Last Updated on August 21, 2025
As you know, I try to share our experiences and knowledge when it comes to what we see how pharma & Life sciences are making progress in communicating effectively with doctors.
That remains difficult for the industry if I have to be completely honest and that has consequences for the reach they want among doctors and the speed at which this reach is achieved. It takes too long…
What are the signals for that? I will explain them briefly.
1. There is a lack of knowledge and experience about dealing with customers. Customer focus in communication is still a long way off: In some cases, there is little to no content available to share with doctors. There is also still a push idea instead of a pull. Let’s send something instead of asking what this doctor wants to know from us so that he can do his job better, for example.
2. Good and up-to-date data is often underestimated in order to communicate well with the target group. Is the doctor’s data still correct? Do we know what this person is interested in? How up-to-date is the customer data? Where do his or her communication preferences lie? The data often lacks the quality and topicality it should have.
3. Developing omnichannel capabilities does not happen or remains window dressing. Beautiful PowerPoints and slick videos? Yes. Execution, Well no. There are two groups to distinguish. One continues to swear by a sales rep model. The other steps away from it because it is too expensive and the speed in increasing reach is too low (after all, 10 sales reps per year do not nearly achieve the number of touchpoints you want with your doctors), but get bogged down in internal discussions due to a lack of ownership. Who does what, who is responsible for what, what does the customer-to-customer process look like, and, more importantly, there is often a lack of cooperation between departments to activate and improve those channels that the doctor wants so much.
4. In many places within pharma organizations there is a chronic lack of expertise about what existing systems within the organization can or cannot do. An example of this is that it is often thought that the entire orchestration of the (digital) customer journey can be done via the CRM. It must and will go via CRM. And if you ask why, the answer is because the CRM is the only truth for customer data. That was indeed the case 25 years ago when we only had physical visits as a channel. Now that doctors are using other channels, this is no longer tenable. And that is not what a CRM is intended for. You will have to look at which technologies can strengthen your CRM.
