elandas blog

As a marketer, I can't say enough about the value that conversations with our sales team provides and the strategic insight that comes with it. Of course, marketing a technology solution is very different from marketing pharmaceuticals, biotechnologies and medical devices. And, good or bad, the need to gather insights from your customer facing teams in a more systematic way is exponentially more critical (this is echoed by the Elandas sales team who with every prospect and customer conversations are basically having a mini focus group).

Here are the top three reasons why our prospects and customers find it valuable to capture, consolidate and analyze the intelligence of their own customer facing teams in today's competitive and dynamic environment.

As a fellow marketer, I’m always digging, wondering what it is that will catch the interest of our prospects. If you are in marketing working at a pharma, med device or biotech,  you probably go through many of the same creative processes to keep your communications output fresh. Recently, I put a little test out there to see what would happen. I broke down the benefits of our elandas commercial excellence platform into four key areas. Then, I waited to see which one of them would get the most traction.

Whether you're launching a pharma product, trying to evaluate market access, drilling down into data to inform tactical approaches for strategic accounts, or just trying to evaluate your team's performance, you feel the pain of intelligence gaps.

When marketers and sales teams were surveyed to find out the impact it was having on how effectively they could perform, the results were compelling.

Read the infographic below to find out:

• how your pharma sales force feels about the intelligence they get to drive performance
• the top 2 intelligence gaps affecting pharma product sales
• how marketers in pharma feel about the intelligence they get to help with execution
• the top 2 pieces of intelligence that are the most difficult to obtain for pharma sales and marketing

In today’s high-stakes world of drug launches, top pharma teams are discovering that even before new products hit the market the ultimate secret weapon in their success arsenal can be the intelligence being gathered and effectively shared by members of their own team day-by-day.  

With millions of dollars and lives at stake- setting the stage for a new drug’s success trajectory is crucial in the early stages. And certainly more important than ever, is access to decision influencing data that can enable a launch team to course correct its strategy in real time.

Just because you are in the pre-launch stage of a new drug’s lifecycle it doesn’t mean you have settle for being left in the dark when it comes to future market access visibility. Collecting projection information via your team in the field can actually be a very coordinated, precise, and yes accurate process. One that yields valuable insights that are impactful when it comes to making the appropriate shifts in your brand’s strategy leading up to launch.

How purpose-built business intelligence tools can help: 

With the right pharma-specific business intelligence tools, you don’t have to be caught flat-footed when it comes to having a clear view of your product’s projected market access. Or, end up in a people hours eating death spiral of Excel sheet updates that for many teams used to look something like the following. Pharma X Company Field Director, David, had a big spreadsheet and would call 50 plus account managers responsible for a particular set of insurance companies, and ask them, “Okay, what they are telling you about how this drug will be covered?”  Sometimes he would reach out to them via email too. It was a very manual process that he would have to refresh every 14 days as it’s critical having all of this information up-to-date during Pre-Launch, and it ate up 80% of David’s time. 

That’s quite a bit of effort for something that with the right technology solution can be done with a click of a report button. Even better, the information is both highly accurate because of built-in access data validation which is key to making accurate predictions, and it’s able to be locked down so that only approved stakeholders within an organization have access. Key to all of this is finding a system that offers the kind of high configurability that can be tweaked to meet your team’s ongoing needs for new and expanded insights.

In today’s ever more complex and high stakes pharmaceutical selling environment having a united commercial strategy for gaining information can be the difference between being agile as an organization or not being nimble enough to compete. 

More informed launch planning and execution, and an increased ability to assess and adapt go to market strategies in the early stages of a pharmaceutical product hitting the market can prove critical to its early success. 

The ability to nimbly assess and act can ultimately become a huge factor in determining whether a product reaches its full potential or fizzles instead.

Here we take a look at how your team can best position itself for the win when it comes to launch success.

As pharma companies continue to pursue even greater patient centricity, being able to share intelligence between business units becomes critical to commercial excellence.  The proprietary and actionable insights many top brands are able to glean by using software platforms to manage knowledge enable them to layer information in new ways, meaning data is quickly being recognized as the killer strategic asset it can become.

While pharma brand teams have always had Excel spreadsheets at their disposal to record information, as well as one-trick pony survey tools, what they have lacked is an intuitive way to capture information and activate it within the same system across multiple internal stakeholder groups. This means lengthy time delays in updating data and getting it into the right hands in actionable formats. It also means that critical information being stuck in organizational silos has all too often become the norm.

