Next Best Action in Pharma Sales

Maciej Kłodaś (MK): Hello everyone, my name is Maciej, I’m the leader of Analytics Experience Competency Group at C&F, and this is C&F Talks, a place where professionals share experiences and ideas from the perspective of an IT vendor. My guest today is Michał, Michał is the head of Enterprise Data Consulting and Insights Business Unit. Hello Michał.

Michał Osuch (MO): Thank you for the invitation, I was looking for this one for quite a long time.

MK: Michał, when I joined the company, you were one of the first people I met, and the history of your experience in the company and the level of insights and information you have about the pharma industry was enormous, but today we’re going to talk about a different topic, very close to my heart, which is sports. Professional sports, yes. Like basketball. NBA. So what can you tell us about NBA? We know that you love it.

MO: Yes, but not the one you think of, so we will not be talking about the National Basketball Association and eight feet tall guys, we will be talking about the business topics, so the next best action, rather than sport, unfortunately.

What is next best action and how it helps salespeople?

MK: Next best action sounds very interesting, but it’s a very broad topic.

MO: It is, and imagine that you’ve got a company-wide field force, it’s 150, 250 fantastic people, but your company is struggling with price pressure, competition, maybe your product is not the most advanced one, and maybe you’re not as good as the others. So what would you do? You need to cut the cost, you need to ask your team to do more, lower your prices, or maybe make some of your team redundant.

But is this the right way you should move your business forward? Why don’t you give them more insights into what they should be doing, help them to free up some of their time, empower them with insights so they can be focusing on the right thing to do in the right time for the right channel. That’s what the NBA is for.

MK: Sounds like a very simple process.

MO: It is and it is not. As always, you can start building it from simple things and just giving a simple recommendation what your field force should do. But as everything with the 21st century age of AI, there will be more coming on top of it with some advanced mechanisms and some advanced algorithms helping you to overcome your competition.

How did the role of a sales executive change over the last years?

MK: All right. But until now, I remember that when you had reps, they knew everything about their customers. They had their flow, they had their actions written down on a sheet of paper or notebooks or whatever. They were the chest of wisdom about all your customers. So what has changed now?

MO: So not much has changed in terms of the sales force. Maybe let’s divide the situation into two sides. So if we put ourselves in the shoes of a sales representative, right?

The person has their weekly routine. I need to do my weekly call planning, then I need to do my call execution, and then I do a post-call reports. In order to plan my week, I need to review my latest performance.

I need to check my MCCP multi-channel planning activities. I need to check how many visits I should do. I need to look into multiple places and maybe even look into my car glove box and go through 25 yellow post-its with my notes, right?

All that will lead me to populating my CRM calendar. Then when I’m getting ready for the actual visit on a day, I need to check the latest orders of the customer. I need to look into some maybe medical inquiries he made.

Are there any pharmacovigilance inquiries? Maybe there is some product return, or maybe he just unsubscribed from our newsletter. So I will be prepared to respond to those. I don’t want to be surprised by a statement. Hey, by the way, I just unsubscribed from your worthless newsletter.

How come, right? I need to be able to challenge that before he even asks me. So that is taking me an enormous number of hours to be prepared. And in order to do so, I have to look into seven Tableau dashboards, five Power BI reports, seven email chains, and tons of paper notes I have. This is a lot I have to do to be prepared.

MK: Right. But on the other hand, the customers have less time. So you have less time to draw their attention, right?

MO: Correct. With the latest digital age and all those Zs, Xs and Ys that can probably focus on a single content for like 30 or maybe 50 seconds if you’re lucky. You have to be very crisp in your messaging.

Right. And if you are working for a generic drug company and there are 20 people like you queuing up to get the attention of an HCP or a vet, right? You will have very little time to pass the right message.

And this, the attrition or the acceptance of the message must be very high. Otherwise you will lose your slot and may not be able to return to the HCP for the next like two weeks. So you have to be, you have to be very crisp, very well prepared and prove that you’re professionally prepared for a meeting with an HCP or a vet, depending who you’re working for.

The implementation process of a next best action system

MK: All right. But let’s start from the beginning. So imagine that you have a business goal, your company cascades your goals to you, that you need to optimize the process, you need to increase the revenue, you need to do something. And you have this workforce, you have all of these tools, you have processes in place. What needs to be done? How to start off with a project like that?

