DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION SERIES - The field force becoming the orchestrators of omnichannel

I recently had the pleasure to pick James' brain on a Linkedin Live, our first ever one! I thoroughly enjoyed hearing more about his career moves and opinions on the future of the field force.

James Harper and I met through a Reuters webinar on omnichannel. Both of us were commenting about things we thought should be discussed. The similarities in our comments led to us having a conversation outside of the webinar, and we are as aligned as we thought we were!

We still have not met in person, but we already know each other. Our Venn diagrams of what we do for a living overlap quite considerably. This shows the power of digital and shared passions.

You studied Ecology at University. What led you to the pharma industry from there? 

A collection of circumstances have led me down the path that I'm on today! Ecology was a great degree, but it wasn't very applicable to a career. Plus, there was a lot of competition in the job market at the time. I knew having a degree in Science was valuable, and someone pointed me to the back page of The Telegraph, and there was a job for a medical rep advertised with a car and salary. My camper van was on its last legs, and my bank account was in the negative, so I jumped at the opportunity and got the job.

My father was a GP, so I had some knowledge in this field. When I told him about the job, he said he really valued the time he spent with medical reps. He would see three a week and tried to see reps from competing companies to put the views together with a pinch of salt. This genuinely helped him in his medical practice. This job was an excellent start for me, and since then, I've been championing the good we can do in the field.

I made the unusual move from being a rep to working in an agency. There are not a lot of us that move from the field team, but I really enjoyed helping to grow Athena.

I was then headhunted to run an agency in Cambridgeshire, moved around through different agencies but ended back at Athena. At that time, we were asked to be more digital, so we made the strategic choice to bring in Big Pink to run the digital, but by the end of the year, they had all of the budget, and we had none.

I was then inspired to set up 28b in 2010 to support small and medium independent agencies with their digital so that they could compete with large digital agencies. In 2015, we fell in love with Veeva and started to really focus on enabling reps with technology and data. The opportunity that technology presents to a field team is immense. I reshaped the whole company to just deliver in that space.

How do you think pharma can improve how the industry communicates?

Full credit to Paul Simms; this quote was from a UK Pharma Managing Director, "With the backlog of patients that we are seeing in the UK and the rest of the world, it's now a moral, ethical obligation for us as an industry not to waste the time of our HCPs." That's really important.

How do we ensure that we are not wasting their time? We need well-informed, skilled, competent, confident reps that understand their customers' needs in-depth and can orchestrate the content and communications that customer experiences so that we add value. We must create meaningful conversations over time rather than have the same conversation every time.

We need to move from Rep 2.0 to Rep 3.0. The rep of the future needs to have the ability to have in-depth conversations, understand our customers' needs, get it down to what is the job to be done and then help the customer do that job. Our job as an industry is to understand that and then address it. So that can be through field teams or digital communication.

The doctor doesn't care what function we are from in pharma, whether we are MSLs, KAMS, reps, or marketing. They want to have a consistent, meaningful engagement with that company. That's where omnichannel will come in.

I believe that omnichannel should be powered from the field. The best data set comes from the Reps, KAMs or MSLs interacting with the customers and building that data set. That's how we add value.

What are the key things we need to measure to add value?

We want to ensure that we are adding value at every touch point in a consistent, meaningful way. I believe it's becoming increasingly less relevant to measure reach and frequency. If you're measuring this, some sales reps will go to see HCPs just to bump their numbers.

At 28b, we create effectiveness dashboards for field teams that bring data points from CRMs together so that they can take action and add value.

What's your definition of the omnichannel experience?

Creating a meaningful, consistent engagement across all of the channels and touch-points for a customer, to create a great experience over time.

I'm very keen on the idea that omnichannel is an ongoing conversation. I am people focused; the hardest thing about omnichannel is the people aspect. Each organisation has to have their own definition - one consistent definition. They then need to break down the barriers between the different departments.

Your most engaged post on LinkedIn by far is the famous tombstone post, talking about the overstated death of the pharma rep. What is your opinion of the rep of the future, and has your opinion changed in the eight months since writing that post?

Someone had asked me if Covid was the nail in the coffin of the rep, I felt inspired by this, and that's when I posted that post on Linkedin.

I think human beings are always part of sales and customer relationships. You don't prescribe based on a banner ad. You don't prescribe based on even medical education or a good webinar. And frankly, you don't suddenly start prescribing because an MSL has set up a pathway between your treatment centre and your referrer. That's the naivety of thinking the future is just MSLs. You need a person to convince and show the evidence.

I think the rep's future is 3.0, technically competent, scientifically literate and business savvy. The Rep 3.0 is an orchestrator, and they understand their customers' needs. They are orchestrating the customers' journey and have a huge array of content and channels.

You need to ensure field teams value data, that they've got the tools to collect that data, get it in your CRM, and then act on it. Why? Not just so we can sell more but because it means we are adding value and that we understand our customers in a deep and meaningful way which allows us to respond and give them what they need to improve their clinical practice and the outcomes for their patients. 

Conclusion: 

I was so excited to successfully host my first Linkedin Live and will be doing more of our Digital Transformation Series via this channel! It was incredibly reassuring to hear from yet another leader in pharma that human beings will always be part of the sales journey. We just need to help the field force become the orchestrators of omnichannel.

At Cheemia ReSET, we are constantly developing content to help global sales teams not only adopt omnichannel but change their habits and behaviours to be successful using these digital tools. Our award-winning remote sales engagement training platform has been referred to as the Netflix of pharma because our bite-sized videos are so easy for sales professionals to ingest and then implement into their daily lives.