Doctors, nurses and healthcare teams are being stretched to their limits, thanks to the fallout from dealing with Covid-19. Now, amidst all of the uncertainties surrounding the pandemic, one thing is clear: this increasing pressure will impact the way healthcare professionals deal with the pharma industry moving forward.
Today, more than ever, healthcare professionals are under heavy time constraints, particularly as they have to follow the necessary safety procedures to keep themselves and the community safe. With this in mind, it can be challenging for pharma to gain access to healthcare professionals ethically, while ensuring the valuable time spent with them is worthwhile.
Nonetheless, it’s not impossible. It requires readjusting old strategies to account for these new limitations. In this article, we’ll discuss some ways pharma can effectively, and ethically, work with healthcare professionals, now and in the foreseeable future.
It all comes down to leveraging the digitisation of communication.
Offer value through authentic understanding
Pharma must go beyond trying to impart brand messaging to healthcare professionals with an impersonal plan shown on an iPad or an e-detail. Instead, they have got to prioritise providing true value. By this, we mean offering (and carrying out) services in a way that effectively help pressured healthcare professionals to carry out their services when treating patients in our community.
Now, while pharma needs to meet the needs of the healthcare professional, it makes sense that pharma meets its own needs too. But doing this successfully requires an intimate understanding of what the ‘New World’ looks like for these healthcare workers professionally.
This requires asking some questions.
What are the healthcare professionals' pressures and pain points?
Can you alleviate these to make their lives easier?
Only then can you begin to make an assessment.
Tracking and ensuring ROI
Assessing asset effectiveness can help give clarity on exactly what’s working and what isn’t – for your customers and for you. Tracking asset effectiveness in meaningful ways allows you to make manageable changes to your sales team’s interactions and improve them over time. This requires using interaction and channel-specific data, in a focussed and critical manner to ensure the strategies, and channels used, are maximising their potential with regards to accessibility, engagement, and accurate, informative messaging that’s in alignment with the specific commercial objectives for that brand.
Embrace new channels
Embracing new channels is inevitable - even if it is in unexpected places like EHRs for example. We need to meet HCPs where they are. Remote meetings are here to stay. However, more consideration must be given to maximising the opportunity these calls present, and ensuring teams have the insights needed to adapt to these new pressures.
On top of this, one must appreciate the fact that the rep is just one channel, so we need to look at the healthcare professional’s journey with your brand as a whole. This helps you meet them where they actually are, so you can appropriately guide them to where we want them to be.
An example of this is an experience map. This is a visualisation that can be guided by experts, to map out the customer journey clearly so that your business can more effectively reach its goals.
Perhaps you’re a pharmaceutical company who wants to increase efficiency and reach new clients ethically. An equipped team will map out the process and clarify the customer journey, and recommend the channel, content and messaging at each step, aligned to your customers personas and needs, so that your company can realistically achieve this outcome.
In summary
Increasing access to healthcare professionals can be achieved by doing the following:
● Listen to the customers’ needs
● Ensure these needs met by you
● Ensure these needs are measurable, generating value for your team and your client
The modern market is about building long-term relationships - no longer are interactions purely transactional, and nor should they be. This is why it’s crucial that your team understands the customer’s perspective. Only then can you support your HCPs in a way that ensures you’re building relationships that generate value over the long term. This requires real-world insights alongside strategic planning.
How can we help you?
If you’re interested in gaining insights into your HCPs and the patients they treat, what they need from you, and how to target content and messaging to increase access and valuable interactions, we offer countless strategies that could guide you through the process.
Talk to Twist to discuss your customer and channel strategies. Let’s get started and reshape your customer engagement plan today!
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