Make digital work - webinar highlights
With customer demands rising and face-to-face time diminishing, virtual engagement (also known as 'remote') is one of the most promising ways to reach doctors and provide value. It comprises a number of solutions that provide a 'live' experience at a distance - making it more convenient to healthcare professionals and cost effective for life sciences companies.
Still, this is a new area, so many people are looking to get their virtual strategy off the ground. To provide insights, we teamed up with eyeforpharma and experts from Almirall, Takeda and Roche in a webinar. Here we'll cover the hot topics, with the answers to webinar attendees' questions.
How is personalisation possible in a regulated environment?
While personalisation is one of the benefits of digitisation, one webinar attendee wondered how this is possible within such a regulated environment as pharma. Here our panellists answered:
"We have been able to integrate interactive sales aids that put together financial, reimbursement or clinical models on the back end (...) so they meet the test of the compliance environment. Whether at the hands of a sales rep or in a virtual experience, customers are able to input their reality (...) and then it outputs for them the implications." (Lisa Huse, General Manager, Roche)
"While digital experiences are one-dimensional you can create super content that allows the doctor to profile himself and thereby co-create the interaction (...), creating a personalised experience." (Lars Diemer, Chief Executive Officer, Agnitio)
How do you show a return on investment?
Proving return on investment was considered key and still a barrier. Our panellists' recommendations:
"We define digital as part of our customer experience and our philosophy so the digital part is adding the opportunities of more channels, and more channels in a very customer centric way (...). Now, we always have the figures to show what are the right channels. The earlier you start to generate your own metrics and start analysing them, you can actually also prove what is working and what is not working." (Hannelore Grams, Head of Digital strategy EUCAN, Takeda)
"In different situations you will have different solutions. You need to find the right mix of actions in order to reach the maximum number of customers in the best way that for them adds value."
"I firmly believe that the traditional model is still very good and very strong (...) but when you complement with virtual engagement you can really increase the output of what you can achieve." (Carlos Sosa, Director Global Commercial Effectiveness, Almirall)
How do you create a 'digital mindset' in pharma?
The lack of a digital mindset in pharma was seen as a major bottleneck. Our panellists had some useful tips:
"It is not just mindset as it is knowledge of digital. We created a boot camp on digital for most of the senior people of the organisation to put everyone at the same level. This has been very successful and there are plans to move this to the rest of the organisation little by little." (Carlos Sosa, Director Global Commercial Effectiveness, Almirall)
"Getting people to focus less on what it is you're doing but why you are doing it - what customer problem or business problem are you looking to solve? People can wrap their arms around solving a problem and if virtual engagement is a sound way to solve the problem, they are more likely to at least try." (Lisa Huse, General Manager, Roche)
"To succeed with technology, you need to fail fast. It sounds horrible in the pharma industry because failure is not an option, which makes sense in terms of developing drugs but in terms of applying technology it's important to fail fast because you will get early learning points in a small scale that you can try to improve upon." (Lars Diemer, Chief Executive Officer, Agnitio)
What's the main motivation to act now?
Many questions from attendees revolved around the reason why pharma should act now and the kind of ROI calculations and benchmarks that would be needed to sell it internally. The panel saw a more urgent question:
"What if we don't do this - what if you don't go into digital? (...) If we don't change the model, it will change use." (Hannelore Grams, Head of Digital Strategy EUCAN, Takeda)
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This was one of the most popular eyeforpharma webinars, tackling topics of keen and urgent interest to life science companies. If you are interested in the full discussion, sign up here to access the full recording.
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