A fairly embarrassing leap of faith on my family’s recent spring break vacation reminded me of parallel challenge in the work world. One that so many of us marketers often find ourselves in. It’s the type of situation that often involves a lot of unnecessary drama and spending, and it’s also one that we could often strategically avoid. And so, my story begins here…

Roughly 41 percent of medical device and pharmaceutical sales professionals believe inefficient processes are the single biggest inhibitors to their success according to a 2016 Elandas research survey of life sciences sales & marketing professionals.

When it comes to sales enablement tools that can really contribute to commercial excellence, the technology is what separates pretenders from contenders. But how can you tell who really has what it takes to best fit your needs? Here, we’ve come up with a quick checklist to offer you a better understanding of how to vet the best industry specific sales enablement tools on the market today.

Medical sales reps shouldn’t have to spend inordinate amounts of time compiling information for effective pre-call planning. You didn’t hire them to be data  analysts. And, if  you give them the right sales enablement tools they need to efficiently do that part of the job, they will be able to better spend their work hours building relationships and becoming valuable partners with your key customers.

Welcome to 2017 – a new year that is sure to be as momentum filled as the last several we’ve seen in the life sciences industry. Healthcare as we know it is still experiencing great momentum around a number of shifts and with this metamorphosis the needs of sales and marketing teams in pharma are evolving likewise.

As we are all well aware these days, the life sciences sector continues to be in a state of transformation due to a combination of price sensitivity, patient-focused strategies, increasingly stringent regulations, and a changing of the guard in how medical device and pharmaceutical sales reps interact with physicians.

Today’s elandas insights guest blogger is Tom Kukla who comes to us with a wealth of experience in Executive Communication, Coaching, Management and Leadership Development. As Principal and Founder of Credere Leadership, Tom trains some of the best brightest talent at leading Pharma, Bio, and Medical Organizations across North America.

 Med Reps know that time with doctors is precious and more limited than ever these days. With that shift it’s also becoming increasingly crucial that marketing to physicians is approached with less direct selling and more team spirited partnering. Med reps need tools to help them deliver a better customer experience.

This means that sales needs to have immediate access to up-to-the-minute, personalized data, integrated from various sources to create the most relevant engagement possible. For optimal control, materials must be at their fingertips at every opportunity, on the right device – an iPad or tablet.

Face it. We've pretty much all been there at one time or another -bored at the booth, and praying the final day of the conference would at last shower down with mercy on our weary feet and souls. Trade show pain - something Advil alone cannot cure.

Not to mention the trade show hangover, and haven't we all been there too? In addition to re-entry at home after days on the road - there are tons of emails to respond to not counting all the proactive ones you need to send to the new leads and contacts you just met at the show. Follow-ups that are so numerous and at times so generic they fall through the cracks one way or another. It’s a necessary, but sometimes tough part of life science marketing.

Smaller players in the life sciences ecosystem face challenges that are unique to them when it comes to marketing and sales.

The human side of pharma. Sometimes it feels like we hear so little of it. eyeforpharma Philadelphia 2016 which I attended at the beginning of May, was all about making a patient centric focus the new the heart of Pharma. It’s a very compelling theme, and I’m eager to share here with you some of the most inspirational things I heard about where the industry is headed along these lines.

In the post Affordable Care Act world the healthcare universe is looking a bit like an alternate universe at the same time we are finding ourselves operating in today’s knowledge economy.

If you’re a marketer or sales professional in pharma, med device, or biotech you already know the market is morphing, and precious time with docs is the sand that keeps falling through the holes in the sifter you’re left holding. Your sales goals are not going anywhere though, and that means you are being forced to get creative about how and when you are meeting with HCPs. At times conferences may become the new office, and shorter office visits themselves demand that you are nimble and ready on the go with the right data and messages.

As the world of life sciences spins at what can feel like out-of-control speed, sales and marketing teams in the industry forge ahead in their quest to find the holy grail of technology solutions to give them the competitive advantage they need.

 Their search for systems that will make on-the-job life easier and more productive continues in earnest. There are even some who say they may have found the answer, and for them it somewhat surprisingly lies just on the other side of their CRM.

Life is busy, and for lots of us finding ways to fit in things like fitness, better work/life balance, more family time, and exciting work successes can sometimes seem impossible to accomplish at the same time.

