Maria DeBoer
Director, Worldwide Oncology Commercialization – Pan Tumor and Branding
Bristol Myers Squibb
A More Sophisticated Sales Operation
In order to build a truly sophisticated sales operation, you need to ensure that the right resources are tied to the right stakeholders, and then delivered by the right team member at the right time. And when it comes to doing this for organized customers, there are a lot of variables involved, making it challenging for most leaders to spearhead an initiative like this for their organization. But as the previous Director of Segment, Value, and Population Health Markteting, Maria DeBoer took this on for Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS) with grace and a strategic philosophy that incrementally brings the company closer to the sophisticated sales operation it desires to be.
Maria started from the beginning with research and resource analysis, working with her agency partners to analyze and consolidate primary research to align various types of organized customers. Maria and her team then segmented this research into organized customer archetypes and identified the priority stakeholders within those archetypes. To take it even further, value drivers were identified across the stakeholders to better understand messages and resources that would resonate with them. All of this work culminated into the creation of a resource planning tool that would help account executives not only understand the segmentation work that was done for their organized customers, but also allow them to decipher which resources across multiple brands they could use for their customer based on archetype and stakeholder.
Maria also initiated the effort to strategically align BMS initiatives to the growing importance of the Pharmacy Channel. Internal workshops, research, and resource analysis were used to highlight the different stakeholders within the Pharmacy Channel and identify how current resources could be used to speak to these stakeholders’ key priorities. This resulted in the development of a pharmacy playbook that account executives could use to confidently prepare for customer meetings in this channel.
The incremental strategic wins that Maria produced enabled her to make a big shift within her organization. The organized customer segment at BMS now has a sophisticated sales approach with a lot of internal support attached to it, and Maria is being praised as the transformational leader that she is.
