The three account selling disciplines
Ask five pharma companies what KAM is and you may get three to five different answers.
Ask a consultant and the answer is probably it depends.
And they are probably all right.
There are in fact different customer engagement models that can all co-exist in a given pharma company.
But each is more or less effective, depending on who the customer is.
We can perhaps think of three account selling disciplines:
Targeted Account Selling. This approach is typical for group practices, small institutions, LTC etc. The main challenge is account and decision maker valuation (because data is only at an aggregate level), but decision makers are otherwise fairly independent. This is not really account "management" as we are just figuring out the value of individuals and departments, select the best targets, and then execute one-to-one selling.
Orchestrated Account Selling. This is an effective approach in situations where stakeholder groups make joint decisions, i.e. the decisions of individuals are linked to other individuals, and we need to address the account as a dynamic system. We typically find this situation in larger institutions and managed care organizations. We still sell our "standard" products and services portfolio (and support it with health economics data etc.). The focus is on communicating the value proposition in the most effective manner. Tender/RFP situations fall into this category, and our efforts aim at increasing the win-rates. The selling process is complex and may involve many different selling activities and potentially multiple customer-facing roles that need to be well synchronized.
Co-development Partnerships. This is the application of B2B value-based-selling (VBS) ideas to pharma. Here, we develop a new solution together with our customer. The customer could be a payer or a large provider network (e.g. hospitals plus outpatient plus lab). These relationships are typically not RFP-based and transactional; instead they are preferred partnerships for the longer term. Compared to Orchestrated Selling, we are no longer positioning our products and services per se; rather we align our capabilities with the client's capabilities and create something "bespoke". This approach very common in B2B, and has been emerging in pharma in Europe. It is still fairly new in US pharma (but there are some cases and the approach is widely discussed).
None of these approaches is intrinsically superior to the other. Nor do we need to evolve from one developmental stage to the next.
The choice of the most effective engagement model really depends on the customer situation, in particular their buying/decision making process, and the willingness to work with a partner (vs. a more transactional "vendor" relationship).
For instance, it is likely that we will have Orchestrated Account Selling with many of our payers, but Co-development Partnerships with some selected insurance companies and very large integrated healthcare networks. Targeted Account Selling may be most appropriate for community hospitals and LTC facilities, whereas for large teaching institutions Orchestrated Account Selling may be the norm.