How Medical Detailing Is Changing With Pharma Marketing Technology

Selling in the healthcare industry has never been more difficult

Detailing is still the most vital part of pharmaceutical promotion, not to mention the role of medical reps in attaining successful detailing sessions in every visit.

Data from REVO shows that reps who achieved significantly higher sales than their peers were found to be three times more likely to use multiple slides and detail aids in a single physician visit.

However, over the past decade, there have been significant changes in the pharma industry that had a major impact on how pharmaceutical detailing is done.

Despite the prevalence of detailing and the various trial programs to regulate pharma detailing, few people were acknowledged about how pharma detailing restrictions affect physician prescribing, until now!

Changes that impacted the Pharmaceutical detailing?

1- Physicians are time-strapped

Physicians are struggling to balance their time between seeing patients, attending science conferences, and keeping up with medical reps' visits. According to the annual ePharma physician report, the share of physicians seeing medical reps in-person dropped from 67% to 54% in 2019 a survey of 1,285 practicing physicians in the U.S.

Data from REVO shows that the median detailing time (in front of a physician) for a medical rep on the system in 2021 is 64 seconds, during these 64 seconds, medical reps were able to only deliver one key message divided on two visual slides.

2- Multiple sources of retrieving knowledge

Physicians these days can draw on a wealth of information when deciding on a new pharmaceutical product. They don’t need to solely rely on the medical representatives anymore as the internet can provide most of the knowledge they need at their fingertips. According to the annual ePharma physician report cited earlier, 49% of physicians said they never had a question for a representative that they couldn’t find answers for online!

3- Noise of competition

The aggressive approaches of the generic companies determine a huge competition in the pharmaceutical market, hence reflecting on pharma detailing, and with more emerging new technologies, pharma starts to adopt new methodologies to cope with the market changes, which leaves no room for laggards and short-handed companies.

4- Competency of the medical representatives

The medical rep’s job is to be an adviser, educator, partner, and trusted source of information – not a product pusher. They need to prove they understand the physician’s needs as well as their patients. They also need to demonstrate the detailing often in two minutes or less, and with information changing all the time, the medical rep needs to be able to access real-time detail – and update it - when needed.

During a decade of working closely with pharma companies through Revosuite, we have seen many of the reps these days don’t feel comfortable presenting visual detail aid to physicians (Or worse, don’t know how to properly use it). Unfortunately, this had a huge impact on many companies long term prescription-driven sales.

No pharma company is any more immune to these changes, and hence it is recommended that companies take explicit steps to face these modern-day challenges.

To cope with this, here are a few practices that helped us overcome this with our current customers:

1- Discipline, discipline, and discipline!

With pharma’s current high rhythm and dynamism, and while having many pharma companies focusing on sales targets, it became very easy to get distracted from following up with discipline and compliance.

That’s why (As an example), with REVO, medical reps must use e-detailing in order to record a visit. Although this might sound controversial, our data show that there is a strong correlation between detailing compliance and higher sales achievement.

But that’s not all

We have also implemented several dashboards intended to measure compliance and discipline among the field force, and hence it's easier to visualize every stage in the company’s compliance journey.

Having this mix of strict workflows and dashboards focused on compliance and discipline helped our customers ensure real compliance and get the headache of malicious discipline out of their heads, and that was very clear every time we surveyed one of our customers.

2- Automation

With all of the technological advancements now available and with the very nature of pharma’s high volume activities, automation is not a luxury anymore (especially if your competitors started adopting it)

Marketing automation platforms enable marketers to manage, control, and automate the tiniest piece of communication (especially if that piece of content is presented by a medical rep).

In this case of healthcare, automation can help the brand create a story around a disease, patient, or product with carefully planned, cleverly crafted, and brief messages that truly consider the current shrink in detailing time.

An example of how automation can help you craft a better experience for your target customers with technology, within the Revosuite platform, we have crafted a few features that can help higher management direct and ensure the execution of their field force, features like:

1. Missions.
2. Customized detailing flows with Configurable Tags.
3. Super Tags.

3- Use data for continuous improvement (Data beats opinion)

It’s not just about pushing information either. Marketers can use analytics from their e-detailing platform to continuously improve, uplift, and build a stronger case for their customers, by drawing data from the wealth of information and insights captured from the e-detailing activities done by their teams, marketers can now produce a more precise, engaging, and persuasive piece of content to their target audience (physicians).

To put this in perspective and to see the amount of data that you can get from a good E-detailing & CLM platform, please follow the links below that shows the charts and reports generated from a system like REVO.

1. CLM Pro Analytics Guide.
2. E-detailing Analytics Guide.
3. KPIs Dashboard.

Use the data available in your hands to educate, train and create company guidelines to achieve your strategic objectives.

4- Customize engagement based on customer needs

CRM systems can provide the marketing teams with knowledge from the field. At a holistic level, they can help build a picture of the real attitudes of physicians, hospitals, pharmacies, and patients – rather than basing marketing messages on assumptions.

At an individual level, the medical rep can personalize a call based on knowledge of that physician gathered from previous conversations and details on interests, barriers, and previous purchases.

5- Keep your material fresh

One of the main reasons that made physicians sometimes resistant to detailing is that most companies these days don’t update their material frequently, which results in outdated and boring material with no added value.

We know that traditional detailing and e-detailing software impose a high detail aid production cost, which makes companies resistant to updates (That’s why we built REVO to be a ZERO-COST detail aid engine).

However, comparing this to the long-term gains from properly educating your customers, then the potential outgo the cost by far.