In Life Sciences possibly more than any other industry today, the demand for targeted informational selling is off the charts. Today, we find ourselves in a fast moving environment where complex and evolving regulatory and compliance requirements are positioned next to constantly changing insurance plan coverages. Added to the mix is Mergers & Acquisitions activity that is record high and changes the complexion of how Healthcare Providers (HCPs) do their jobs in the face of internal and external procedures and considerations that are moving targets.

For this Valentine's Day week, what we'd really like to do is give all our customers and partners heart-shaped chocolate samplers. But that seems a tad impractical. Instead, we hope you'll enjoy (and make better use of) a practical sampler of our favorite workday quotes, culled from among elandas' own employees, with a personal note on why they resonate.

Not only are they better for you; they may feed your drive as you pursue this month's sales and marketing goals.

Today’s elandas insights guest blogger is Tom Kukla who comes to us with a wealth of experience in Executive Communication, Coaching, Management and Leadership Development. As Principal and Founder of Credere Leadership, Tom trains some of the best and brightest talent at leading Pharma, Bio, and Medical Organizations across North America.

There’s no doubt these are challenging times to be on the front lines in Pharmaceutical Marketing and Sales, but as the saying goes where there’s challenge lies opportunity.

As the technology marketing partner for many leading teams in Life Sciences, elandas is a company that is continuing to stay in front of the industry by creating solutions that put our clients in control of their managed markets data and processes so they can improve sales results.

As we look ahead to 2016, I wanted to take a moment to connect with you and sharesome of the big tech trends we are seeing ahead in the New Year, and invite you to share your feedback on what you see happening too.

Today, I’m CMO at elandas, the company that streamlines and accelerates the flow of actionable business data for marketing and sales teams in Pharma, Medical Device and other Life Sciences. But before I ever came to this fiercely competitive industry, I thrived as a marketer working with beverage brand rock stars including Moosehead Breweries, Labatt Canada, and Jim Beam.

Just the other day I was thinking about the obvious contrasts between these highly regulated industries, and it struck me that there are really many similarities between them and winning marketing strategies that apply to both. I decided it would be fun to have a chat with one of elandas’ top advisory board members, Daniel Waits, who is Worldwide Sr. Marketing Manager at BD to gain his insights too. Here’s a look at our conversation.

Hayley: Ok Daniel so in both industries we have multiple stakeholders, and that drives a need to develop individual strategies for different target audiences.

For example, in beer sales, you have bar & restaurant owners and managers, retailers, the government, and of course consumers. In the healthcare world, it gets even more complicated. There are payers, providers, patients, support caregivers, pharmacies, hospital administrators, health care systems, and governmental bodies and each group needs to be understood.

Daniel: That’s exactly right Hayley. In both industries there has to be a systems thinking approach. It’s important to map out those stakeholders and understand the interconnectivity among them. Bring all of the key people together to eliminate silos. Define the desired outcome that everyone wants and do it in one initiative with tactics that are tailored to each stakeholder group.

Hayley: Data is king in both worlds. To be effective in beer marketing, you have got to be able to predict how an initiative is going to affect sales so you can actually have the product available when it happens. Worst thing, and I’ve seen it happen is spending time and money on an awesome campaign and then demand skyrockets and you reap no benefit because you didn’t have the product available to meet the demand. Beer marketers must be able to predict how the market will respond—historical data on sales, competitive campaigns, how the weather affects sales, how elastic their brand is to price discounts, new market entrants, and sales rep input can all help to unlock the mystery.

Daniel: Yes, data is also king in Life Sciences and, strong segmentation helps you to understand whom you are targeting. Life Sciences marketers must have clear data that will assist in forecast assumptions to empower targeted marketing plans. Both industries need ways to analyze and layer data for better decision-making, forecasting and opportunity identification.

Hayley: Let’s talk about innovation. For any company to survive, they need to innovate. For a beer marketer, innovation is constant, a new look, a brand extension, new promotions, new events, new packaging, social campaigns, collector items… you name it. After all, beer is beer – and it’s how you position it and connect with your customers and consumers that will set you apart. Is marketing innovation as critical in Life Sciences?

It’s been just about a year since we began putting together our vision for an advisory board at elandas and when I look back at how far we’ve come with this mission since then I have to say it’s been one of the most strategic moves we’ve made as a company in 2015.

