eye4pharma article on content-collaboration

Razing SiloS to EnhancE collaboRationDeveloping an organization that drives value, wellness and integrated care

With case studies from Pfizer, Merck and GlaxoSmithKline

ContentsSummary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Drivers of collaboration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Case study: Pfizer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Case study: Merck . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10

Case study GlaxoSmithKline . . . . . . . . . . .11

What next? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14

Written by Julie DonnellyEdited by Deirdre Coleman

www.eyeforpharma.com/philadelphia 2

Razing SiloS to EnhancE collaboRation

SummaryAs the pharmaceutical industry adapts to the changing needs of the marketplace, global companies are working to break down silos and promote collaboration to help drive efficiency, cost savings and new revenue models .

But breaking down functional divisions within the world’s largest drug companies demands a change in mindset that leaves behind historic competition between sales and marketing teams and overcomes defensive tactics by legal and regulatory departments . The shift to collaboration also requires a fresh approach to compensation models that will incentivize rather than discourage collaboration .

As we explore in the following pages, even the largest companies with the most entrenched siloes can make significant progress towards collaboration, by incorporating several key ingredients and avoiding a number of common pitfalls . Case studies at Pfizer Inc ., GlaxoSmithKline and Merck and Co . show that cultural chasms between functions can be bridged, and it is often a singular focus on driving value for the customer that determines success . Finally, we will explore three trends likely to shape collaboration efforts in the future .



Drivers of CollaborationThe shakeup of commercial organizations across the industry is driven by both spiraling complexities inside pharmaceutical companies and externally in the larger healthcare landscape . Old divisions between sales and marketing, between individual brand teams, and even between major business units are receiving careful scrutiny from the C-suite down .

Within large pharma companies, the development and commercialization of drugs (now sometimes accompanied by diagnostics, devices or health IT applications) has become increasingly complex . This requires additional resources to both sell to and educate customers . Meanwhile, the number of channels used to reach customers has exploded, requiring companies to develop sophisticated multichannel marketing plans that employ print, digital, social media strategies and a mature, but easy to use, CRM system

Internal complexity is coupled with vast, rapid changes in the healthcare landscape that have shifted drug-purchasing power away from individual doctors, and into

the hands of physician group leaders, hospital C-Suite executives and pharmacy chain heads .

On the one hand, it is a time of unprecedented opportunity for the industry to realign its commercial teams to become true partners with customers . But top industry executives are keenly aware that this opportunity won’t last forever .

“Customers have more challenges than ever before, and they are looking for someone to help them,” Matt Portch, Team Leader for Commercial Effectiveness at Pfizer Inc . said . “We must behave well, but if we can help them, I believe we can be a partner . I do believe that window will close, by the way, and if they get the answers without us, we’re probably going to be on the outside looking in .”

Dismantling and reassembling a new, more collaborative commercial structure is a daunting undertaking, but one that is already midstream at several of the top global pharmaceutical companies . The toughest part for some companies is to launch collaborative efforts early in the process of a drug launch or other project .



“The most frequent problem with ‘collaboration,’ is that it usually comes as an afterthought – after a project is well underway and you have already thrown people and resources at it,” David Davidovic, Founder of pathForward consultancy group, said . “Collaboration, most often, is called-for only after problems occur, projects get stalled, there is some big blowout, or people become disengaged .”

Companies are working to get ahead of these potential blowouts in order to guarantee they can continue to drive value in a new market landscape . While industry leaders expect to see ROI from collaborative efforts on both the revenue and cost-savings side of the ledger – many companies are not there yet .

Eric Rothstein, Executive Director, Customer Channels & Solutions, Vaccines, Merck and Co . says . “We see our customers are changing and it requires that we evolve with our customers . If we don’t, we aren’t even going to make the numbers in our current plan .”

The key for pharma is committing to investments now in new teams, new business processes and a new mindset, while remaining cognizant that the tangible benefits of collaboration may be slow to materialize, or initially tough to measure . What follows are some critical ingredients for success, some pitfalls to avoid, and some examples of collaboration in action .

Key ingredients for SuccessWhile there is widespread consensus about the need for collaboration to overcome today’s market challenges, putting business processes in place to support that collaboration is not easy . The right recipe for success includes several crucial ingredients, a fair number of judgment calls, and a list of pitfalls to avoid .

