Author
Alex Tolmasoff, Director, KPMG Sales Transformation and HCLS Lead
Pharma’s top 4 challenges from traditional commercial models
How pharmaceutical sales models impact revenue growth
In our first blog in this series, we discussed the five market trends and challenges pharmaceutical and biotech companies face that hamper revenue growth.
At the same time, traditional commercial model issues also hinder growth. For many commercial teams trying to keep pace with the competition, here are the top four issues that could affect results and cause lost revenue or missed opportunities:
1
Poorly aligned commercial resources that create poor customer experience (CX)
- Patients, providers, and payers increasingly possess more information and have higher expectations regarding product quality and support
- Customer-facing teams typically have therapeutic areas of focus that make scaling commercial models difficult and can lead to inefficacies (e.g., poor account planning across large accounts, multiple sales resources calling on the same site of care)
- Too many customer engagement touchpoints and a lack of orchestration create poor CX; in fact, 94% of pharma and biotech sales leaders say that customer centricity is a top priority but 43% find that customer interactions are getting more stressful1
- Front office teams (sales, marketing, patient services, etc.) often lack the organizational expertise, power, or authority to enforce CX strategies and initiatives, such as creating personalized engagement by customer or driving use of specific digital tools, data, and value messaging
- Commercial operations and insights teams lack the necessary resources, talent, and status to develop and implement new customer strategies
2
Difficulty coordinating commercial teams across traditional and new therapy areas
- Legacy “blockbuster” drugs have relatively straightforward commercial models that can be powered by digital channels but often have large supporting field forces that need to be redeployed
- Newer precision medicine treatments require a transformation of the traditional commercial model because they have smaller patient pools and require specialized knowledge. Commercial teams also need to influence provider behaviors for diagnostic testing, set up a robust network of labs for test support, and integrate novel capabilities (e.g., advanced diagnostics)
- This complexity is only expected to increase as software and AI (Artificial Intelligence) tools proliferate in the patient and provider journey and as a part of biopharma’s suite of customer offerings
3
Failure to adapt to the shift to hybrid sales models
- 83% of biopharma sales leaders believe that the pandemic drove permanent change from traditional field sellers to “hybrid” digital sales roles - and many of these changes have been welcomed by providers and provider leadership1
- An increase in digital engagement also led to the rise of new digital field roles, such as TLLs (Thought Leader Liaison) to help pull through technical education for innovative therapeutics and RMLs (Regional Medical Liaisons) to supplement home office marketing and executing on core promotional programs
- Unfortunately, many organizations struggle to capitalize on the investment, with traditional “hunter-dominant” field sales models that have a tough time adapting to this new normal and fall behind the more efficient and customer-aligned digitally powered hybrid selling teams
- Hybrid models increase reliance on automation, commercial operations, and marketing – which makes them more productive but also more challenging to pull off
4
Declining productivity from traditional sales models
- Many pharmaceutical industry reps have been in their roles for years; these legacy sellers are often less open to using modern technologies and selling unfamiliar next generation therapies
- Legacy territories and account assignments that have not been refreshed can lead to unclear growth paths, misaligned incentives, and poor ROI in some regions
- Some legacy sellers focus on maintaining their base and have a laundry list of reasons that they cannot change accounts or compete for new business, making it more difficult to compete with more nimble competition
- New models will require increased clinical and economic expertise that sellers typically do not have, resulting in more medical science liaisons (MSL), medical affairs teams, and clinical support roles, as well as population health and economic buyer roles to explain the economic benefit
It’s time for a transformation to a more modern commercial approach. Your commercial model should be structured to help you go to market across customer segments with new digitally enabled ways of selling and servicing customers. Additionally, your talent strategy, training, goal setting, and incentives should be aligned to your growth drivers and market-driven insights.
In our next article, we explore what smart commercial leaders are doing about these issues and improving their sales models.
Footnotes
Source: 1KPMG Pulse Survey, Summer 2022
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Read moreMeet our team
Walt Becker
Principal, Customer Advisory Sales Transformation & Commercial Industries Lead, KPMG US
Alex Tolmasoff
Director, Customer Advisory, Sales Transformation, KPMG US
Walt Becker
Principal, Customer Advisory Sales Transformation & Commercial Industries Lead, KPMG US
Alex Tolmasoff
Director, Customer Advisory, Sales Transformation, KPMG US