MO: So maybe let’s take one more step back, right? We’ve talked about the field force for ages, for decades, actually. All the salespeople, especially those experienced ones were saying, I know what to do. Don’t tell me whom to visit. Don’t tell me how to do my business. Don’t tell me how to run my calls. I know it best.

But for a while, and because of what we said previously, it is actually the company that is driving your behavior as a salesman, right? The company tells you what’s the brunt expectation. The company tells you what’s the key message to pass. The company will tell you whom and how often or how frequently to be visited.

And you may love to spend your mornings with Dr. Jane, having a morning coffee with her, but the company would prefer you to visit her, Dr. John, her ex-husband, because he’s your preferred or best prescriber, regardless how you dislike him and you prefer to spend time with his ex-wife, you should be visiting him, not her, every second week.

So this is where the NBA comes to play. So the next best action. This is the equipment that the company is giving you as a salesperson to allow you to focus on the right message in the right time, in the right channel, without spending unnecessary time to be getting prepared for that.

MK: So this is a mix of business process and technology and data.

MO: And experience.

MK: And experience.

MO: Exactly. Because the nature of an NBA is not to replace you or not to force you to do something by the book or how company is expecting you to do. NBA is a next best action. It’s a set of recommendations that will help you to prepare for your week or for the actual call better.

With the properly designed and implemented next best action, you should not be surprised by anything that your client will tell you or will face you with. With properly configured and properly administered next best action solution, you will know his or her latest orders. You will know latest inquiries. You will know the market performance. And you’ll be given at a glance the customers that you should be visiting in the first order because the system or the solution has already built their profile and adjusted the profile to the market trends, market share or generally the behavior that is expected by the company. So you’ll be going to the right people again with the right message at the right time.

MK: Okay, so imagine one of our clients is the one we are aiming at and they already have this workforce. They already have a setup with their tools and processes in place. So how to start off with a project like that? What is the first stage of a project and what happens next?

MO: I think we should divide the project into at least three phases. The full implementation will obviously have many more. But those three are defining the requirements, identifying the data you need to fulfill the requirements.

You cannot move further without the right data. And then focus on the technical aspects of the implementation, choose the right platform, right solution, and then follow the implementation. Really, the first part is the one that is driving your move forward.

Now, you remember we were talking about those field guys that know everything best, right? Let’s take advantage of that in the first step. Yes, the company is driving the direction or the strategy because it’s the company that has the brand strategy, performance, and knows the market from the high level.

But we are building this solution or we’re designing this solution to satisfy the field force. If we would exclude the field force from building the requirements list, the so-called acceptance, um, would be zero.

MK: They wouldn’t be following the process.

MO: They wouldn’t be following the process. You would waste the money completely. And the acceptance would be so low that you could throw everything in a basket. So as a first step, yes, you have to bring to the table your expectations and your directions and your objectives.

What would you like to achieve with this solution? Okay, you want to obviously increase your sales by having more orders. What’s driving you to have more orders processed? Should you allow your field force to do more calls so they can generate more orders? In order to let them do more calls, you have to give them more time.

You shouldn’t be extending them beyond eight hours a day, right? But if they’re spending too much time on getting prepared and, you know, I’ve seen I’ve seen post-implementation statistics from one of the animal health companies where they were saying they’ve reduced the average time of a call by 15 minutes, which sounds crazy, right? Because the call takes 15 minutes, right?

But if you add up the pre-call planning, actual call preparation, right? Getting ready for the call and then post-call nodes, right? And that may take you half an hour or maybe on average a little bit more.

If you deduct 5, 10, maybe even 15 minutes from the whole process, right? Multiply that by eight calls a day and by five days a week, that gives you enormous time that you can spend for something else, for one person, right? So that translates into a huge amount of dollars, right? So we said, okay, this is our way of thinking, right?

So you get your field force, you tell them, we want to help you. We want to release you from the burden of unnecessary work, going through tons of analyses, looking to five different reports in seven different places, going through your notes and logging into seven systems and God knows what else, right? We will give you two things.

We want to provide you with two things. We want to provide you with something that you can call customer 360. So as one pager, well, all the essential information for a given customer at a given moment is presented.