A recent eyeforpharma Pharma Collaboration survey supports this assertion . Out of 80 top pharma executives, a whopping 93 percent agreed with the statement, “There is an increasing need to consult and partner with internal stakeholders (e .g . other functions), in order to drive commercial success .” Almost 90 percent agreed with the statement, “Commercial success cannot be attained without more collaboration between sales and marketing .” Yet, only 65 percent of respondents said that their organization is currently implementing initiatives to align sales and marketing . (See Figure 2 and 3 .)

Figure 1: My organization is currently implementing initiatives to align sales and marketing

Agree65%

Disagree6%

Not sure29%

Figure 2: commercial success cannot be attained without more collaboration between sales and marketing

Agree 89%

Disagree 3%Not sure8%

Agree 93%

Not sure 7%

Figure 3: there is an increasing need to consult and partner with internal stakeholders (e.g. other functions), in order to drive commercial success

Source: eyeforpharma Collaboration Survey of 80 senior-level sales and marketing executives from the US.





The eyeforpharma survey also found that most executives interviewed believe collaboration must come from the top . Approximately 73 percent agreed that “Strong senior management buy-in” drives success of long-term cross-functional collaboration .

“We’ve identified a number of organizational capabilities we need to successfully collaborate and number one is senior leadership buy-in, because it’s very hard to do from the bottom up,” Matt Portch, Team Leader for Commercial Effectiveness at Pfizer Inc . said .

“You have to be resourced accordingly, because it’s a very different cycle from a timing perspective . People have to understand a collaboration project might take weeks or months and not days .”

The executives interviewed for this paper all agreed they had the necessary backing of the organization’s top management . In fact, in most cases, the collaborative vision came from the top . The methods of achieving this collaboration however have typically been left to

commercial leadership to figure out .

Survey respondents said the second most important component for collaborative success, the survey found, was “Effective communication channels between different departments/functions,” with 61 percent of executives agreeing that was a key factor .

Less important, survey respondents said, were “Clearly defined goals and KPIs across the organization,” with 41 percent of respondents agreeing these were a driver of collaboration success .

This may reflect some disagreement within the industry about what exactly it means to have one shared vision (see Figure 4) .

For Dave Moore, a former Johnson & Johnson execu-tive who was tapped to be late-stage biotechnology firm, Cempra’s first Chief Commercial Officer, retaining a shared vision is paramount . As the research and devel-opment stage company approaches its first commer-cial launches, Moore is building the commercial func-tions from scratch .

“When building these functions, everyone needs to be working towards the same goals . The vision needs to be understood and shared by everyone, including the marketing, regulatory, business analytics, legal and medical affairs departments,” Moore stated . “If at any time you are off spending time, energy and resources without that vision in mind, you must course correct .”

Figure 4

n Fully integrated data capabilities

n Strong senior management buy-in

n Effective communication channels between different departments/functions

n Clearly defined goals and KPIs across the organization

100%

90%

80%

70%

60%

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

0%Most important Important Not important Not important at all

“The most frequent problem with ‘collaboration,’ is that it usually comes as an afterthought – after a project is well underway and you have already thrown people and resources at it,”

10% 15% 19%

56%51%

22% 15%

12%

24%

37%29%

10%

15%25%

37%22%




Nonetheless, others see the value in hashing out competing points of view to arrive at the best solution . While there may be a straightforward shared goal, such as launching a new drug by a certain deadline, it is important to remember that the varied perspectives, language, insights and data from different functions will frame the common goal in different ways .

“The reason you need to collaborate is because no one person or function has all the answers, “ David Davidovic, founder of pathForward, and a former executive at Merck & Co ., Genentech and Roche said . “The question is ‘How can we make sure a diversity of experiences and perspectives is included right from the start and throughout?’”

Davidovic thinks that the key is not to have consensus immediately, but to set out clear decision-making processes that value both diversity and progress . He said he’s been involved with both consensus models and models where there is one final decision-maker, and he prefers the latter . In his view, consensus means too many compromises, and that may water down the potency of the final plan .

Survey respondents deemed “fully integrated data capabilities,” to be the least important criterion for collaboration, with just 25 percent listing this as a necessary ingredient .

Executives said that while many companies are struggling to harmonize several legacy data systems and data sources that do not all interconnect, this is not a major obstacle to viable collaborative projects . One reason is that each function, including marketing, sales, medical affairs and regulatory must necessarily use different types of data sources that are not relevant to other functions .One challenge is when two or more functions are working from data that appears to directly conflict with one another . In this case, it is advised to resolve this conflict before making a decision . Both sets of data may be correct, depending on what was asked of it, and the key is to figure out which set of data is truly more relevant for the project at hand .

