3 Quick Wins to Transform Your Results in the Digital Era

Everything is digitized in pharma now. Covid increased the budget for digital in every company I have spoken with. However, we see large variations in the way companies are approaching digital with some simply seeing it as digitizing existing processes, while others view it as a way to completely transform their operations. Variations in understanding of how it is being applied can result in piece-mail initiatives that miss opportunity and create false starts.

Things need to change for pharma, and fast. Most in the industry have a strong base – strong platforms and technology – but these are not leveraged sufficiently, nor integrated effectively in many cases to really compete with the disruptors of the future in pharma.

To market effectively in the digital era, companies need to plan well, and that planning offers many challenges as well as opportunities for companies doing this well.

Here are some factors to assist transformation of your results.

1. Understanding and delivering superior customer experience and value
Ensuring you meet your customers’ needs and expectations, and providing value to the customer along with a superior customer experience, is critical. Today’s customers have much higher expectations from companies and expect to get all their needs met 24/7 online. They want access when they want it – on demand. They want the experience to be personalized and targeted precisely to their needs. In addition, they want it to be easy. Are your digital services able to meet these needs? The way some in pharma are meeting these needs is with the use of Artificial Intelligence. This allows instant analysis of each individual and their needs and can serve up the right content for that individual, in the channel they want in that moment in the right sequence, at the right time. Because of the increased sophistication of customers, 77% of the buying decision journey is completed without any sales involvement and yet customers still want that personalized, immediate and relevant touch. Research from CEB also shows that on average, 5.4 people are now involved in an average B2B buying process. This is true for pharmaceuticals as well as the stakeholders increase and the interactions become more complex. The brand has to convey trust to a varied group of stakeholders, all with different needs, who are seeking information in different ways.

2. Ensuring user‐centered innovation
Google, Apple, eBay and Amazon customers expect user-centered interactions that are simple and meet their needs. Patients, physicians and other stakeholders are interacting with brands before they ever use them. Pharma are not utilizing this enough in their digital planning process; if they are, it is not done in an engagement-led way. User-centered innovation is typically done well by start-ups but not by Pharma. It is often missed across sales management processes in Pharma, with disparate digital efforts all being conducted in a piecemeal way. This needs to change.

3. Using Artificial Intelligence to deliver unique digital buyer engagement journeys
The integration of many and varied data sources now available means that we can ingest all these different forms of data, integrate the datasets in a consistent format, add a temporal aspect to them, and then write AI algorithms to analyze any number of things. For example, we can analyze things such as the true customer segments in terms of how they will respond to various things, in addition to the different digital journey they take to come to us. We can examine how frequently people are lost on that journey, and why. We can look at how to quantify the interaction between channels, which customers have the highest potential for growth, which are most influential, which will be likely to respond to a sales rep, and so much more. By taking all of this analyzed data we can also then predict which content will engage which segments (down to a segment of 1) at which time, in which sequence, at which time. The potential to utilize this data to design a unique digital journey for an individual customer to maximize engagement and loyalty is enormous. So often, when AI is used in this way, people assume it is an amazing coincidence that this company read their mind and delivered exactly what they were looking for. It is no coincidence. Interestingly, despite all the great engagement we can get prior to interacting with a company, 53% of customer loyalty is driven by the sales experience. So, customers value how sales reps spend their time. What this means is that architecting a unique engagement journey supported by the right content ecosystem and commercial insights are mandatory to achieve sales success. We can now use AI to understand the different stakeholders and their specific needs and predict their behaviour, understand the optimal unique journey for each, and understand what content and channels are required for what individuals to influence their engagement and journey through the buying cycle. By doing this the tools for sales reps can deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time, and this can also be done in the digital channels. We can now create tools that use Artificial Intelligence to analyze the customer and messages required and deliver a customized message for each customer in real time. Significant uplift in sales can be achieved from this process. The rewards to those willing to implement can be large.

Pharma need to understand how their customers come to their products and services to ensure that internal capabilities are aligned to the customer needs. Many pharma don’t consider the impact that these types of sales enable-ment have on commercial transformation, and do not design their programs to support this effectively.