The pharmaceutical industry began to adopt closed loop marketing (CLM) strategies back in 2005. However, many companies are struggling to implement and maintain an effective CLM strategy especially with the overwhelming variety of digital tools available.
Physicians and healthcare providers (HCPs) are becoming increasingly busy, meaning they have less time for sales presentations. They are becoming tech-savvy and more comfortable using tablets and apps to find pharma product information.
This article is our fresh perspective on CLM as a digital solution for pharma. Exploring the key factors that pharma needs to succeed with their CLM strategy including digital detailing, sales and marketing alignment, and data analytics.
What are the steps for achieving CLM?
A CLM solution involves analyzing a physician’s detailing preferences, and refining content messaging to inspire desired responses and close deals. It is a strategy built on feedback loops.
There are four essential steps in a CLM strategy:
Introduce: Pharma sales reps (PSRs) engage HCPs with tablet-based presentations or online digital meetings, their goal is to engage the HCP in a meaningful conversation about their product to attract their attention.
The traditional approach favours an in-person interaction, but contemporary trends are now favouring digital engagements. This means communicating through email and social media as well.
Learn: This is where we begin to see how the digital transformation enables quality relationship building. As HCPs engage with the content you’ve shown/shared, your CLM system (an aspect of Sales Enablement) monitors the meeting in real-time and provides actionable insights.
A strong CLM platform will have options for recording a HCP’s prescribing priorities, content interests (cost-based versus outcome-based information), feedback, etc. with the help of automatic data collection.
Analyze: Pharma marketing teams can then analyze this data to find out which communications were most effective and which ones were insufficient. They can determine a HCPs preferred channel, medium of communication, product choice, message resonance, etc.
This is also where CLM introduces predictive analytics for actionable insights. A pharma sales enablement system can integrate with your CRM to provide you with valuable feedback based on a history of interactions, not just one meeting.
Create: 
Your CLM strategy must also work in harmony with your multi-channel marketing (MCM) strategy. MCM is the use of various channels with integrated multimedia messages. Channels include anything that relays information such as face-to-face meetings, apps, and product brochures. It’s important to utilize multiple channels because what works for one HCP may not resonate with another, and because you want to ensure that you’re reaching your potential audiences at the right place and time.
Digital Detailing
Previously we talked about the evolution from paper-based interactions to iPad mobile sales, and how today PSRs have a number of digital channels they can use to communicate with busy HCPs.
One of the most important digital detailing channels is the tablet. A 2014 study found that 91% of HCPs saw PSRs using tablets for digital detailing, and they rated them ‘extremely useful’ as a sales aid (Source: Global Issues in Pharma Marketing, 2015).
(Stat Source: Three Point Turn, 2016).
These preloaded tablets help PSRs to engage HCPs in discussions about new drugs, educate them about side effects and safety issues, and renew interest in older products. Mobile sales enablement apps on tablets can also host competitive analysis tools, e-signature capture, co-browsing, dosage calculators, etc. all of which are features necessary for modern PSRs.
Since pharma deals with important, and highly regulated information and compliancy rules, it is critical that PSRs are only allowed to design content not create it. This means that they can take the most relevant sections from marketing-created (and therefore regulated) content and compile them to create hyper-influential and relevant presentations, without ignoring compliancy information.
However, this isn’t without its challenges. A big pain point for pharma CLM is that while many PSRs and marketing teams are working hard to design, implement and employ their CLM strategies, each new channel, device, and operating system update brings about its own setbacks.
(VP of Sales, Kevin Wessinger, explains more in this interview with Smart Selling Tools)
Digital detailing can help PSRs build strong relationships with HCPs based on trust and transparency. The goal of CLM with digital tools is to provide value to HCPs and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of sales communications.
Sales and Marketing Alignment
In the past we’ve discussed the evolution of the PSR in the challenging healthcare environment – from trusted product advisor to time-consuming nuisance. Even though HCPs are restricting sales visits, PSRs are still integral to the pharma sales process. They are the direct-line of communication between pharma companies and HCP prospects, connecting marketing materials to the appropriate decision journey personas.
With the help of a strong CLM strategy, marketers can create enhanced digital content and load it onto a sales enablement platform, organizing it with relevant searchable tags, making it available to PSRs on any device, and keeping it up-to-date with the latest messages and regulatory compliance.
In an effective CLM system, marketing teams receive feedback from PSRs related to content usage and outcomes. Marketers can use this information to help guide future content creation and distribution. Whether the salesforce is working from one office, or spread out around the world, a CLM system ensures insights are shared across all teams and incorporated into all customer-facing communications.
Data Analytics
A major problem with CLM is something referred to as the ‘data dump’. This is when sales platforms provide companies with extremely large quantities of data that may not serve any specific purpose. Simply collecting data isn’t helpful; we must discover valuable insights from data.
This is increasingly tough since nearly 50% of surveyed pharma companies rated their analytics capabilities as immature, making sorting data a daunting task, especially if their CLM platform is out-dated or unable to handle global operations (Source: Three Point Turn, 2016).
Also, the quality of data from CLM activities should be questioned. While digital detailing tools can track how long a HCP spends on a slide, it cannot tell us why or what they thought.
If you build your CLM strategy effectively, and choose the right tool for your solution, you can record HCP reactions and collect helpful demographic information.
When using this demographic information in tandem with the quantitative CLM data automatically collected during sales calls, PSRs and marketers can create marketing tactics and optimize the pharma sales process.
For CLM, simplicity is best!
“Implementing a CLM strategy can be a complex process, which is why a CLM platform must be a simple, but effective in its design. Through custom development and integration, a CLM solution can address your specific needs and fill any feature gaps.” (Source: Three Point Turn, 2016).
The best CLM solutions integrate seamlessly with the rest of the tools in your sales stack to provide you with high-performing content and actionable data, increasing sales and marketing alignment.
If you want to learn more about CLM, request a demo below and allow our sales specialists to show you just how easy creating and implementing a CLM strategy can be.