Many executives said the biggest data challenge they have is making sure that the company has sufficient and appropriate data analytics to actually measure the ROI of these new collaborative projects .

Dr . Andree Bates, President of marketing analytics firm Eularis, says that marketing departments have historically not done well in quantifying their business results – a problem that has prevented marketers from being on equal footing with sales departments in the eyes of the CEO .

“I’m surprised when I go into pharma companies and ask how they are measuring marketing success and they say, ‘oh, you know, mostly gut feel", Bates said . “Marketers are engines of the business, but without good analytics, it’s tough to prove their case .”

PitfallsCulture WarsThe first obstacle most companies encounter as they increase collaborative efforts is the tension between the sales and marketing functions . Getting the two teams to play nicely together in the sandbox takes an understanding of the two disparate cultures, and a strategy to create a win-win scenario that stops pitting sales and marketing groups against each other .

The sales culture has historically been numbers driven, competitive and secretive, with short timelines to accomplish goals . Bates recalls working with one client that had horribly outdated doctor lists – many of the physicians on the lists had retired or moved . What her team discovered is that the sales reps had their own updated lists, but were not sharing them centrally, because they wanted to retain the updated information for themselves, in case they changed firms .

In contrast, the marketing culture has historically been marked by a more creative, open culture, with less focus on numbers and longer timelines to accomplish goals . Bates and others said the culture is changing as marketing analytics gain traction . But this is not as widespread as we would hope . Marketing can be viewed by the sales department as absorbed with superficial matters such as logo colors and typeface, rather than hard business results .

“The cause of the challenges a brand faces can be a combination of sales and marketing issues and to get to the bottom of the specific issues at hand, analytics is needed to solve the problems faced .” Bates said .

The tension between sales and marketing can erupt into



war when it comes to budget matters . Both teams may have to compete for the same resources and sales teams may be critical of the ways that marketing colleagues spend money, if it cannot be directly tied to higher sales . Executives said that often because top management comes from the sales side, top pharma leaders may also countenance increasing budgets to sales over marketing teams because they feel it would more likely lead to increased revenue .

Another conflict can emerge over drug prices, where marketing teams are responsible for setting list prices and reporting to the CFO . Meanwhile, sales reps would rather see a lower price to make drugs easier to sell . Developing collaborative teams for long-term projects is complicated by the typically short tenure of marketers on any one project . Marketing teams are often switched from brand to brand every 18 to 24 months, which can make continuity difficult once trust is established between the two sides .

Many executives said that their collaborative teams include more than just sales and marketing personnel . As a result, they described additional cultural chasms between sales and marketing and other departments such as medical affairs, legal and regulatory . These latter three groups may take a very conservative, defensive stance because their roles are to ensure product safety, legal and regulatory compliance, rather than to sell the product .

“If marketing and sales don’t sit down with compliance functions early in the process, and outline what they are trying to achieve, legal and regulatory will often say they can’t support a program, because they don’t understand the end goal,” Dave Moore of Cempra argued . “A better approach is to say to them, ‘Here’s what we’d like this marketing program to be able to achieve’, so legal and regulatory can act as partners instead of saying ‘you can’t do that, it hasn’t been done before’ . Otherwise it’s one group trying to get what they want and the other trying to protect what they have to protect .”

Misaligned IncentivesOne of the struggles at many companies is figuring out how to incentivize collaborative behavior . If collaborative models are to truly to bear fruit, the common “eat what you kill” compensation system for the sales force will need to shift to include bonuses for working as a team towards

business goals, which may be more complex than how many prescriptions were sold this quarter . Medical affairs personnel must share in the spoils when patient and health provider education leads to higher volume and legal and regulatory colleagues need more reasons to say “yes” to marketing campaigns in a timely fashion .

Many companies continue to reward old sales behaviors that are no longer effective – such as the number of calls to doctors per day – but fail to acknowledge the difference types of interactions with doctors or hospital administrators that may lead to long term collaborative success .

Some pharma companies are now offering bonuses tied not only to sales reps brands, but also to business objectives aligned with overall performance of a customer . These incentives encourage reps to assist other reps as well as colleagues from different functional areas on their teams, lessening the competitive mindset across functions .

Other executives acknowledge they still struggle with some misaligned incentives .

