To influence or be influencedthat is the question
So this is my first foray into the world of blogging and I have recently even managed to set myself up in the world of twitter, and my first follower..number 10 Downing Street the British Prime Ministers office of all places, so I figure I am either under investigation for something Ive done or not done (probably living in Switzerland for 3 and a half years didnt help) or George Orwell was right and big brother really is watching everyone!
Anyway, enough of my ramblings - I have been asked to write a blog around my views on the state of the healthcare industry and in particularly whats going on in the world of sales and marketing, as this is the domain in which I have spent the last 11 years of my life (working for Sanofi-Aventis, IMS, Novartis and now Kantar Health a recently formed combination of TNS Healthcare , Consumer Health Science, MattsonJack and Ziment) and one in which I have presented on numerous occasions for eyeforpharma and others.
Going back to the title, the world of Pharma seems to be in the grip of influence mania at the moment, as everyone goes through the big change of moving to a new commercial model one which is leaner, meaner and more focussed on delivering value to physicians and patients. We are in a world of reduced sales forces and doing more with less, one where the once lowly sales effectiveness guy or gal no longer just does territory re-alignments but is being asked so how do we carry on selling $1bn of drug x with a sales force half the size? The answer to this question seems to be coming in the form of really understanding the value of each influencer group to your brand, how they all interconnect and to what degree they all influence each other. A common stat we see is that in just 2 years GPs in the UK have lost 20% of the control of what they write on their prescription pads now its all about what the PCT and NICE tell them.
We at Kantar Health tend to do quite a lot of research around current trends, and after what was a very successful webinar we did in February around the new selling model, we turned our attention to what we are calling Influence 3.0. I have put together a few of the top findings below (drop me a mail if youd like the full deck or theres a recording available on www.pharmavoice.com/influence). Most interesting to us was when looking into the influence social media has on type II diabetes brands in the US, Germany and the UK views were very polarised on all brands, but Byetta had managed to fare much better in the UK with no respondents ranking a strong negative influence versus nearly 1 in 10 doing so in Germany and 1 in 20 in the US. Good to know from the save our sales force side too that when we looked at the value discussions with reps brings, it still exerts an overall very positive influence on the brand. Also peer to peer recommendations came through as important; we found that when a physician cites a peer as an influencer their prescribing decisions are in synch. But this is eclipsed completely when we looked at the influence KOLs have on each of the brands we looked at; where interestingly metformin leads the way.it maybe old but it appears the people who count are still shouting metformin from the rooftops!!
I close my first entry into a new world of blogging and twitter by going back to my opening comments, and wondering if Influence 3.0 will be contained somewhere in the British governments policymaking, or more likely I have managed to write something that has added me to yet another list.
I hope I have managed to write something that is of interest to you, and look forward to your comments.
Mark Sales is Global Practice Leader for Stakeholder Management at Kantar Health (formerly TNS Healthcare , Consumer Health Science, MattsonJack and Ziment), and can be reached at mark.sales@tns-global.com