Future Pharma’s Secret Weapon: The AI-Augmented Sales Rep

When asked what made him such a successful hockey player, Wayne Gretzky once famously answered, “I skate to where the puck will be, not where it’s been.”

Of course, Gretzky was a one-in-a-million hockey player. In reality, humans are pretty lousy at knowing “where the puck will be”, especially in complex environments like the healthcare market. Yesterday’s most ambitious pharma sales reps were limited by the tools at their disposal, none of which were particularly sophisticated (not by today’s standards, anyway).

But today’s sales reps have a secret weapon at their disposal: artificial intelligence. It turns out machines are actually pretty darn good at evaluating past human behavior and making accurate predictions about the future. So good, in fact, that AI-augmented sales forces today are seeing a 50% increase in leads and appointments and up to four times as many prescriber conversions.

So, how exactly is AI helping sales reps achieve all this? And what modern tools should pharma sales forces look to integrate today for better conversions tomorrow?

The AI Difference: More data, more connections, more insights

Artificial intelligence, and especially machine learning (ML) algorithms, are able to sift through vast amounts of data and identify patterns within it.

For pharma companies, this means looking through thousands of past practitioner and payer interactions, public and proprietary demographic and psychographic data, up-to-date disease and patient information, and practitioner claims and Rx data. Indeed, the quantity of data available to pharmaceutical companies today is orders of magnitude greater than it was just five years ago.

More data means more connections and more (and more useful) insights.

Sales teams, who are already great at connecting with practitioners and payers, can use these insights to better engage their leads and maximize their efforts. Below, I present six of the most important ways AI-augmented sales forces can do just this.

 
Precision and Priority Practitioner Targeting

Historically, practitioner targeting was performed once or twice a year, with limited data regarding interactions, patient volume, and decision-making tendencies and motivations. Sales teams have relied on calls plans based on historical value, but with little insight as to how to increase existing or create new value.

Dozens of factors determine when practitioners are most likely to write the next script for a given patient and, importantly, how that decision can be influenced or precipitated. Payer reimbursement history, prescribing behaviors and attitudes, patient mix and even professional networks play into decision-making.

Predictive physician targeting enables AI-augmented sales teams to better understand these factors to achieve more granular and accurate targeting and segmentation, and provides key insights into reaching decision-makers, shortening paths to prescription, boosting prescriber loyalty and preventing brand switching (see below), winning underserved practitioners, and more.

Of course, sales teams can also greatly improve their productivity by knowing which practitioners to target when. The user-friendliness of AI-based sales tools make it easy for teams to identify and then track key criteria, even layering this with lab results and clinical trial outcomes, to ensure their efforts and time result in maximum results.

 
Practitioner Switching Prediction

A wealth of information is available to pharmaceutical companies in the know. Artificial intelligence algorithms are now capable of analyzing online physician activity (such as trial search behavior and social media interactions) and making highly accurate predictions regarding brand loyalty.

Physicians who are thinking about switching can be reengaged, and the reasons for their decision discovered and addressed. The way they’re treated, a consistently high level of service, the presence of valuable services, and an understanding of their practice all contribute highly to brand loyalty, even in the face of generics and biosimilars.

Conversely, physicians thinking of switching from a competitor must also be engaged as soon as possible. Providing easy access to research and trial data, adopting a service-oriented mindset during sales conversations, and leveraging omnichannel interactions with the help of AI are all key.

 
Personalized Messaging

Personalization is one of the most powerful and significant contributions of AI to marketing and sales around the world. It has become so ubiquitous that customers now expect a personalized experience from almost every commercial interaction they experience. For a group whose brand loyalty strongly depends on how well they feel pharma providers understand their practice and are observant of their needs as a healthcare provider, personalization could not be more key.

The human brain can manage just a few such interactions at a time, and can only process enough information for very limited insights into the practitioner’s history, prescribing behavior, and communication preferences.

AI, however, allows for personalized interactions at a truly staggering scale and level of sophistication.

Thus, lean, AI-augmented teams can confidently oversee machine-generated, richly informed, highly personalized interactions with dozens of patients, payers and practitioners, in real time.

Auto-CRM Completion

If ever there was a quick win, this is it. CRMs have grown in complexity as pharma companies try to collect more (and more complex) data for full, 360º customer views. Much of this information can be auto-completed by a well-trained machine learning algorithm.

This not only frees up sales reps’ time to participate in more engaging interactions with a greater number of customers, it also helps cut down on human error (turns out, machines are much better at copying data from one place to another than humans).

Finally, it’s a tedious task your talented sales reps will be glad to have off their plate.

 
AI Whisper Coaching

Whisper coaching refers to the practice of “whispering” instructions or guidance into a sales rep’s ear as they interact with a customer. Traditionally, such instruction was provided by a manager or more senior member.

But because of AI’s ability to organize, analyze, and extract insights from large datasets, it’s remarkably adept at making accurate suggestions for best next steps, activities, and asset delivery. And the most sophisticated commercial AI available to pharmaceutical sales teams today is even able to make these suggestions in real-time—in other words, whisper coaching, taken to the next level.

Take, for example Cyrano, a cloud-based AI service which analyzes omni-channel interactions and provides sales representatives with plain-language, turn-by-turn recommendations to use in calls and meetings: what to do, what not to do; what to focus on, what to avoid; what kind of language to employ; what matters most to the customer. A perfect example of AI-augmented sales.

 
Precision omnichannel event sequencing

Next-best action marketing depends on knowing, on a customer-by-customer basis, which sequence of events is most likely to provide the highest level of success, as determined by factors identified by a sales team. Artificial intelligence is able to do this better than most humans, and certainly faster and at a much larger scale.

As a result, sales representatives know that Practitioner A responds best to new drugs when first sent a message immediately following the close of a clinical trial, offered an invitation to the trial result’s public announcement, and then sent eDetailing information a few weeks later that they can interact with on their phone, whereas Practitioner B is more likely to prescribe after sitting down for a face-to-face interaction with a representative, followed immediately by a detailed email, and a follow-up call within the next one to two weeks (but whose interest drops off significantly if left alone too long).

Practitioners get information when and how they want, while accurate recommendations and intelligent automations free up sales reps to engage in the most useful conversations at the right time and, most importantly, in the right order.