It can be dynamically adjusted to the season, to the time of the year, time of a selling cycle. It can present the information that is most important for your planning and the given day. So it’s not very static. It’s always number of orders, sales, sales versus target, whatever, right?

It can present things like the client has unsubscribed for all our newsletters, right? That is suspicious, right? He’s your best prescriber, but does it mean he’s no longer interested in our products? Or maybe the email campaigns are lousy. Maybe the customer did not subscribe or did not purchase a ticket or registered to an event that you were promoting for last quarter and this is the event of the year.

Why? So this is kind of a discussion or those are the kind of insights that leads you to the really partner kind of a discussion with a client, proving that you know, that you care and that you understand what the client is doing. Not just entering and saying, by the way, I’ve got a new leaflet and a new pen and how many prescriptions you’ve did in the last week or so, right? You are starting to be a partner to your client.

Moreover, and this is obviously presented in the context of a client or a given HCP or a vet you’ll be visiting, but you have 150 of those, right? And you need to prepare your calendar. So what NBA will also give you is the support to your planning activity. It will show you those clients that you should be visiting or planning to visit in the first order.

Those, for example, and those are the simplest one that haven’t made an order for the last two weeks, where usually they’ll been taking orders every week, at least once, right? Or maybe you will be giving an option to visit a customer that is new to your territory, but hasn’t made any order, but the territory he belongs to, he has a very high potential. So most likely he’s being visited by your competitors.

Maybe, you’ll be asked to visit a customer that falls out of the pattern in terms of the market share or the number of prescriptions he or she is doing. And with that, you should at the glance know who is your target to be visited this week and not really repeat the same pattern of John, Jane and Mike and Mike and Jenny every second week because you got used to that. And, and yeah, of course you would like to visit the customers on your way to the seashore on Friday afternoon, obviously, because it helps you to spend the weekend. But maybe that’s not what the company really wants you for.

Tailoring the next best action solution for your sales team

Important to notice is, and speaking of a seashore trip on Friday, is that NBA should not be forcing you. Those are the suggestions, not a mandate. So you still can pick up those that you, as a master of your territory, think or consider to be the right choices and give a thumbs down to those that you think are actually stupid or not worth to be included in your already busy schedule.

Speaking of those thumbs up and thumbs down, right? And the ability for the salesperson to actually pick those that makes the most sense for him or her. That’s, that’s one of the key elements of the properly implemented next best action solution. Cause the adoption with those salespeople that know their field best will let you fine tune your suggestions. When you will be able to implement more advanced suggestion models, AI, or not necessarily yet at the beginning, you will be able to implement a feedback loop.

So if you will be seeing, and you can do that in many, many ways, you can pick half of the territory and equip them with the suggestions, leaving the second part of the territory in the old fashioned model. So it gives this AB comparison approach, right? You will know the difference.

Then within the territory that you’ve been given a suggestion, you can split them further and offer a different set of suggestions, comparing which one have the better adoption. Those thumbs ups and thumbs down will show you which type of suggestions, the frequency or the level of them is accepted with a higher or lower level. Based on that, you can fine tune them.

And when you see that the adoption level is matching your expectations, which we’re defining at the beginning of the process, then you can keep spreading those suggestions to the wider field, still monitoring the adoption and still fine tuning those or removing, adding those that you feel are or are not valuable to your field. Without that, the adoption or the payback from the investments you’ve made will be truly wasted.

MK: I remember one of our clients had this challenge that they had the one process to fit them all for all of their field force guys. But those guys, well, there were different groups of people there in the field force, older ones who used very traditional tools like notebooks or post-it notes, the younger generation, which were very digitized and used these processes and these tools introduced by the company. The problem was that the performance of different groups was varied enormously. And the process you are talking about, tailoring the approach is something that feels that this is the way to go.

MO: So there are two elements as a response to this statement. And yes, I’ve seen very well-performing, old-fashioned salespeople carrying paper notebooks and not responding to an email because. I remember one that couldn’t launch her laptop, but she had all her notes in that big notebook, right?

But you have to fulfill or you have to adopt the solution to those and those that really are going to sleep with the mobile phone under the pillow. So first of all, NBA is not one size fits all solution. Every brand will need to define their own approach, frequency, messaging, target clients, name one that you want to pass, right?

