Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13235

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Perry S.
Aligning objectives: how to cover your clients without losing your shirt
eyeforpharma 2008 Mar 1
http://social.eyeforpharma.com/content/pharma-strategy/aligning-objectives-how-cover-your-clients-without-losing-your-shirt

Full text:

Pharma is an industry under pressure, according to Juergen Guent, senior customer operations manager for Eli Lilly. The industry’s image has suffered in recent years, and that combined with the decline in efficacy of the old share-of-voice sales model, the decrease in access to physicians for the sales force and rapidly rising cost pressures for health care systems are making it tough for pharma to do business.

And the challenges aren’t just financial ones. Health technology assessment authorities are becoming ever more important, and non-prescribers generally are wielding increasing influence on prescribing decisions and behaviors. Says Guent, even if you have a disease treatment that is innovative and fills an existing gap in the market, it may be difficult or impossible get that treatment in the hands of physicians and patients.

Health technology assessment agencies may well determine that the cost utility of your product simply doesn’t merit the expense. Money is limited, and agencies are making very cautious decisions about where and how to spend the resources they have.

Aligning objectives
To counter the difficulties of the market, Guent suggests that pharma align its objectives, nationally and locally, with the objectives of health care providers. Since, ultimately pharma and health care providers share a common goal-the good health of people in their care-working together should be a natural fit.

The first priority of pharma should be to determine how best it can fill needs, by “introducing a product into the new healthcare system where it actually helps the customers,” says Guent. Our goal should be assisting physicians in meeting their target health care outcomes.

Do more than medicine
The more services and solutions pharma can offer, Guent says, the more value its products have. Other industries have been very innovative in providing services that go beyond the standard. In this way, even a product that has numerous, similar competitors can differentiate itself from the rest. Guent suggests that we ask ourselves, “What value proposition can I give to the customer?” It’s not a matter of just providing a product-these days value is in the product and in any additional embedded services that accompany it.

However, to provide appropriate embedded services, you must first know what corollaries would be useful and valuable to customers. Says Guent, it’s important to build “competence teams,” teams populated by people who know how to talk to the other influencing bodies in the health care network. We do that now, Guent says, but in a limited way and in silos, not as part of a cohesive team effort.

The three-fold path to customer-centric sevice
Success in this challenging market environment really all boils down to having a customer-centric focus, says Guent. Customers are looking for more value for their money, and only those who can understand and meet customers’ needs will be of value. Guent offers three suggestions to help pharma companies become more customer-centric.

Insight. First, you must really understand what your customers’ needs are and the environments they are working in. What pressures are they under? Innovation. Once you have a better understanding of your customers’ needs, you need innovative ideas for meeting those needs. Think outside the blister pack: how else can you be a source of help? Understanding. Says Guent, never impose on a client’s valuable time without providing value.

Pharma and the future
Things aren’t going to get easier any time soon, predicts Guent. Cost pressures will continue to increase; health technology assessment bodies will continue to exert more influence over which products do or do not make it to market; patients will continue to seek information on independent websites, and more and more often doctors will be called upon to defend their treatment decisions.

Increasingly, the trend will be towards guideline-driven or care-pathway driven treatments, and physicians who deviate from those guidelines will have to document their reasons for doing so. Only those pharma companies that know who the influencing and decision-making bodies are and are prepared to provide valuable products and services to those bodies will be able to overcome the challenges ahead.