“We’ve seen some companies go to customer experience measures instead of sales measures, but we haven’t really done that yet,” Eric Rothstein from Merck said . “The challenge is we make our money from our product but doing it through a customer . So we set business and revenue objectives at the brand level but then have to accomplish them through engagement with customers” .

The Best IntentionsAnother pitfall to sidestep is doing collaboration halfway



– making the effort to launch a project without a process in place to ensure success . Here are some typical examples of how collaboration projects fall short .

1. Exclusion. Not all the right people are at the table when decisions are made . Critical stakeholders often include those without defined decision-making power . Executives said a common mistake is to leave out other departments – for instance legal or regulatory affairs, who need to be part of the discussion to offer elements to be considered . The result is that there is a lack of buy-in from those stakeholders, or the project must start over because important points were not considered .

2. Bullying: Everyone is at the table, but dominant personalities or functions run the table . If not all perspectives are represented equally; the new solution may fail, because not everybody had the opportunity to contribute .

3. Poor follow-through: Following a great collaborative process, everyone feels enthusiastic after decisions are made . But if nothing materializes as a result of the process or the results do not conform to plan the result may be highly dispiriting for the team . Some

executives cited this issue as prevalent with external consultants .

4. Foot-dragging: People come to the process because they are forced to do so . They either feel they do not have the time or they do not see the value of the project . This can lead to a process where colleagues are disengaged and fail to voice their opinions . In this scenario, agreed upon actions are typically not achieved because the stakeholders are not invested in the process .

taking the short viewFinally, executives reported that employing collaborative models to respond to changing dynamics in the market demands patience . Return on investment may not be immediate, or it may look different than imagined . Executives reported looking at efficiency metrics, customer satisfaction metrics and collaborative behavior metrics – not just revenue numbers – when they tally up the return on investment .

The building of true partnerships between cross-functional teams and the customers they aim to serve consequently requires a long-term view .

Three years ago, Matt Portch was given a daunting project at Pfizer Inc., simply called Pharma 2.0. Now the Team Leader for Commercial Effectiveness, he had a singular task –determine what was wrong with the company’s commercial model, and fix it. His first challenge was that he had no staff. He spent six months interviewing customer-facing Pfizer employees and customers themselves to figure out what was working and what wasn’t. He also engaged in some competitive intelligence to find out what rivals were doing. “We needed to become more relevant in the new marketplace as customers became larger due to merger and acquisitions, and became more vertically aligned top to bottom from administrators to health care providers,” Portch recalled. Portch decided on a new account team model that would include sales and marketing staff, under the direction of a key account manager or “KAM”. The KAM is accountable for a strategic plan addressed to a specific customer, which is executed by all the people on the team, including the district sales manager, the regional manager, field

medical colleagues, and regional marketing colleagues. Each member of the team owns a piece of that strategy, depending on his or her role. The team is supported by IT planning tools that allow medial affairs, sales and key account managers to link to the customer plan. In order to make his vision work, Portch had to overcome some natural tensions between the salespeople, who have responsibility for a few specific brands, and the key account managers, who must make strategic choices about the biggest opportunities for growth across the portfolio of Pfizer’s products. “Sales will wonder, ‘what are you doing for my brand?’ But there has to be a strategic discussion, based on customer needs, what do we want to focus on from an enterprise approach, and sometimes trade offs have to be made,” Portch said. “Hopefully over the long term all the brands are represented appropriately.” In the meantime, Pfizer is working to update incentive models that work with, not against, new collaboration goals. Sales representatives now receive bonuses tied not only to their brands, but also to business objectives

Pfizer - A Key Account Management Approach That Starts with The Customer, not the Brand



Matt Portch

aligned with overall performance of that customer. This allows sales representatives to benefit even if they end up driving someone else’s brand. Portch said the company just finished conducting a total rewards survey to try to identify the right mix of individual and team incentives. “When we had exclusively individual quotas, you are incentivizing behavior different from what you want.” Portch noted. “We know we need to incentivize both behaviors to get what we need and if we don’t incentivize collaboration and teamwork, it’s going to be hard to get that”. Another hurdle to overcome was different goals between marketing and sales personnel. In the past, Portch said that there would be a brand-marketing plan, and customer sales plans and the two never connected to find synergies. Now in addition to the key account management teams, there is an integrated planning team – including marketing leaders – a sales colleague, a KAM, a medical colleague, and a staffer from the legal and regulatory departments. The team is charged with creating marketing and implementation plans that link the internal needs of the brand and the external needs of the customer. Portch said this team synergy has been invaluable to help marketers gain insight from the field experience of their sales colleagues who must grapple with customers’ needs. Simply getting people to sit at the same table to hash things out was a big step, and Portch said even one year in, he started to see results.

