DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION SERIES - Creating a culture of innovation
As part of our DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION SERIES, Mehrnaz thoroughly enjoyed interviewing Florent Edouard about his diverse career and opinions on various industry topics!
Florent and Mehrnaz related on so many topics and you can hear so many nuggets of golden information from him!
A few of Florent’s points:
To create a culture of innovation organisations need to stop micromanaging their teams. They need to let them learn along the way and make mistakes!
The pharmaceutical sales representative’s role should be the orchestrator of the omnichannel and customer experience.
Representatives need to know the field and their products and not just the marketing message. As HCPs can just visit a website to read that.
Please enjoy the interview!
Florent Edouard is quite atypical of most senior leaders in pharma as he started his successful career in a French bank. This may explain why he is so good at numbers and focused on ROI!
Florent’s Career
Florent left the banking world to launch and sell Areks, a consulting and training start-up company based in Paris, New York and Kobe. During that time he worked with multiple pharmaceutical companies.
After successfully selling the company to IMS-Health, Florent joined AstraZeneca where he held various commercial roles, from creating the Global Commercial Excellence team to Business Unit head in Japan. He delivered over 1 Billion USD in sales, launched multiple products and drove the company’s national ranking up from rank 12 to rank 6 in just 4 years.
Florent then moved to take responsibility of AstraZeneca Respiratory Global Analytics and Intelligence teams, shaping the 10-year respiratory strategy through market forecasts, competitive intelligence and insight generation.
Upon completion of this phase, Florent moved to Grunenthal, to lead Global Commercial Excellence, driving the Commercial transformation of Grunenthal, and reporting directly to the Chief Commercial Officer. Supported by a Global team of 20+ experts, Florent designed and implemented the new Customer Experience driven, omnichannel delivered, commercialisation model.
I met Florent at Reuters in Nice, where he was a keynote speaker and I was delighted when he agreed to let me pick his brains on digital transformation. We connected on so many levels during our interview.
What really attracted you to join pharma?
It was a two-step move, in banking you are focussing on purely generating money but I moved to a start-up company I discovered the world of pharma. When we sold the company and I joined AstraZeneca I learned first-hand the impact the product was having on a particular patient and that was a pivotal moment for me.
I felt that by having a career in pharma I could explain to my kids and friends that through my work I was trying to help patients get their lives back. That thought has always kept me moving and pushing forward. It is my driving force.
What did you learn from your experience working in Japan?
I learned so many things during my four years in Japan. If I had to share one key learning it is that you need to listen to the people! You cannot go in like you know it all as they have been working and learning there for years. Being in contact with another culture and learning how they work and think really matters and enriches you.
I also brought things to the tables and during my time there I pushed for a diverse and inclusive team with more female leaders. It made the team stronger and we delivered.
The new omnichannel strategy you’ve implemented at Grunenthal tripled your productivity. Can you tell us any of your secrets?
We took a step back and thought about what defines an agile company. You need a good strategy plus the right structure, platforms, people and processes.
We launched a massive transformation programme where we tackled all those elements one by one with the team. When we implemented our new omnichannel model we did that as a team of 70. We learned as a team and established a working relationship of trust from day one.
When you create new content, the team is involved. Does this improve the buy-in?
Yes, it improves the buy-in and the speed to market. If innovation happens in one country, we propose it globally. This fosters innovation.
At Reuters, you talked about ROI. How do you make sure something is going to perform?
When someone comes to me with an idea, I ask what impact they want to have and how will they measure it. I want to know what good looks like. If they can articulate that, then I will look at the idea and calculate the ROI.
You recently described the human challenge as your biggest challenge. What did you mean by that?
A lot of managers in pharma get promoted because they’ve been successful but they’ve been relying on technologies and methods from the past. It’s difficult for them to adapt and realise that many HCPs are Gen Z. Digital engagement is primary and this is difficult for them. But we have to bring them with us. We need to give teams the time to make and claim their mistakes whilst mastering omnichannel.
You can change technology overnight but you can’t do that with the people. It takes time and trust.
How can pharma leaders create a culture of innovation that allows room for mistakes and learning?
Let’s empower the people, as leaders we cannot micromanage. We need to allow our teams to be confident to go off and just do it as that’s how they’re going to learn. For example, if I am the one controlling everything then everything will be done to my own availability. If they are empowered to do things off their own back it will enable the team to make their own decisions, saving me time as a leader and leading to a better outcome for everyone involved.
Have you ever thought about giving recognition to those that fail?
We asked the senior leadership team what they felt they had failed at recently to encourage them to learn from why they failed; not many of them raised their hands!
But when things fail we try to understand why they did fail. But I believe that if you work in an agile way the failure rate is far smaller. Because you can correct or kill a project early on if there’s no hope to achieve the outcome.
Where do you see the future of sales reps in our industry?
I see the rep as being the orchestrator of the omnichannel and customer experience. Reps of the future need to listen and learn from their customers. They need to know how to create the right customer experiences for their customers. Reps of the future should be asking: What content are they interested in? When do they want to consume it? How do they want to look at it? Which channel do they want to use? What do they need for their patients?
They need to think about how they can tailor the offering of the company for that particular HCP so they get the right customer experience and understand the products. Sales representatives also need to know the science. It’s not about just reading the marketing message to a healthcare professional it’s about knowing what products are going to solve their problems and being available to the healthcare professional when they have questions.
Conclusion:
It was so refreshing to hear another inspiring leader in pharma agree that we need to bring our teams along for the ride when it comes to digital transformation.
That’s precisely what we do at Cheemia ReSET for pharmaceutical companies looking to help their teams master omnichannel engagement to create the experience HCPs are looking for. Pharma leaders know that sales representatives need to be digitally savvy, but that doesn’t mean they need to hire professionals that already have that skill set. It means they need to give their teams the time to train and relearn the new ways. Our award-winning remote pharma sales engagement training platform helps sales professionals master the human transformation of digital HCP engagement through bite-sized video modules and practical worksheets that help techniques become habits.