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Blog
Strengthen Your Brand with Commercial Outsourcing
Martin Bate, Head of HCP Engagement, Commercial Engagement Services
Apr 23, 2024
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  • Strengthen Your Brand with Commercial Outsourcing

Engagement between pharmaceutical companies and their healthcare professional (HCP) customers is evolving, with many pharma companies now choosing to outsource contract sales to an experienced provider like IQVIA. In this blog, we’ll highlight some of the current trends in customer engagement and discuss the value that IQVIA Contract Sales can bring to your brand.

The future of customer engagement

As we move farther from the disruptions brought by the COVID-19 pandemic, we find that HCPs still favor face-to-face interactions with pharmaceutical sales reps. However, while people are still the preferred channel, today’s sales force needs to embrace different ways of delivering excellent customer experience — whether in person or through remote channels (e.g., video, digital). In many ways, the pandemic made this easier, as all of us were forced to embrace remote meetings and video calls, technologies that have remained for the long term.

Despite an increase in remote and hybrid interactions over the last few years, effective engagement is, overall, still people driven. As the field evolves, it’s important to respect the needs of HCPs and to balance overall messaging to ensure we’re using an effective channel mix. The goal is still to deliver relevant messages, but in a way that meets their communications preferences.

For example, today’s HCPs are seeking higher levels of clinical data and accessing a broader set of information. This includes a preference for more real-world evidence and patient benefits of treatments, education and services, such as patient support programs, beyond the traditional messaging around clinical efficacy, safety and pricing. As physicians do more of their own research, some pharma companies are increasingly providing information that is more supportive, medical oriented and educational.

Striking the right balance between personal interactions, electronic messaging and online research requires an integrated omnichannel approach that leverages technology and data driven insights to empower commercial sales teams to deliver customized HCP engagements. Success in today’s marketplace requires a wide range of capabilities to ensure the sales professionals make meaningful personalized connections with the right message, using the right channel, at the right time to drive the best outcome.

Ultimately, the most important thing to keep in mind is that the HCP experience is predictive of the engagement outcome. By tailoring omni-channel content to suit each individual’s communication preferences, a sales team can greatly increase the likelihood of success.

Commercial outsourcing: What it is and why it adds value.

Commercial outsourcing, generically speaking, is simply an alternative model to recruiting, training, deploying and managing resources within your own organization. By outsourcing contract sales roles, you gain the ability to utilize and retain high-quality people while being more agile. A contract sales partner can quickly react to changing priorities and stay flexible in its ability to efficiently scale up or scale down according to workloads and other needs. Contract sales personnel can engage for both tactical and longer-term strategic needs within your resourcing plans and according to your portfolio.

Caption: IQVIA Contract Sales delivers solutions tailored to your evolving needs

[source: https://www.iqvia.com/solutions/commercialization/healthcare-professional-engagement/contract-sales]

For life sciences companies, there are many use cases, across a broad range of offerings, which could benefit from commercial outsourcing. One common scenario is to engage a contract sales partner to improve vacancy management and to be more tactical as you fill medium- to long-term vacancies (as when you lose staff to illness, family leave, etc.). By outsourcing such vacancies, you guard against the possibility that a vacant territory could slow and lose sales that you would have otherwise achieved. IQVIA can provide single or multiple roles to fill those gaps very quickly and flexibly, for whatever period is necessary, without the need to recruit and hire internally.

Another, more tactical use case is to employ contract sales organizations to support an existing team during times of increased activity, such as the launch of a new product. Such a team could be managed by the pharma company or by IQVIA, to achieve your goals (for example, to increase your share of voice in a therapy area for a period of time). This in turn makes it much easier to later downscale and to fall back to your prior status quo once the goals are met. In addition to product launches, this is also a reliable solution any time you need to focus on a specific priority or expand into new therapy areas — or even entirely new markets — without having to build the infrastructure and the associated support services within your own organization.

sales professional with HCP

Outsourcing is also a great way to adopt a more innovative, technology-enabled stance. A contract sales partner can bring a step-change in innovation to your organization. It can help upscale your own processes or pilot new solutions or new capabilities such as omnichannel engagement, and other aspects of flexible deployment. Many pharma companies find this to be the most effective way to test a new concept before institutionalizing it across the organization.

No matter the use case, a contract sales approach is a reliable way to overcome the challenges of managing commercial costs, particularly around headcount and related engagement resources. Simply put, it all comes down to the ability to be flexible, agile and innovative so pharma companies can react quickly without taking on long-term resource commitments.

As the contract sales business has evolved from a “body shop” (single point in time problem resolution) to that of a true strategic option, IQVIA has the breadth and depth of expertise to deliver meaningful results. Across our global footprint, we have more than 40 years of experience empowering the commercialization journeys of all types of life science companies. At present, we have deployed more than 5,000 people across 50+ countries and 20+ therapy areas.

Our portfolio delivers everything from vacancy management to customer-managed teams, IQVIA-managed teams and IQVIA engagement specialists — ensuring that whatever your needs, we offer a proven solution that will fit.

Contact us to learn more about how we can help.

Introducing IQVIA Engagement Specialists

Accelerate your business outcomes and deliver a trusted customer experience by leveraging tech enabled Engagement Specialists armed with the right insights, technology and expertise to optimize all your HCP engagements.

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