Reuters Events | Pharma

Thought leadership and innovation for the Pharmaceutical Industry

Dave Giles, former Global Commercial Operations VP at Shire, on his predictions for the future of pharma sales forces.

By Aidan Brain on Oct 14, 2015

The term ‘multichannel’ engagement is thrown around a lot. What does it mean to you?

So I would start with asking what engagement means. Engagement means you are truly seeking to gain insight from your customer and understand their real needs, as well as provide them with balanced product information from your company – but it really starts with both of these things rather than just one. When you think about ‘multichannel’, it’s about how you leverage a mix of channels for customers with the result that you are generating responsiveness for your product, sales results, and a model that your customer truly prefers.

When you think of multichannel it can be any number of different channels – many people just think of reps, and emails, but I think you should truly think about how to engage digitally and how to utilize inside sales reps. The key to engagement is understanding the needs of both the customer and the brand – as well as ensuring all this is held together with a strong analytical framework, so you can continue to optimize the channel mix at the customer level over time.

At the Customer Engagement Summit this November you will discuss how to build a commercial model that works from sales data upwards. Can you elaborate?

This takes me back to my previous answer. Different geographical markets are evolving in different ways and in any given market, you must consider a number of factors when it comes to channel deployment.

I’ll start with what I consider to be the strongest channel – the one that has the most proven results and the biggest investment in this industry, and that’s the pharma sales reps. Traditionally, when you look at designing a commercial model with your reps, the alignment process is predominantly focused on prescriptions. In my opinion that needs to change. There are a number of products out there that will enable a marketer and a sales leader to look at differences from region to region in terms of product access – coverage on local formularies etc. – as well as access to the prescribers, meaning can the rep actually get in to speak with prescribers about products and coverage. Then there’s the issue of physician autonomy, because with the increasing ownership of physician practices becoming the de facto norm, many physicians themselves can’t make the decision. So, are you actively considering all these different factors as you’re thinking of how to deploy your sales force?

The question then becomes, in the areas where you can employ a sales rep, how do you then leverage other channels to make the rep more effective? That’s where you look at combinations of different types of reps – such as a virtual rep, or a phone or web-based rep, and put a lot of emphasis on your DTC strategy and leverage some of those technologies to actually target digital promotion towards prescribers.

How is the sales force of today different to the salesforce of 5 or 10 years ago – and where will it be in 5 or 10 years’ time?

I think if you look at the industry as a whole, the last 5-10 years have seen a shift from the predominant products being promoted being the larger primary care brands – such as Crestor, Nexium etc. – to a situation where many products these days are in the specialty and rare disease space. Each of those models have evolved differently.

With the primary care sales forces you have to be very smart, very disciplined and very deliberate in how you’re deploying them, which ties in with building the model up from the sales data. Here you can benefit from increases in technology and CRM systems. It used to be that a rep had to make a lot of decisions from a lot less data on a daily basis. Now with new technology, sales reps should be enabled with the capability to make more decisions – more ROI decisions, more activity decisions, by leveraging that CRM technology.

Now when you look at the rare disease and specialty sales forces, in my opinion, these are very different kinds of reps. In many instances these reps are spending a lot of their time trying to actually identify patients and where they are and how they’re being treated. We’re talking about literally just hundreds or thousands of patients in the US, but they can benefit tremendously from therapy.

In both instances going back to technology, the sales rep of 5-10 years ago didn’t have iPads, CRM technology, or the access to real time data that we have today. The rep of today needs to be not just a great salesperson but also someone with great acumen, who can leverage these technologies to maximize their time. This is where companies should put more investment in – sales force effectiveness is a high return on investment area.

You need to create a climate and a culture where it’s expected that various functions are going to work together to focus on patient needs and outcomes.

10 years from now, people say there won’t be reps. I disagree. I think reps will continue to bring value in rare disease and specialty drugs, and I also anticipate there will be more products that can benefit primary care patients. But who knows what the future holds in this industry? I would personally place a bet on having a very targeted, focused sales force that is enabled to maximize ROI with an increasing use of technology.

Can you elaborate on the different functions needed to bring together effective sales & marketing engagement strategies?

It all starts with leadership. The organization’s leadership needs to demonstrate a commitment to patients and improving their health – everything else should flow from there. If patients and providers really understood how hard pharma is working at this, the industry would have a much better reputation.

You need to create a climate and a culture where it’s expected that various functions are going to work together to focus on patient needs and outcomes. When I think about the functions you need, I also go back to any individual marketing materials and how much that should be influenced not just by input from market research, but also input from the sales reps – what is the voice of the customer? What does the customer actually need? And what can the sales force actually execute? Marketing teams may sometimes put too much in front of sales forces in terms of what they can actually provide.

I also think – and this may be controversial – that you should involve medical, legal, regulatory and compliance much earlier in the development of commercial engagement strategies. I believe that these disciplines are not viewed as part of the solution, but rather a review process that is to be ‘endured’. I personally have had great experience with people in those areas and it’s critical you consider them as partners. They bring different perspectives and help ensure that we’re doing the right thing by patients. By bringing them in earlier you can see much better collaboration with commercial functions.

But ultimately, it all comes back to leadership. Everything must be aligned to benefit the patient.