How does HCP Behavioral Segmentation help build a full Engagement Strategy ?

#lifesciences #digitaltransformation #analytics

This article is co-written by Sylvie Faucillon, AI Principal Advisor & Aurore Lamblin, Life Science Account Executive & Olivier Bouchard, Life Science Customer Advisory, SAS.

 Forget about fairy tales ending, in this article we are going to talk about reality and facts. Pharma has gained momentum and must give up mass market promotion approach in favor of behaviors-based discussion with their stakeholders to have more impactful and trustable relations.

Why Pharma Marketing should disrupt itself and how? Here is the true story.  

The Golden Age of Brand promotion

Everybody involved in pharmaceutical ecosystem remembers how the sales force effectiveness strategy was 15 years ago.

We all have the image of a former representative (rep), waiting to speak to the Healthcare Professionals (HCPs), and organizing staff meetings to discuss specific medical topics.

At that time many pharmaceutical companies were investing in general medicine and targeting mass markets. The greater physical promotion on the field, the more income was generated. The ROI was there.

So, in terms of Sales Force Effectiveness, a lot of reps were needed to drive their message to the HCPs.

Reporting-wise, KPIs were mainly focusing on "Call Frequency", "Number of Visit per Day", "Call Pressure" on high prescribers. 

The “Plan of Action” (POA) was steered by all these KPIs and reviewed quarterly by the Sales management. The REPS were discussing about the product leaflet.

Product marketing was efficient.

The promotional spending, as shown in the image below, from 2012 in US reflected that trend. Almost 2 thirds of the expenditure were done on Face-to-Face meetings.

The engagement rules and promotional effort were somehow correlated with the sales volumes. The bulk of the medicines was prescribed by GPs or primary cares doctors, so this is where Pharma was investing their main promotional efforts.

It was really Mass Marketing: same message to everybody!

How do recent revolution in drug development have a major impact on Customer Engagement?

What we are seeing in the market is that most of the pharmaceutical companies are abandoning the mass market, the consumer Healthcare part. Recent news, mergers or spin off confirm that trend.

At the end of 2019, Sanofi officially announced its strategy to sell its Consumer healthcare market; mid 2019, Pfizer and GSK finalized the merge their OTC products to combine them into a world-leading Joint Venture.

Let’s get into the new investment strategy of the big pharma. For most of them, like Novartis, Gilead, or Sanofi, have changed their target.

They are now focusing on innovative treatments for rare or complex diseases, involving state-of-the-art drugs with very high selling costs.

Gilead, for example, developed Solvadi, Hepatitis C drug, with a fairly high cost, up to 43,000 € for a 12-week treatment (1).

In the same way, Sanofi (2) invested in Principia Biopharma to speed up their strategy plan. To focus more on rare diseases, such as multiple sclerosis or oncology, Sanofi had to invest deeply in innovative Biotechnologies company.

This transition to a more specialized and personalized medicine is a trend that will stick around for a while, just seeing the huge amount of articles around the investment on innovative therapies on Google’s news.

Thus, such innovative drugs would require very specific engagement strategy to address this treatment, almost “personalized medicine”. The promotion becomes more complex, more accurate.

As the “typologies” of drugs are not the same, you cannot go on to promote and engage in the same way.

Pharmaceutical industry have to move from product-focused to customer-centricity. To stay ahead of competition, in a highly changing and visible Healthcare environment, a better engagement with HCP with a more tailored and personal experience is crucial.

It involves talking to different people and knowing what their real topic of interest is. It’s all about creating adequate messages that resonate with consumers and segmenting them based on their behavior, their social media interactions, their aspirations, and challenges.

Digital Transformation is not an option.

The pandemic accelerated digital transformation. Sales reps could no longer visit their targeted HCPs during the 1st lockdown. But promotion and medical information must still go on. Pharma had to overcome this lockdown challenge by activating other types of channels, such as webinars, emails and more.

Carrying on a conversation that started at a physical touchpoint, is much more difficult, especially to keep the same level of involvement or the same interests through those new channels; not to mention those that could be digital-reluctant for which you would have to find other ways. 

