Launch Lessons: Bringing a Targeted Oncology Therapy to Market

What’s the next frontier in life sciences commercialization? What’s the territory companies must traverse successfully to drive launch readiness and success in a dynamic marketplace? In my view, it’s flawlessly orchestrated omnichannel promotion. Indeed, a well-executed omnichannel program can help life sciences companies overcome some of the most pressing issues they face today – from increased launch pressures to increasingly limited HCP access. When done right, omnichannel marketing can help companies improve HCP engagement to facilitate the delivery of effective treatment to patients who desperately need and deserve it.

My team recently worked with a midsize biotech company to support the launch of a targeted therapy for a mutated form of non-small cell lung cancer. The omnichannel program played a key role in securing more than 50% of new patient starts within one year post launch, an impressive feat for a second-to-market therapy.

Our omnichannel project offers several important lessons for commercial leaders across the industry looking for ways to crack the code on customer centricity. Before we get there, let’s cover the pressing challenges that make omnichannel promotion a must in today’s commercial environment.

The customer-centricity imperative

Life sciences companies must deliver consistent and personalized experiences to HCPs and other stakeholders who are involved in a patient’s ecosystem of care. These stakeholders are inundated with information from all sides, so reaching and engaging with them is an increasingly challenging task. To break through this avalanche of information, companies must view their content output through the eyes of their customers. Communications from a life sciences company to these stakeholders must be personalized and synchronized across online and offline interactions. Communications from life sciences companies should always be novel, timely, accurate and relevant to treatment teams and their patients.

A key implication of this customer-centricity imperative is that companies must find a way to bridge the often frustratingly wide gap between digital promotion and field sales promotion. A company will only engage customers in a meaningful way if it creates a holistic promotional approach with closely aligned and complementary digital and field promotional efforts.

Keys to omnichannel success

Through this omnichannel orchestration project, we created a blueprint for omnichannel success companies can leverage. Here are the five keys to success:

• Put data first

The foundation of an omnichannel program is data. Companies must acquire and organize large data sets in order to deploy coordinated and effective promotion across channels. This data should include everything from claims data and testing results to microsegment-level unstructured data that helps companies track HCP and thought leader perspectives and sentiments. Data elements also need to come from a company’s CRM and marketing operations systems. Further, carefully constructed data use agreements (DUA) will facilitate third-party promotion and communication channels.

Companies must collect high-quality and accurate physician-level data throughout the lifecycle of the campaign. They must also put in place feedback mechanisms and business planning capabilities to collect local knowledge from field-facing personnel and integrate that knowledge into campaigns. Ongoing data collection and analysis enables real-time tracking of results and agile adjustment to omnichannel strategies.

• Predict and target

With the data infrastructure in place, companies must apply rigorous analytics (and, where applicable, AI-powered tools) to unlock insights. Thorough data analysis will help companies more precisely predict HCP prescribing behavior.

Companies need to stitch together data ranging from alternate treatment algorithms and testing results to co-morbidities, duration of therapy and more. Companies should consider a wide range of analytical methods, including correlation analyses, logistical regression, multivariate linear regression, and supervised and unsupervised clustering. Further, when dealing with unstructured data (e.g., web-based text), companies should consider deploying AI-powered engines to efficiently process, sort, and glean insights from these expansive and varied information sets.

Through analysis of anonymized patient-level data, HCP-level data and HCO-level data, companies can classify HCPs based on key attributes including prescribing behavior, shared patients, event participation and relationships with competitors. This effort will help a company identify and target the right HCPs and, through them, the patients in need of treatment.

• Build and develop an omnichannel-ready sales team

To successfully execute an omnichannel program, field sales reps must appreciate the benefits of the effort and demonstrate a willingness and ability to incorporate a new way of working.

Securing sales support begins with sales representative recruitment. Companies must only hire reps who can implement the vision of 360-degree engagement with customers and demonstrate aptitude for omnichannel data application. “Omnichannel-ready” reps are willing to shift behavior based on insights pulled from analytics and inform the ongoing omnichannel effort by proactively documenting field-based learnings (including, but not limited to, HCP adoption ladders, objections and resource requests).

Ensuring sales force engagement with an omnichannel initiative is a two-way street. The orchestrators of the initiative must ensure reps understand the goals of the effort and what they will gain by adopting it. The “why” is immeasurably important.Sales reps often argue that they know their customers better than analytics gurus. And they are usually right. That’s why an omnichannel program must integrate this local knowledge into alerts, suggestions, notifications and triggers. Omnichannel program leaders must seek to ensure reps understand, respect and apply guidance they receive. In many cases, reps should have a voice in how they receive information and alerts from the omnichannel program.

Ultimately, the omnichannel effort has to prove itself. Throughout this project we successfully convinced many reps of the value of the omnichannel effort by delivering them accurate, immediately actionable insights and HCP recommendations. But it also helps to start with reps who understand the vision, appreciate what’s in it for them, are willing to evolve their way of thinking and going to market in their territories, and are eager to find out how omnichannel can support their efforts to connect with HCPs.

• Coordinate promotion

A key innovation we introduced to this company’s omnichannel effort was the Omnichannel Support Team (OST). This team is comprised of data scientists, digital specialists, and sales and marketing experts. The OST supports the commercial team, orchestrates promotion across online and offline channels, and seeks to ensure 360-degree engagement with customers.

Even if a company doesn’t use the same type of support team we used, it’s essential that a company executing an omnichannel initiative deploys orchestrators who oversee data analysis, parse through insights, and translate insights into reasonable digital marketing and field sales actions.

• Drive implementation from the top

An omnichannel initiative will fail to take hold throughout the commercial organization without consistent support from commercial leadership. In fact, omnichannel must be a central component of a company’s growth strategy. This company’s leaders believed that omnichannel-driven customer-centricity could help it drive differentiation in the market and overcome the inherent challenges of being second to market.

Leadership must insist on alignment with the omnichannel initiative across the organization and ensure departments adopt an omnichannel model and support its ongoing execution. Companies should continually measure the business impact of omnichannel execution. Senior leadership should trumpet positive results broadly to build support and foster buy-in. Additionally, leaders must embrace continuous data analysis and learning from the omnichannel effort to ensure the company understands its customers and their evolving needs and preferences.

A blueprint for omnichannel success

A big part of this company’s launch success was its organization-wide commitment to omnichannel. Other life sciences companies should take note.

As the oncology landscape rapidly evolves, competitive pressures increase and HCP access becomes more limited, companies must deliver tailored, relevant and timely information to customers in a seamless, orchestrated manner. By activating coordinated and data-backed omnichannel activities, companies can ensure value-added HCP interactions, accelerate launch readiness and support the delivery of effective treatment to patients.

For now, omnichannel remains a frontier many companies have not successfully traversed. This project represented a pioneering effort in omnichannel orchestration. It’s time for more life sciences companies to follow suit.

David Laros is a partner at Beghou Consulting who leads omnichannel projects for the firm’s life sciences clients.