5 Things which will change the way Pharma and Hospitals Reps work

In this article I have tried to describe the way forward of the pharma and hospital reps post lockdown. Last couple of months have had disastrous effect on the entire healthcare industry in general. Less on pharma but definitely more to the others plying in this sector especially the hospitals. A review of various articles on the healthcare performance suggest that while the chronic therapy market was intact the acute infective therapies have degrown by about 30 percent. The hospitals and clinics are now recovering to the blow during the last few days but are currently operating between 30 to 50 percent of their efficiencies with a lot of mom and pop shops still closed and maybe dead and buried as well.

1.      No Visitors Policy

Most of the clinics and hospitals have a strict no visitors policy for the medical reps and other vendors, this makes life tougher for a sales person and today even the sales reps are at a 30% efficiency. They set their plans to meet, lets say 10 to 12 doctors, they are ending up meeting not more than 3 and the quality of the call is a deteriorated one, as most of the doctors don’t even spend a minute with the sales reps.

2.      Digital Engagement - will it be the new normal?

The Sales reps and BD team have been busy sharing whats app messages and trying to conduct webinars to reach out to the customers. There has been a overload of the whats app messages and email marketing with an open and click rate of less than 5 percent. Doctors have had enough of this in last month have going through a digital fatigue right now. So is this going to be next communication channel between a med rep and doctor? Well I am not sure.

3.      Shifting focus from B2B to B2C

The entire industry is now shifting the focus from B2B to B2C, while it is still challenging for the pharma to do so, as large part of their product portfolio depends upon the prescription, where as it is easier for the hospitals to shift their focus directly to the end medical consumer. While digital reach is by far the best in terms to reaching out to the targeted customer via Google Ads, FB ads and other social media channels, Offline marketing communication will take some time to get back to its norm.

4.      Downsizing inevitable

Its sad to know that many of the organizations big and small are laying off BD and medical reps during these times, which is inevitable. The BD team or medical reps are being asked to leave or getting transferred to other departments. The correction in this phenomenon will take atleast an year as per industry experts. Many BD positions are left either vacant or not being replaced.

5.      Adaptability – Key to Survive

While there are great lessons to be learned from Uber and Netmeds. While Uber, quickly moved into to logistics space as they had the bandwidth of doing so by launching Uber connect. Netmeds on the other hand leveraged their capabilities and started supplying daily essentials. The same way, few of the BD folks have emerged winners by becoming a digital consultant to the doctors whom they were calling on, and started helping them create a FB page and Google listing for them, even doctor who had been practicing in retail space need a bit of marketing for them to fetch their clients. Indeed, adaptability in these difficult situations will help BD team winners. As the adage goes, "When the winds of change blow, some people build walls and others build windmills."

Sudhaker Jadhav

The Author is Chief Operating Officer at Oasis Fertility.