You will be defining those separately. Some of the overarching requirements obviously coming from the company strategy will be the same, but the tailoring of the approach needs to be brand by brand case. You will have different promotional cycles, different targets, different opportunities, or even seasonality of the product purchase will be different. So you cannot apply that to all of them.

And when you will be building your team, defining the requirements and then piloting the solution, you need to, or you have to identify your so-called change ambassadors, both from the team that has nothing to do with the 21st century technology, but have perfect scores. And those newbies or rookies that think that they will change the world in a week, but they actually haven’t been to the field for more than a week or so.

So going back to your question about the use case, we did something for one of our clients, one of the major global pharmaceutical organizations. We helped them and we actually succeeded with providing both the underlying data model, as well as the front end, this one pager customer 360 view that was actually saving tons of time for the reps to be prepared and giving them a single place with insights of their customers working seamlessly or seamlessly embedded into the CRM they were using, in Veeva. So they wouldn’t have to go into multiple places to search for the information anymore.

And the way how it was constructed was that you always were getting the right message. And there was no room for implementation. You were just being given the information you were expected to be given and digested in a way you were expecting to get them.

The second part was the data model and the ingestion of the data into an NBA engine. So gathering data from dozens of channels, the implementation. And it’s already a very mature company. They were not only limited to, let’s say a typical commercial data. So sales orders, count of calls, and brand strategy. They’ve included all their omni-channel marketing part into the picture as well. So it was not only suggesting their field force what to do, but it was also orchestrating the digital channels of reach to the customers.

So you don’t have to always visit the customer face to face. You were given an opportunity to make a phone call or a video call instead, and also trigger an approved email or be part of some email campaign going out from some other marketing tool, for instance, right? So this way you could serve or you could pass the right information to your client through multiple channels, giving an opportunity for a sales rep to actually make a face-to-face call only when was really necessary.

MK: Okay, but this is the case of very close cooperation between different divisions. In order to get the best value from this next best action and to collect all the needed data and tools in one place, you need to have this close cooperation, not siloing the actions of different divisions like reps or whatever, or marketing. They need to cooperate together to orchestrate all the actions to be able to get this real value.

MO: Correct. And implementation of NBA is a process. Yes, you can start big and it can take you a year to deliver something, but we as C&F, we have an opinion that start small, prove the value and extend.

Start with those simple suggestions that will make the biggest impact on the, let’s say, times needed for preparing your weekly planning, right? Then include your additional marketing information, include your market share information, implement or include your omni-channel campaigns on top of that. Then with those behaviors that you’ve captured from your Sales force, include your AI capabilities and go out from the traditional decision tree into more AI-driven suggestions based on what you’ve been able to learn over past few months or after the implementation. So one step at a time.

Risks and challenges associated with an NBA implementation

MK: Okay, I wanted to ask about the cost, but I already know the answer. It depends, I suppose. But what are the risks when you are implementing this next best action from your perspective?

MO: Well it’s not a risk, it’s a challenge. You don’t have enough data to build proper recommendations. You may have tons of post-call reports, and we’ve learned that hard way by example, working with one of our clients, is that if you tell the rep to make eight calls a day and talk about two products on each call, that’s what you will exactly find it in your reports. So they’ll be useless in the terms of building a profile of a customer or include them in any model for learning.

MK: So you need to have meaningful KPIs.

MO: You need to have meaningful KPIs, and you need to be very respectful to the data you have and make sure that it’s complete, accurate, and useful for the KPIs you’re expecting. Otherwise, you will just get 100% of what you expect. Attrition rate and zero value behind it, right?

Um, the second thing is it will take time. It is not simple. You will have to have your technology teams onboarded. You will come up with fantastic requirements and fantastic recommendations, but all that needs to be implemented in the right way. So you need to be supported by your IT teams, potentially external vendors.

You need to assure that the recommendations are delivered in a timely manner. Because if you are going to get a recommendation on Monday and you’re visiting your customer on Friday, the recommendation might no longer be valid because he made this order and you will look quite stupid saying, by the way, why you’re not purchasing anything for two weeks? Hey, I did it already yesterday. Change your system. Change your provider. This doesn’t make you look professional.