“When you do things in a silo, you aren’t ill-intentioned but you could do things that aren’t good for your partner because you don’t understand their needs,” he said.

the Roi“Pharma is slow to change, and we wouldn’t be making changes at this speed if we didn’t have to,” Portch said. Portch says the company quickly began to see improved performance for customers with active key account teams, versus those without them. The collaborative project also yielded a number of tangible efficiency and operational benefits. Instituting the KAM model has helped Pfizer to eliminate redundancies. For instance, in the past, different brand teams might have created 5 or 6 different customer plans for a large customer, such as Geisinger Health System, in Pennsylvania. Now there is one plan, led by the KAM. Pfizer also aims to improve efficiency by capturing and communicating best practices as they emerge. To this end, Pfizer erected a number of online tools to

help the key account teams share learnings. There is a best practice-sharing platform, which puts KAMs with similar customers together to learn from each other. There is also a feature that includes interviews with key account managers who have overcome obstacles or identified customer solutions. Pfizer also instituted a buddy system between teams in the U.S. and Europe, to share insights on similar challenges. The company is also trying to improve efficiency, and boost the company-wide brand, by streamlining marketing materials so that, for example, a package on COPD bears no resemblance to a campaign on diabetes. This helps the customer more easily comprehend a cohesive message from the key account teams. What started as a one-man project three years ago has now grown to be a 100-person key account model that Portch says is here to stay. The teams are busy not just selling drugs, but engaging customers in projects designed to address population health challenges, such as smoking cessation or diabetes management. “We’re still not as nimble as we’d like to be. The environment and marketplace is changing way too quickly and we have to be more nimble to make those changes. We need to get away from a rigid one-size-fits-all commercial model as we deliver in the field,” Portch said. He said one big challenge in the marketplace is that customers are on a wide continuum when it comes to implementation of new health reform regulations, lean business models, integrated health care delivery and new payment models. Portch said his goal is to create a stable of customer plans that represent a continuum of value propositions. Local sales teams can then “pull one off the shelf” depending on the customer and local market needs. “The big challenge is to be more decentralized and flexible, but also take advantage of our size and scale,” Portch says. It is a task that requires all hands on deck, working together.

"We need to get away from a rigid one-size-fits-all commercial model as we deliver in the field”.

Video: lessons learnt from commercial model innovation at Pfizer US

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-a2uyMjl7Q



Merck is continually adjusting its commercial model to meet changing market demands, according to Eric Rothstein, Executive Director of Global Commercial Services for Merck’s vaccines business. “We seem to reorganize every six months or so,” Rothstein said. “It’s a bit of an exaggeration, but not much. It’s just so complex getting things done it requires a matrixed organization. If the collaboration doesn’t work, the matrix breaks down and things don’t get done.” In the past several months, Rothstein has been setting up new customer–focused marketing teams to work with the traditional brand-specific marketing teams. The company’s vaccines business currently has three of these teams in places focused on integrated delivery systems, pharmacies, and consumers.

Before launching these teams, he started smaller – the first cross-functional venture was a "Single Solutions team” which works with account managers in the field to attack customer problems and look for solutions. But a vaccines business-wide customer level strategy is something new. What he has found is that even collaboration within a single functional area – marketing - can be challenging. There was initially a significant level of distrust by the brand teams towards the new customer teams, which are comprised of both new hires, and colleagues that have moved from their previous positions on brand teams or on the Solutions team. The brand of the customer teams stems from a worry that the new customer teams will siphon off the brand team’s resources yet the brand team will still be responsible to deliver the same business results. The goal is for both marketing groups to be incentivized around the same objectives. In the past, marketers had always been measured on brand performance—a mindset that is not easy to instantly shift. “Brand teams sometimes think the customer teams are just making the customer happy, while the brand teams are held responsible for the business result. With that mindset, the brand teams then want to control all the dollars and all of the communication to the sales force.” Rothstein says he’s asking a lot of the brand teams – they must have faith in an unproven new model. The key is to demonstrate the value proposition the customer

