PM360 January 2010

GUEST COMMENTARY

MOVING AHEAD IN THE NEXT DECADE
By Craig DeLarge

My own recent consideration of the start of this second DECADE of the 21st century has me thinking about two themes on which I believe our personal and professional fortunes rely. The personal theme is that of cultivating greater personal and organizational resilience. The professional theme is that of accelerating our industry’s migration from a predominantly “sales” oriented marketing model, to a more balanced “sales/service,” aka customer relationship, marketing (CRM) model. I believe these themes are compelling calls from the culture, the economy, and our customers, which if we answer correctly will result in a virtuous cycle of better care for ourselves and our customers.

Toward Personal, Team, and Organizational Resilience
I think we can all agree that the “heavy work period” is permanent. There is no break ahead when the workload is going to be less. That said, in giving up the illusion of a lighter workload, we need to develop the savviness to handle the countervailing reality of a permanently increasing workload. I know that one answer to this reality is the cultivation of personal, team, and organizational resilience. Resilience is the ability to recover from, and adapt to, change. I find that as my workload increases, I have to pay more attention to diet, sleep, self-talk, exercise, relationships, purpose, and focus on priorities, as a way of building the spiritual, physical, emotional, social, and psychological reserves needed to sustain and sharpen my  performance over the long term. The best books I have used related to this topic are Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and Loehr’s The Power of Full Engagement, and I highly recommend them. 

Toward Pharma CRM
The changes in customer education and media habits are both exciting and daunting. We are all aware of the trends related to media fragmentation, the growth of convenient, on-demand educational channels, the decline in personal access to our professional customers, and the increased power of the patient. These trends presage a marketing environment where success will require a savvier focus on:

• 1) content better balanced between product-related and customer-related,
• 2) convenient customer access to our archived and live information and services via on-demand, multi-channel, and multi-media education and service channels, and
• 3) customer value-laden experiences that are so compelling and relevant that, like edu-tainment, customers ask, even beg, for access to it rather than run from it.

I believe this move toward pharma CRM will need to yield customer experiences that are relatively less “rep selling and advertising” centered, and more “customer education and service” driven based on how the customers want to be served, versus how we want to serve them. If these customer experiences fit our customers’ “learning and lifestyles,” and increase their effectiveness and productivity, while reducing costs,

I believe we can again thrive in this healthcare ecosystem of which we are vital and, hopefully, indispensable members. Though easily said, this is a daunting paradigm shift for us as an industry.

It will require new organizational structures, processes, and politics, a letting go and redefining of eroding comfort zones, and a discovery of new customer value propositions. This is especially critical in an age when success may rely more on loyal repurchase of our current brands than on new ones.

Pharma CRM is a radical change that we have talked about for years but which the emerging environment is necessitating. If the last decade was the decade of CRM conceptualizing and pontificating, this coming decade must be that of CRM execution and customer relationship driven results. The underlying assumption here is that where there is true relationship, there is lasting and growing revenue streams. Stressful thought, eh? Now you see why “resilience” is critical to our ability to productively handle our migration to CRM marketing models. 

Have a blessed holiday and, as always, I am interested in hearing what you think about these thoughts at Twitter (@cadelarge), Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Craig DeLarge is Associate Director, eMarketing & Relationship Marketing, at Novo Nordisk (www.novonordisk.com). He can be reached at cadelarge@yahoo.com or www.linkedin.com/in/cadelarge.