“There has been a rapid switch to digital HCP engagement, where previously face-to-face interaction would have been the standard approach." Marc Princen, Chief Executive Officer, Mundipharma

To make its investments profitable and its products launches successful, pharma must modernize its targeting approach and make it more accurate in this new world. Pharma must identify the best prescribers, key opinion leaders, support, and engage them in a long term. Also understanding the opponents in their ecosystem could help them better tailor messaging.

“As long as you deliver accurate, relevant and clear content in a technologically non-painful way, healthcare professionals consume it, how and when they want. This is what I call the Netflix effect, we need to move out of the old Pharma TV broadcast approach.” Florent Edouard, SVP, Global Head of Commercial Excellence, Grünenthal Group, Germany, Reuters study: COVID-19: Accelerating digital transformation in life sciences

#EngagementAnalytics: from buzz to reality

This history leads us to the crux of the question: how to drive a digital-first engagement strategy to deliver the right message, to the right person, on the right channel at the right frequency and with the right tonality?

Data is key. Partial or siloed but everywhere. 

You need to consider all the data available: to build a personalized interaction with the HCPs to optimize the level of engagement, you should leverage the Social Media (LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram …), dedicated web sites (i.e. PubMed) or Open Data, as your customers are sharing their voice on those platforms too. The black-box effect due to data already aggregated disappeared.

Real potential appears when we merge internal data already in the ecosystem: CRM interactions, digital events, and external data: open data, medical publications, clinical trials, conferences, social networks insights (in accordance with GDPR rules)

A major trap to avoid: being digital-first does not mean adding and cumulating channels that could consequently lose your customer engagement focus.

Listening: is just the first step. 

Understanding what you are listening is even more powerful. Here, Advanced AI and Machine Learning techniques come into play. NLP, graph theory, statistics, clustering will drive qualitative or attitudinal understanding of your HCPs interests.

Each post, article, email, comment must be categorized thanks to the Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities: in a nutshell, a set of linguistic rules to flag messages by topics, disease, treatment, therapeutic area and more. To go further, use Machine Learning to discover new topics of interest or weak signals you’re not aware of.

The tipping point is here, when augmenting a traditional, panel-based, and manual segmentation by a statistical one using clustering. The advanced analytics engine automatically detects the threshold to group the HCPs together regarding their Share-of-Voice (SOV) by topic, by social network.

The graph theory helps to detect the communities, understand the links of influence in a network: who are the broadcasters? who are the followers? The centralities measures capture a person's role in allowing information to pass from one part of the network to the other.

Then you have all the cards in hands to build a behavioral segmentation based on offline data and online customer data to gain more accuracy and objectivity.

Your company is now on its way to deliver personalized information. 

Key take-aways you should remember

Start NOW!

• Don’t wait to have ALL the data. Use the data you already have to initiate the pump.
• Go step-by-step: discover value sprint after sprint, then scale the project up by learning from what you have discovered.
• Iterate: a customer behavioral segmentation is more a daily routine than just a one-shot. This is an infinite game, a virtuous cycle, where teams gain in autonomy.
• Be GDPR compliant.

Dream BIG and keep the long-term experience in mind

• Apply an End-to-end approach from data to modeling, to deployment and industrialization: Enrich your dashboard HCP 360° then create personalized, targeted campaigns and customer journeys that increase response rates and generate leads for profitability.

Become “DATA-driven”

• Execute the move from data to insight to decision in a rapid and scalable way.
• Create and produce an analytical engagement score thanks to out-of-the-box analytical capabilities.
• Do not underestimate change management impacts: gaining new information, moving to a new way of segmenting your customer will be transformative for all the stakeholders involved in the sales engagement. Thus, you must onboard them in that transformation.

Now it's time to ask yourself : where are you in this journey ?

 #lifesciences #digitaltransformation #analytics

1: Source: https://www.sciencesetavenir.fr/sante/sovaldi-le-laboratoire-l-emporte-a-nouveau_127535

2: Source: https://www.sanofi.com/fr/media-room/communiques-de-presse/2020/2020-09-28-15-30-00