So you need to think of close to real-time integrations, recalculating your model and recalculating your suggestions on a daily basis even. Maybe even preventing you from saying something just before entering the office of your HCP. It’s maybe not something you would start with, but you need to plan your environment and your system towards being close to real-time rather than five days.

MK: And real-time performance monitoring to see whether reps did what you recommended them to do.

MO: Then, you know, another step might be large language models, right? You will be typing in your post-call notes. You might be allowed to record a call if the HCP allows to, right? In order to take insights from that and then put them back into your recommendations, you can get it into your LLM model, which will make a digestible summary out of that, that then will be easy to use for further recommendations and also can be adequately displayed on your customer 360 page, for instance.

Practical tips—how to start the implementation?

MK: Okay. Let’s imagine that I’m, you know, I’m a manager. I have like 200 reps under my supervision and we have some business goals from my superiors, but I don’t really know what to do and how to do it. I know that I have some data. I’m cooperating with the marketing team. I know that, you know, I have some processes in place. I’m using Veeva like everybody else.

But how to approach a project like that? I’m, you know, I know you, you are my partner, my best vendor of choice. So help me, help me start off this project properly. What are the key points, you know, high level elements that we need to address in order to start the project like that?

MO: So the first step you’ve made was right, you called C&F.

MK: I chose you.

MO: You chose us, so half of the victory is already done. Don’t start with the technology, right? You’ve, you need to choose a right partner to help you set the foundations, right?

Only when you know the requirements, only when you know how fast you can move, what would be the pace, what is the budget you have? Then you will, you can talk to your technological partners because the requirements will be there, regardless of the technology you do. We recommend to be very creative and very open in terms of, of gathering the requirements. Sky is the limit.

MK: Budget is the limit.

MO: Then the budget is the limit. Not so much technology anymore. You will have to apply a filter and make those requirements and those suggestions realistic and applicable to your way of doing the business, but still let your team be creative. Based on that, you will know, knowing your budget constraints, can you afford, and actually from the cost perspective, it doesn’t really matter. You can go to an off the shelf solution. You can go to ZS Consulting. You can go to IQVIA. Probably those two will be the top, most expensive ones.

But on the other hand, you may want to build it from scratch, like with us, right? We do not own any out of the shelf solution, but we’ve got enough experience and enough accelerators and the building blocks that then help you to build a custom tailored solution. First, starting with maybe those traditional recommendations, moving towards the AI driven recommendations, LLM models, and so on. Both of those have those pros and cons.

Obviously the vendors or the off the shelf solution will promise you everything out of the scratch. It’s not like that. Being very honest, there’s always a customization needed with the custom builds. You have a full freedom and full flexibility to go wild with what you want to achieve, spend less at the beginning and keep evolving with the functionalities to be added for the next year or two or three, which is not that easy to be achieved with out of the box solutions that are on the market.

MK: Well, I’m a bit afraid of the cost of such approach and the time that is needed to build this approach. So I assume that we can start off with low hanging fruits or address only elements in the process to get the value because I need to sell it internally to my manager that yes, I have this value for my money. I will get additional funding to start off with next stage of the implementation. Is it possible to take care only of one element in the process? I don’t know, optimization of the field force processes or whatever, introducing a new tool or a new view in an existing tool.

MO: Correct. So first of all, you can select only one brand or one part of the field force. The whole project, we have to be very honest here, it’s a year-long thing, right? You should request, you should reserve a quarter for going through the requirements, talking to your stakeholders and evaluating the budget you have. Then probably another quarter or two for the technical implementation because of the platform constraints, time needed for the RFP for selecting the vendor and the proper implementation. It takes time, we know. Paperwork can take a month for instance, right? We cannot avoid that.

Then probably another quarter for the POC or MVP, if you will, with the smaller group within your field to prove you were right, which will be a great proof for us to ask for more money with your stakeholders. But give or take a year is quite a good timing to have an end-to-end project completed from the idea phase to closing the MVP with your field force.

MK: Okay, sounds good. I think that’s all for today. Thank you very much for being here, Michal, and sharing your vast experience in the field. And thank you very much for being with us and see you soon in the next episode of C&F Talks.

MO: Thank you, my pleasure.