marketing teams bring to the table. One of the jobs of the customer marketing teams is to look at solutions to broader marketplace challenges – such as, for instance, resistance to adult vaccination. This is a public health issue that hinders the sales of Merck’s shingles vaccine, ZOSTAVAX®, as well as other vaccines made by a variety of companies. “If brand teams start to see that the work we do to remove barriers is making their jobs easier, then they’ll say OK, it’s working and I see the synergy between our two groups,” Rothstein said. “Because the thinking is so new at the customer level, not everyone has the same idea of what we are trying to accomplish, and they think we have spent money they don’t think is aligned with the brand strategy to make customers happy and they don’t see it creating a business result.” Rothstein acknowledges it is not always easy to tie every dollar spent to a business result in these new customer teams. “But if we can remove barriers to adult vaccination broadly by working with the customer, then you’ll sell more ZOSTAVAX®, and the messages around ZOSTAVAX® would resonate more and become more relevant to that customer”. The customer-focused marketing teams are involved with everything from patient education materials, to helping to enhance processes at primary care offices or pharmacies. Rothstein said that until now, these changes have enjoyed a lot of support from upper management. He said the vision came from the top, then he and his teams were given the resources management thought they needed, and were tasked with figuring out how to best execute on the new strategy. “It’s trial by fire to try to figure out what dollars we need for next year in which groups. So it’ll be a good test to see how successfully we build a plan and what support we get from leadership going forward”.

Merck – Getting Brand Marketing Teams and New Customer Marketing Teams to Work Together

“It’s so complex getting things done it requires a matrixed organization. If the collaboration doesn’t work, the matrix breaks down.”



One of the ways that some large companies are working to break down silos between individual brands is to create additional central core teams that work across brands to leverage best practices throughout the organization. The recent eyeforpharma survey (referenced above) found that nearly 65 percent of respondents said that their commercial operations used a mixed model, where, “certain capabilities are supported centrally but brand teams have independent capabilities.” Peter Lammers, a life sciences consultant affiliated with North Highland, says that the trend is driven by a need to eliminate duplication and lower costs throughout large organizations. He also cites a desire to achieve more consistency in front of customers, especially as those customers arrange themselves into larger physician practices and health systems, as a motivating factor. “Each brand used to make its own decisions about what kind of engagement platforms to use and how to go to market”, Lammers said. “The same customer is getting materials from different brands at the same company that look very very different”. Lammers is a former Vice President of commercial operations at GlaxoSmithKline, and was involved in helping to re-organize the commercial operations, building a new cross-functional core team that offers its expertise across brands. The idea is to drive efficiency throughout the commercial operation by sharing some successes and avoiding some pitfalls that may happen brand by brand without having to relearn from scratch each time. The first thing Lammers team did was to describe what success looked like, very specifically, and then to

determine who would be accountable to drive results. For GSK, it was a priority to speed up the time it took from idea inception, to the launch of a new marketing campaign for a drug. This process would typically take 44 to 88 days, which the company felt simply was not fast enough. The new core team comprised primarily marketing and operations professionals as well as a few IT colleagues. But since the group was looking at the review of promotional materials, the other really critical stakeholders involved in this process are medical, medical affairs, regulatory, legal. One pain point Lammers team identified was that there would typically be a big hold up of any new materials, once it got to the medical affairs, legal and regulatory teams.

The problem was one of conflicting mindsets. The marketing colleagues on the brand teams would want to move projects along quickly. But the regulatory colleagues were tremendously risk-averse, with little incentive to speed up their approval times, because new material out in the marketplace exposed them to new regulatory scrutiny. “So we needed to have shared objectives, we called it a true north or a charter”, Lammers said. “Our mission was to get materials through in the timeframe we agreed in a high quality and compliant way”. Lammers said in order to build trust with the regulatory teams, the core marketing team needed to improve the quality of materials it sent to them for review. So one of the success measurements the core team adopted was around quality submissions. A poor outcome would be if a project were rejected before it even got to a copy review discussion because of avoidable rookie mistakes in submissions. The commercial organization owned the quality as much as the regulatory terms did. Once the regulatory teams saw the commitment to quality, their trust in the core group grew. Lammers said this helped them to see that the core team could increase efficiency by repurposing and reusing content that was not brand-specific. Over time, regulatory colleagues learned that “every time they see a new piece come through, they don’t need to go back and redo a paragraph

GlaxoSmithKline– creating a central core team with sales, marketing and other functions to work with individual brand teams

“The same customer is getting materials from different brands at the same company that look very very different.”



