, the strategy itself must include all customer groups. Each customer has a role to play in ensuring that a product comes to market as quickly as possible, and the market access call strategy is simply about determining an appropriate order in which to approach them all to capitalise on their various spheres of influence.

Shared intelligence

However, such has been the growth in the importance of payers as customers, market access customers have now assumed a relevance to virtually everybody within the sector’s collective field force. While some companies have dedicated efforts to engage with this important group, no one customer sits in isolation and therefore activity and intelligence across an entire local health economy needs to be shared and understood. However, for those within market access teams or with a closer focus on market access customers, how, in such a complicated environment, do you take responsibility in order to build an improved market access call strategy?

“The approach is simple, but requires a change of mindset,” says Simon Dawson. “If you already have a market access call strategy, it’s likely this has been handed down to you from head office. If you want to build on it, it’s time to be more competitive and to start to capture your own information and share it to ensure that ongoing strategy is focused and appropriate to the customers with whom you’re now developing relationships. In a sense, the original call strategy guide will have got you through the door, saying the right things to the right customers. But now it’s about asking the right questions, so you’re able to get more of the right information from these customers, and so that their needs can be met as effectively as possible.”

But what are the right questions? This is difficult and will differ according to things such as therapy area or locality. “Sometimes it is not even specific questions that will inform you, but is more that as a relationship develops you begin to understand the spheres of influence that certain customers have and how different pieces of information are used within a local health economy. So if you tell a commissioner something, where does that information go and what impact does it have on the use of your drug?”

Aside from taking greater ownership for market access information, the challenge is to ensure that communications systems are in place in order to fulfill its potential. This, in turn, will engender a truly cross-functional approach. The battle for field-based market access champions will be to make sure their voices are heard. “It’s the field-based specialists who are the local experts and it is their job to identify customer-specific or organisation-specific information that is likely to effect the uptake of their drug. But their ability to feed that information through to the right people so that everyone has the same understanding of what’s going on will be critical,” says Elliot Rosen. “The emphasis here is on the local and, with every health organisation in the country operating differently, communication is paramount. It is vital that what you are doing on the ground is fed back, not only to your colleagues in the field, but also to head office. This will help define and shape everything from strategy to materials moving forward.”

The concept of field-based ‘Brand Champions’ is, of course, not a new one for pharma. The industry has historically deployed product champions to collate information from the field and to feed it back to management. But this has largely tended to focus on traditional clinical customers. In the current climate, however, the need to broaden this approach into market access customers is great. The focus on cost-effectiveness as a key consideration alongside clinical effectiveness is only going to increase, and as it does, the influence of payers on the uptake of products will become greater. Extending the remit of field-based champions into the market access arena, with clear responsibility to communicate across the internal commercial spectrum, will add much more value to the role.

Competitive advantage

From a field-based perspective, taking responsibility for market access, rather than relying upon others to provide it for you, is highly beneficial. “It’s all about competitive advantage,” says Elliot Rosen. “If you have got all the information you need to drive uptake of your product, and you have an understanding of the market that your competitors don’t have, then you have a real edge. If you can be communicating the right messages and providing the right information at the right time to your customers while your competitors can’t, it’s much more likely that your product will be adopted ahead of theirs. Competitive advantage is about being able to meet the needs of your customers better than your competitors can. By driving a field-based field-intelligence approach, your chances of competitive success increase significantly.”

It is clear, therefore, that the opportunity exists for field-based professionals to drive a cultural, mindset change for the pharmaceutical industry – and in the process, help deliver significant improvement to sales and marketing methodology. “The key to achieving this, from a field-based professional’s point of view, is to take increased responsibility,” says Simon Dawson. “The smartest out there should seize the opportunity and become more competitive and more proactive in driving the market for their drugs. If they can push themselves forward to work with local field-based teams – representatives in both primary and secondary care – talk to their customers, build relationships with them and communicate it appropriately, the dream of being able to influence and indeed drive strategy may become a reality.”

Management, on the other hand, can build on this, perhaps, by introducing regular market access team meetings, where information is pulled together by the fi eld-based champions and communicated to head office. From here, cross-functional teams can use the information to develop materials that are as appropriate as they can be for the local health economy for that drug.

Becoming a champion

With or without a dedicated role for a field-based market access champion, the central principle to this approach remains consistent: a thorough understanding of your customers, their needs and the spheres of influence they have, will bring untold riches. If you take responsibility and do your homework on your customers, success should follow. By taking responsibility for understanding your customers’ marketplace, the value you add to future dialogue will undoubtedly benefit everyone. And then you really will be a champion.

Simon Dawson and Elliot Rosen are Management Consultants at WG Consulting.
WG provides a range of bespoke services to improve market access opportunities for pharmaceutical companies in the UK.

For further details, please contact simond@wg-group.com.