The reasons why are many.

The nine individuals who currently sit on the elandas Advisory Board represent a diverse range of knowledge and experience in the broad Life Science industry. Their shared expertise is impressive and invaluable to elandas as we have been evolving our next generation product line, and we are continuing to grow as a successful organization through our collaborative efforts with them.

Our advanced, highly configurable technologies make it easier to capture and share critical information efficiently as well as help coordinate efforts across organizational silos so that sales and marketing teams in pharmaceutical, medical device and other life science companies are able to work smarter and faster.

Hearing directly from our advisory board members about how elandas technology directly solves their challenges in the real world and how they would like to see it advance in step with what they see on the horizon has enabled our development team to build solutions that feel customized, and yet are easy to implement for the clients buying them.

Each of our advisory board members offers us insightful suggestions by organizational role ensuring that elandas technology has a positive impact on all stakeholders. This drives onboarding and utilization rates higher. By identifying the key value drivers they want to see, our advisory board has helped us create dashboards that are intuitive, and that offer data insights every member of a company’s team is eager to leverage.

In short, our advisory board has been instrumental this year in helping elandas create innovative solutions we are certain can add value to sales and marketing teams across the Life Sciences. And, we are excited to continue our regular team dialogue with these respected members of the industry as elandas prepares to unveil new mobile technology to the marketplace in early 2016.

Fifty percent of the life sciences marketers we surveyed say that prescribers have the most influences on market share so every interaction needs to count.

Prescribers are under increasing time pressures and are responding with restrictions. In fact, we are learning that 49% of physicians have placed moderate-to-severe restrictions on visits from pharma sales reps* – so it’s vital to maximize the time you have together. That means being organized and presenting the most important info and data on your product in an engaging way. You want this meeting to be interesting, efficient, and more importantly actionable for both you and the prescriber.

There’s no doubt that the current transformation of the pharmaceutical industry can easily compare to the 1990’s Internet shake-up. At the recent PharmaForce conference, over 150 experts in pharma sales and marketing attended panel discussions, roundtables, workshops and presentations to discuss top trends impacting our business. While PharmaForce provided a variety of valuable insights, we were especially interested in information for solutions providers, which is elandas’ niche. For those who were unable to attend, or for those who did attend and would like a refresher, here are some of the key insights we gained from this year’s PharmaForce.

Ryan Roberts launched elandas because he saw the struggles life science companies faced in managing information and getting pull-through materials to prescribers quickly.

Ryan has always been a problem solver. His first job was building enterprise systems for Fortune 500 clients while at one of those big IT consulting firms. He was the guy who pulled the ‘all nighters’ cranking out code, subsisting on a diet of honey roasted peanuts and orange juice.
He was always coming up with new ideas and better ways of helping clients. But in a big organization, change often comes slow. So Ryan decided to put his passion and technical skill into becoming an entrepreneur.

Our clients love the fact that Ryan translates pressing business needs into practical software solutions. He’s equally comfortable working on both sides of the street – as a businessperson or as a coder. That’s often a rare combo.

Ryan loves the work. He thrives on connecting the dots that make technology useful for businesses. He’s spent countless hours meeting with pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device companies to figure out the best ways to solve the challenges they face every day.

It’s meant some more meals of peanuts and orange juice, but it has helped him develop practical solutions to gathering and sharing information quickly in a dynamic and complicated environment.
After a decade working with life science companies, for Ryan it comes down to speed. How do you use technology in ways that gets information in the hands of the right people faster?

That ‘need for speed’ informs everything that we do at elandas. We speed up collaboration, the sharing of knowledge and the delivery of materials. With speed comes increased efficiency and larger market share.

Ryan’s focus on creating pragmatic solutions to real problems is why some of the top names in the life science business are already working with elandas. And his passion is helping attract a skilled team of IT and business pros to the company.

He’s building elandas as a company that will last. There are always better ways of doing things, and elandas will help find them.

If you’re a sales and marketing professional in life sciences, you may find you’re so busy with unnecessary energy wasters and minutiae that strategic planning – the foundation for success – never gets the time it deserves.

Getting a product to launch on time and with success is harder than ever for today’s life sciences marketers. You must have the right tools to keep up. Problem is, many are using old strategies to win a new game. Using an outdated approach will ensure your launch lacks the speed and flexibility needed to beat the competition.