they approved in a prior piece two weeks ago. That was a major piece of the collaboration and training and change management to get them on board with those changes”. Lammers team put into place a number of formal business processes, such as shared dashboards and regular meetings at different levels of the organization. But he found it was human behavior that was slower to change – the regulatory teams were used to scrubbing each piece of copy because it was their necks on the line. Lammers had to engage with senior leadership in the regulatory groups to show the connection between a defensive stance, and longer times to market. Slowly, medical affairs, legal and regulatory teams did shift their mindset.

lammers’ advice to peers launching new collaborative programs is this:

1. Have a clear and specific articulation of what success looks like

2. Identify who is accountable to drive those results3. Put processes in place that support the shared goal4. Realize human behavior takes longer to change than

processes5. Build trust by addressing concerns of reluctant

stakeholders 6. Measure, measure, measure results7. Celebrate successes together as a team

In Lammers case, successes include speeding up the time to market by 25 percent for a product such as a drug website with new patient materials, jointly produced by

the brand team and the central team. This translated to a few weeks, which may not seem like a lot. But Lammers said that in the new world of multichannel marketing, the extra time opened up more capacity at the company to deliver more content supporting the launch. The core team was also able to leverage the growing store of “pre-approved” materials that could be re-purposed. This new model, with the core marketing team working with the brand teams and also with regulatory colleagues was faster, and used fewer resources than the old model which consisted of each brand team individually executing its own marketing strategies. In the past, each brand would create a subject matter expert on multichannel marketing, and each brand had at least 3 product managers to do tactical execution. Some of those workers were moved into the core team that enabled all these functions to be carried out by fewer people. Also, because of the high volume of projects completed by the core team throughout the year (versus two or three projects per year by each brand team), the core team became faster at getting projects out the door. Lammers said another benefit of the core commercial team is that it is able to quickly put out fires across the organization when promotional materials need to be changed. For instance, if there is a correction that needs to be made to the promotional materials for a respiratory drug, it may also need to be changed within unbranded patient education programs. Lammers said the core team handles the “identify, retract, revise and republish process”, which takes away some of the grind from the brand teams, so they can focus on higher level strategy, customer insights and future needs.

What next?Pharmaceutical executives say they are running to stand still to keep up with changes in the marketplace . Many say expanding collaboration efforts is a prerequisite to speeding time to market, reducing duplicative efforts, and standardizing best practices across the commercial organization .

Three themes emerge about how pharma will move forward . Firstly, isolated, stand-alone brand strategies may become a relic of the past . As pharma increasingly engages with large health care customers to sell multiple drugs and other “beyond the pill” programs, brand strategies must become more integrated into larger customer strategies .

The second theme is that these new large, powerful customers are increasingly becoming collaborators in

their own right . Driving value for pharma will depend on expanding collaboration models externally to include physician groups, health systems, government regulatory and pricing bodies, insurers and pharmacies .

Finally, pharmaceutical companies will seek to become more integrated on a global level by discovering synergies and company-wide learnings across regions .

no brand is an islandBrand teams must evolve from the old “lone wolf “ model for two important reasons . Firstly, executives say there is too much reinventing the wheel when it comes to both planning and executing brand strategies . With the growing content demands required by multichannel marketing efforts, brands must re-purpose materials for use by other teams, such as for medical affairs



colleagues involved in unbranded patient education . The second catalyst for breaking down barriers between individual brand teams is that new portfolio-wide strategies will require some brands to take a back seat to others as commercial leaders evaluate the best therapeutic areas to drive growth with particular partners .

In the old model, pharma tried “to cram everything down customers throats, but it’s not the way of the world today”, life sciences consultant and former GSK executive Peter Lammers said . The new model requires choosing between brands, or combining brands to find strategies that solve problems .

Merck’s Eric Rothstein goes further, imagining a not-so-distant future without separate brand and customer teams .

“If our mindset shifts, we wouldn’t have to have this breakdown between customer and brand . Some of our customers go across all brands, that’s the complexity of it," Rothstein said . “We’ll be able to have analytics and other support to let us look at what’s our ROI on the customer teams versus on investment in brand teams . We’re hoping our data and analytics put us in a better position to understand the value of the new investments .”

the customer is KingmakerMuch of the drive to increase collaboration in the pharma industry is driven by the vast changes facing customers – as their organizational bureaucracies and regulatory burdens grow . One goal is to harmonize messages and show one company face to the customer . The other is to make sure that face is one customers want to see coming through the door . Executives say customers have more problems than ever, so drug companies need to offer solutions, and that takes cross functional teamwork . How well pharma companies achieve this goal will determine industry winners and losers going forward .

