When pharma customers stop listening, it's time to try something new.
I spend more time these days—with clients and within closerlook's four walls—thinking about new ways to communicate with and reach physicians.
But more than ever, my discussions with clients are about channels—probably because there are so many channels, and new ones coming to market every day. We know 'em all—banners, websites, social media, e-mail, mobile, face-to-face, print journals, SMS and even that service that feeds medical content to physicians via TiVo. There might be more—and there will be new ones tomorrow. But channels alone, new or old, cannot solve any of the problems we face in pharmaceutical marketing.
The truth is, reach is not a problem. We can reach people anywhere and at anytime and through dozens of devices and channels. The problem is this: We, pharma, have nothing to say.
Recently, I was having a conversation with a smart guy in biotech, musing on the application of Apple's new iPad to pharma. The conversation was summed up with, “How many physicians do you think have already asked a colleague, 'So, how long before we'll be assaulted by a rep with a shiny new sales aid on that thing?'” Even in all the iPad's newness, will we have anything new to say?
Channels and tactics are not going to make or break the pharmaceutical industry or its marketing partners in the next 10 years. Our collective success will be driven by engaging our customers in a better conversation. That's it. There's really nothing else.
Let me back up. You're in a bar. You're single and available. You summon the courage to walk up to someone, say hi and see how things go. If you're skilled in the art of conversation, you will do a better job of listening than talking. Your goal is to find out something interesting or unique about the other person, something that gives you a way to connect with him or her. (If you're missing the marketing 101 parallels here, please stop reading, because, truthfully, we're just not on the same page.)
Now imagine that, while you still know very little about the person other than what he or she looks like or what he or she drinks, you are suddenly armed with a superpower. You can force messages to his or her cell phone, you can have the bartender serve glasses with your name engraved on them, and you can project images of your face on the bar. And with this power behind your approach, you start talking constantly, promoting your best features, using the same pickup lines you've been using for 20 years. You don't pause once. You don't ask any questions. See it now? It's that bad.
In a nutshell, we've been doing the same thing with pharma marketing—shouting in multiple channels, without doing any listening. Now, before that pisses you off, which it should, let's be fair. We can only say what we can say—we have our friends at the FDA to thank for that. But thank goodness they are there. Imagine what we would say about our products if no one were there to stop us. I'll leave that there.
The first step in improving your conversation with your customers is assessing whether you have the resources to make it happen.
The bar scenario is a bit contrived, but consider this: We love to talk about our brands and our products, and we should—that makes sense. But do we also talk about issues that interest our physician customers? Perhaps, but only when the conversation very quickly gets back to us. In fact, we're so persistent in promoting our products—no matter what we pretend to be talking about, no matter what channel we use—that access has increasingly become a concern. More and more physicians are closing their doors and e-mail inboxes to us. Doing nothing but yelling the same old approved messages is at best boring and at worst totally irrelevant. This is all talking and no listening. This is all speaking and no conversation. This is a bad approach at the bar, and it stands very little chance of forging a good relationship with a physician.
Beyond channels, beyond tactics
The pharmaceutical companies and partners that do the hard work of learning how to engage physicians in a better conversation are going to lead the next decade. It's that simple. Topics covered in this better conversation will include patient care, outcomes, disease management, trends as well as the efficacy and safety of our products. The better conversation will also enhance a physician's relationship with patients. But most importantly, the better conversation presents us with the opportunity to listen, and to learn many things we don't know yet—that kind of learning is one of the cool potential outcomes of any good relationship, is it not?
There is incredible strategic value in figuring out what better conversation you should be having with your physician customers. And have no doubt that the better conversation is achievable. If you don't achieve it, one of your competitors will. That is, as they say, “it's a matter of when, not if.”
The pharma marketers and partners that rely on channels and tactics without improving the conversation will fail, left in the dust by those who have figured out how to have the better conversation with physicians.
So what should you do?
Figure out who you're working with. The first step in improving your conversation with your customers is assessing whether you have the resources to make it happen. The following questions give you an idea of how much evangelizing you will need to do, and whether or not you will need to find some new partners to work with.
Consider your internal teams:
- Do they want to experiment? Do they want to learn?
- Do they start conversations with return on investment rather than return on learning?
- Do you have political, positional and monetary support to do things differently?
Consider your partners:
- Do they seem satisfied with the way things are? Or are they bugging you with questions of how we're going to continue to compete in the next ten years?
- Do they demonstrate a willingness—even a desire—to work with your other partners to improve the conversation? (Read: Do they concede that they don't do everything well themselves? Because, well, no partner does.)
- Do they seem to think that their tactics alone will win the day? And my favorite—do they really think that social marketing is just the best thing ever?
Find out what you already know. How much information about your physician customers is readily available? How much is available but will be a pain in the rump to collect and make actionable? Your ability to demonstrate your knowledge of your doctors will enable you to engage them in a better conversation. You can't improve the conversation without better insight. No channel, no tactic can change that fact. Creating a base line of your current knowledge will help you quantify the work you and your partners need to do to develop real, actionable insight. Some of you will be better off than you think, but others will find they know very little about their customers.
Start. This is the hardest part, because every pharma company has different barriers in place to hinder the learning you need to improve the conversation. The good news is that formal insight development is already underway at several big pharma companies. All of these programs are in their infancy, but pilots are being conducted, physicians are being shown new value, and the experience and knowledge of the teams running these programs are growing every day. The bad news is if you're not working on this every day, then you're falling behind and losing competitive advantage that, in the long run, will be almost impossible to regain.
So get a team together, grab a partner that you trust and think is smart, or both. Start the thinking. Start the listening. Start the learning. Test a few things and let the measure of success be insight first and sales second. Take that insight and test again. What you learn will make it obvious what to do next.