Key Account Management
Situation | Offering Benefits
- Eroding sales margins and higher R&D costs are forcing pharmaceutical companies to make cost cuts across the board. However, based on the market developments, simply cutting the size of sales and marketing teams will not do! The challenge ahead is to understand the market from the perspective of delivering products and services for the “full cycle of care” and thus become a contributing member in the evolving healthcare system.
- Within this system one challenge is to define the appropriate stakeholder-mix – “the most important collaborating customer groups in the healthcare system” (also see Healthcare Market Analysis). Another challenge is how to interact with these customers, since they make different contributions to the system, i.e. payers, regulators and providers, may all have different needs - albeit the same goal and finally also require different services in this respect. Those companies who understand how to organize for the best interaction across the group of customers will win the positioning game in the eyes of the market.
- Executive Insight has developed and implemented advanced account management across a range of pharmaceutical companies, from large global players to smaller local entities. Our strength and experiences center around three key areas:
- On a strategic level we help to define what account management means for our clients. If our philosophy of networked healthcare is shared, an account will ultimately be a mix of the most important stakeholders to be engaged with, within a defined district or region. From an organizational point of view, the right account team structure is then designed to enable the company to work within this local healthcare economy.
- Implementing the above design is our bread and butter! We are experts at making things work and stick because we have done this with our clients in a collaborative fashion many times over! (please contact us for references) At the very center of our approach lies the objective of changing behavior in the arena of commercial operations. How your sales representatives engage with customers and their own colleagues, what they talk about with customers – above and beyond the portfolio of products, how they assess customers needs and finally how customers are connected to each other, are all questions which need to be answered and trained during implementation.
- After launching the new go-to-market model, Executive Insight will accompany our clients - if requested, to help build a learning organization. We are convinced that the power of networking and sharing information is not just limited to the customer environment. Internally, employees and their colleagues can facilitate a steeper learning curve by being brought together on specific topics and questions and by sharing tips and tricks as well as success stories of difficult situations in form of anecdotes. While this process must be managed, our time on board is limited to the launch phase, after which we urge clients to continue on their own.
- Key Account Management in the pharmaceutical industry is today mainly practiced when engaging with hospitals. Executive Insight has taken this approach to another level and expanded it to be applied to the larger group of stakeholders of the healthcare economy, and therefore also the primary care market. A set of well documented and trainable components define account management, among them Portfolio and Network Management, as well as business planning.
- Collaborating with Executive Insight on a transformation program to implement Account Management will result in a smaller, more focused sales team interacting with customers on a range of topics covering products and business needs. Coupled with a better understanding of the local healthcare economy and its respective stakeholders, new value adding service concepts can be designed and delivered that cover the “full cycle of care” - improving health outcomes, reducing overall treatment costs and ensuring long term profitability of our clients products.