Going for the Gold: Does your promotion model have the agility of a gymnast?

Kirk Harmon

Javier “Jave” Castillo

At the Summer Olympics in 1984, the first American woman gymnast won the gold medal in the individual all-around competition. Over 40 years, some things, such as the athletes’ courage and commitment, are unchanged. Other aspects of the sport are significantly different — from the wider range of equipment to the more complex, technically challenging skills gymnasts perform in their routines.

At IQVIA, we have seen parallels in life sciences. Macroeconomic conditions continue to fuel financial pressures. Product launches involve more time and uncertainty as companies address diseases with smaller patient and provider populations. Commercial leaders face more complexity in managing promotional channels and customer experience (CX).

While new tools like artificial intelligence (AI) and digital transformation have generated buzz, over-indexing on digital can negatively affect the CX of healthcare providers (HCPs). That’s especially true when more competitors are vying for smaller markets. Consider a recent IQVIA survey that found that 63% of HCPs have noticed the significant shift to digital. What’s more, HCPs indicated that they’re “overwhelmed by digital content that is not valuable to their practice.”

In short, like Olympic gymnasts, life sciences leaders must perform at much higher difficulty levels. That requires investments in speed, strength, and the agility to execute with precision timing. These requirements start before launch — when the uncertainty of product approvals, timing of line extensions, market access conditions, and competitive activities necessitate rapid response while minimizing cost burden — and continue throughout a brand’s lifecycle.

Three ways to flex your field force

How can you rapidly flex to meet your brand’s evolving promotional needs along its lifecycle and adapt to local market challenges? Forward-thinking brand leaders and manufacturers have adopted a more agile promotional model that uses a contract sales organization (CSO) to keep pace with today’s fast-changing environment.

The CSO model inverts the traditional staffing model — providing greater flexibility with lower fixed costs. By engaging a CSO, you can deploy qualified resources more quickly. You also gain speed and flexibility for testing new targets, piloting new roles, measuring progress, and then further refining your approach.

What follows are just three examples.

Find your footing — and make an impact — faster

Everyone is striving to strike the right balance between omnichannel, digital, and personal promotion powered by AI. Right now, there’s no playbook; nor is there time to “wait and see.” Leaders must embrace a rapid, test-and-learn mindset that allows them to accelerate the deployment of pilots. Traditional go-to-market and staffing models stand in the way. But CSOs, such as IQVIA, offer the data and insights to optimize your targets and channel mix, along with the operational footprint to quickly deploy resources tailored to your brand and customer needs.

Build your core for a stronger launch

Fierce competition and aggressive market access hurdles are shortening the window for commercial success. As a result, 75% of brands are missing launch forecasts.¹ Given the pace of changing market dynamics, you need to be faster and more flexible to accelerate launch and rapidly adjust to twists and turns.

By working with a CSO, you can launch more quickly while augmenting the impact of your go-to-market strategy. For example, as you enter rare disease therapeutic areas with new target prescriber audiences, consider the value of inside sales representatives (ISRs). Pre-launch, these resources are valuable in identifying and profiling HCPs. They can also schedule appointments for your field team, accelerating their time to impact.

In addition, your CSO’s promotional teams can power initial disease education and awareness, boosting patient identification and/or referrals to specialists. Beyond pre-launch activities, CSOs offer the flexibility to rapidly scale up critical roles at launch — or to augment your team’s promotional efforts to an expanded target audience.

If you stumble, recalibrate and recover

Given financial strains, you may have launched with an under-resourced sales team or fallen victim to overcorrection during a round of layoffs. Or maybe you made a strategic miscalculation about the size of your target audience. Now your commercial excellence team has surfaced opportunities to maximize brand performance with expanded coverage — but the pursuit of permanent headcount could lead to delayed or cancelled deployment.

IQVIA recently partnered with a top-five pharma that had an urgent opportunity to leverage marketing dollars to evaluate the impact of additional personal promotion of a rare disease product. In 10 days, IQVIA hired a team, and within six months, the IQVIA team delivered a more than 50% increase in the volume of new prescriptions and new patient starts. The one-year pilot led to an extension and expansion of services into additional rare disease franchises. For other clients, IQVIA has helped make promotional and staffing adjustments to better align with a brand’s lifecycle stage. These may include shifts to non-personal or lower-cost personal promotion via revised hiring profiles, inside sales reps, or customer service representatives.

The award ceremonies for the 2024 Summer Olympic Games are complete, but your quest to improve CX and increase agility continues. For help reaching your goals — despite rising complexity and competition — get in touch with IQVIA about CSO solutions.

¹ IQVIA Market Access Center of Excellence