Blend digital and field sales promotion for omnichannel success: 4 takeaways from a launch success
By breaking down traditional divisions between digital and field sales promotion, a biotech company created a holistic promotional approach that drove customer engagement and launch success.
When commercial leaders think of omnichannel, most envision an integration of digital marketing activities – email campaigns, social ads, third-party sponsored content, etc. But this definition of omnichannel leaves out life sciences companies’ most impactful commercial channel: the sales force.
Companies understand the importance of their sales forces. Therefore, it’s crucial that they make them an integral part of their omnichannel efforts. The challenge lies in the historical divide that exists between digital promotion and field sales. These two components of a company’s commercial operations should work hand-in-hand, but they often don’t. As a result, companies risk delivering suboptimal experiences to their customers (poorly coordinated outreach, irrelevant content, etc.).
We recently worked with a biotech company to support the launch of a second-to-market oncology drug with an omnichannel orchestration effort. A central piece of this company’s success (it secured more than 50% of new patient starts within one year post launch) was bringing together digital and field promotion into a coordinated – and impactful – omnichannel program. This company was able to bridge that divide by focusing on data and analytics, people, and processes.
We recently sat down with sales and analytics leaders from the company to reflect on the project and what we learned. From that conversation, we identified takeaways that other companies can apply to their
omnichannel journeys.
1. Develop a “data-driven culture”
This company’s leadership committed to an omnichannel-driven customer-centricity model as the foundation of its launch effort. As a result, the company developed “a very data-driven culture,” in the words of one of the commercial leaders.
From the start, the biggest consideration was determining what “omnichannel” meant for the company. After all, omnichannel is a bit of a buzzword that means different things to different people. Knowing that the sales force was the company’s most impactful – and expensive – channel, it decided to implement an omnichannel program that enhanced the sales effort by equipping reps with valuable information, supporting their outreach and complementing their efforts with coordinated digital promotion.
The goal was a blend of personal and digital content delivery across channels and continuous optimization – all driven by ongoing analysis of campaign data and HCP engagement.
- Sales force detail
- Video detail
- Speaker event
- Email promotion
- Digital promotion (i.e. web, third party, programmatic)
behavorial triggers
- Successful sales force detail
- Consumption of digital content
- Email engagement
- Speaker event attendance
- Treatment diagnosis, prescription, referral, etc.
optimization
- Selection of delivery based on propensity and preferences
- Sequencing of messaging based on triters and analytics
- Non-responder split testing
2. Find sales reps willing to take a “leap of faith” on omnichannel
An omnichannel effort requires sophisticated and consistent coordination between all parties that touch promotion – from the sales force and commercial leaders to digital agencies and the omnichannel team. Not only can sales reps benefit from an omnichannel program, which provides useful insights to help them make their calls more effective. But sales reps, with intimate knowledge of their customers and their preferences, can also contribute their own insights to the omnichannel effort.
Yet sales reps who know their territories better than anyone else may be wary of analytics-derived insights delivered from company headquarters. Securing sales force buy-in and developing a coordinated sales and marketing effort is critical to omnichannel success.
Setting reps up for success
Important to this company’s omnichannel success was the ability to take important learnings, implement processes around those learnings and then repeat. For example, many reps sponsored local conferences in an effort to meet with customers. In one instance, the team dug into the conference attendees and provided the sales rep with a pre-conference download of who was attending, what their prescribing habits were and how often they engaged with digital content over the past six weeks. So, instead of the rep going to the conference and connecting opportunistically with attendees, they were armed with a gameplan. Following the conference, the team built a process around this pre-show research activity and applied it to other regions.
This company had the advantage of starting largely from scratch. As a result, leading up to launch it was able to build a sales team that aligned with its omnichannel vision. Commercial leaders sought to recruit sales reps who were energized by the prospect of a more analytics-driven sales effort. During the recruitment process, they laid out their vision for the omnichannel program and asked prospective reps to take a “leap of faith” and embrace omnichannel orchestration that blended digital and field promotion.
The company’s commercial leaders also involved sales managers and reps in the development of the program, giving them an opportunity to weigh in on the vision and the various components and strategies. In the end, the company’s sales leaders were invested in the success of the program. Having sales leaders in place who understood the omnichannel program and the data that fueled it – its advantages, its limits, and how to leverage it properly – gave the program credibility among the broader sales force.
To succeed with omnichannel, companies must understand their audiences and iterate continuously, based on campaign results. To ensure they had a granular understanding of customers and tailored promotion appropriately to all their targets, this company created an “adoption ladder.” The company placed HCPs across the six rungs of the ladder: unaware, aware, consideration, trial, usage and advocacy.
Status: Promoter of therapy to other HCPs.
Example action: Equip with relevant updates related to efficacy, cost and coverage, as well as patient benefits of earlier and/or sustained use.
Status: Reliable prescriber of therapy.
Example action: Strengthen relationship by continuing to provide cost, coverage, patient services and efficacy information.
Status: Willing to try the product with patients who fit the clinical profile.
Example action: Provide cost, coverage and patient services information.
Status: Attended speaker event and engaged with sales reps.
Example action: Share medical journal article about efficacy as well as information about administration.
Status: Engaged with awareness-focused email campaigns.
Example action: Provide safety and tolerability information from medical journal article; invite to speaker event.
Status: No engagement with the brand.
Example action: Share press release and seek sales force detail.
HCPs moved along the ladder based on data and analytics-driven triggers as well as rep curation based on local knowledge. Program leaders also incorporated digital campaign data into the ladder and validated this data with reps to ensure the company had a holistic view of every HCP. This information served as ongoing market research for the marketing team, allowing them to understand what was resonating, what wasn’t, and narrow in on specific, personalized messaging based on where HCPs fell on the adoption ladder.
Ensuring reps updated this adoption ladder consistently was critical to the company’s success. Reps aren’t always eager to hand over data on their customers. They are also very busy. So, the company’s commercial leaders clearly explained the “why” behind their requests for data. They shared what they planned to do with the data and explained the benefit they anticipated delivering to sales reps. This transparent approach helped them secure buy-in and participation from the sales team. In the end, this company captured nearly 100% documentation of every target.
This company leveraged a cross-functional team of orchestrators to manage and optimize the program. This “omnichannel support team” included a group of analysts and data scientists who were experts in patient prediction. The team also included digital specialists who understood the interplay between different pieces of promotion and channels – and were able to align promotion with the appropriate channel. And, perhaps most importantly, the driver of the omnichannel effort was a former sales rep who understood how to best use omnichannel insights to support reps’ on-the-ground efforts.
The omnichannel support team not only orchestrated campaigns. They also provided ongoing counsel to the sales and marketing teams, meeting with them regularly, sharing data and insights and collecting feedback to inform tweaks to the overall program. The omnichannel support team created a closed-loop model that ensured the company captured and acted on all relevant insights.
A true omnichannel effort will bridge the traditional gap between digital and field promotion. A company must start with a strategic vision that puts customer-centricity at the heart of its people, processes and technology. Then, successful execution requires a required a mix of vision, data analytics expertise, ongoing training and proselytizing, and cross-functional collaboration.
By building an omnichannel program that addresses data and analytics, people, and processes, a company can bring digital promotion and field sales together, deliver coordinated and relevant outreach to customers – and secure meaningful engagement with customers.
David Laros is a partner at Beghou Consulting who leads omnichannel projects for the firm’s life sciences clients.
Want to access actionable examples for how you can implement a best-in-class customer centricity model? Watch our webinar, “The Oncology Omnichannel Blueprint,” for a deep dive into 10 key learnings from this oncology company’s omnichannel effort.