Pfizer’s Matt Portch said in the near future he sees expanding circles of collaboration, breaking down barriers not just within the company, but with customers as well .

“We want to be customer centric but not customer led . We don’t do it just for the customer, but because it also brings performance back to Pfizer,” Portch said . “Ideally we would like to see a joint business plan, working together to improve COPD, for instance, instead of an adversarial relationship around volume . “The solution

might not always be our drug, but that’s OK, we can do fine if we find the right patients to take our drugs and keep them on it” .

Portch says much of the success or failure of the collaborative model depends on building trust – between different functions within the organization, and between Pfizer and its customers .

“The true test is not just prescription lift, but that one project turns into another and another, and it becomes a true partnership that is integrated into the system, instead of us being a transactional partner . Then you find there is less talk about the cost of your drug, and more talk about getting to the right patients to put on your drug .”

it’s a small world after allOne of the major shifts that Peter Lammers is seeing in his work as a life sciences consultant affiliated with Pennsylvania-based North Highland, is a move by large pharmaceutical companies to try to erase the lines between brands and between local, regional and global operations . He says this is driven by a need to eliminate duplication and lower costs throughout large organizations, as well as a desire to achieve more consistency in front of customers .

“We’ve seen this in a lot of other industries, but for pharma this is a new concept,” Lammers said . “Each brand used to make its own decisions, in each region about what kind of engagement platforms to use and how to go to market . But now, the traditional model of, say, the U .S . going out and contracting with its own agency and come up with their own creative campaign, that is under scrutiny" .

Lammers says his clients are increasingly working towards the goal of creating a “reimbursable file” for a new drug, across all regions . This means that while there are different market and access dynamics in Japan, the U .S ., and Europe, the company is seeking to identify core messages about the product that will be used globally . These global brand teams have staff representing each region equally, who can share expertise on different regulatory requirements in each region . He says global brand collaboration extends beyond sales and marketing to all the support functions including IT, finance, and even human resources, as companies try to figure out whether certain skills and capabilities need to sit on regional or global brand teams .



The easiest way to avoid having to break down silos is to avoid building them . As biotech companies like Cempra contemplate their imminent plunge into commercial operations, collaboration is top of mind .

“In three years, what we want to have is a bunch of very serious commercial personnel to identify best ways to communicate the value of our therapeutics to clinicians and patients,” Cempra Chief Commercial Officer Dave Moore asserts . “The goal is for them to work together constantly to come up with better ways of achieving goals, sharing in successes and sharing in challenges” .

But for pharma, already with entrenched functional divisions and competitive cultures, both business

processes and mindsets must be dismantled and rebuilt . Executives say it’s about surviving amid tumultuous market conditions . But it is also about taking advantage of a new role for pharma as a solutions-based “problem-solver” .

Executives are gaining more confidence in breaking down silos within their organizations and realigning incentives to encourage collaboration . As they do, some see a new world that is full of opportunities to serve customers in new and better ways . New services and value-added products for customers are creating new revenue streams . New cross-functional teams are shortening launch timelines and surprisingly former competitors are reaping the rewards of becoming allies .

Conclusion



Join us on April 7-8th at eyeforpharma’s 13th annual Philadelphia 2015 commercialPharma Summit to hear pharma execs share their insights on how collaboration can inspireinnovation and improve commercial effectiveness .

Philadelphia 2015 is a journey of learnings and a collaborative effort for forward thinking pharma executives to be part of a positive change, the change that entails improved operations strategy and execution, planning and reporting, and, most importantly, enhanced collaboration both internally and externally with stakeholders and customers .

The summit will feature 3 tracks designed to address a wide scope of challenges – from health economics to commercial data analytics; from payer relations to HCP engagement; from key account management to multichannel marketing; from market access to patient adherence .

n Value = clinical + economic benefit: utilize RWE to redefine your value proposition and develop specific beyond the pill services to differentiate from competitors

n Propel commercial excellence: cultivate collaborative environments to develop integrated commercial capabilities to improve efficiency and customer engagement

n innovate to engage and empower patients: leverage technology to better connect with patients’ needs and improve adherence

If you’d like to be part of the positive change, please email Evena Liao, the conference director at [email protected]

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