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You have invested seriously, time, energy, and money, into omnichannel. And yet you still can’t pinpoint what’s working and what isn’t. In the worst cases, you can’t even see that your pharma HCP engagement is improving at all. The question you might keep asking: we’ve put in all the effort, so why aren’t we seeing the results?
That question was the starting point for the latest episode of Pharma Talks that features Mark Watson, Co-Founder of Fractal Force, an independent consulting company.
Watson believes that when teams fail to achieve their goals, “it’s not a people problem. It’s not even an investment or effort problem. It’s often an architecture problem.”
The foundations that HCP engagement in pharma was built on were designed for a different era. They were built for broadcasting, meaning getting a message out to as many people as possible, as efficiently as possible. They were not built around listening, responding, or customer centricity. And no amount of new technology or new platforms fixes that underlying problem.
This is why pharma CRMs still capture activity, like what was done, when, how often, but don’t ask whether it was the right thing to do in the first place or whether it had any impact. Segmentation personas exist “beautifully within a slide deck” but no one verifies whether an HCP has been placed on the right customer journey.
Annual planning cycles impose rigid paths on relationships that are inherently dynamic. And because omnichannel KPIs are built around activity (did we use the new channel, did we get people to Congress), teams end up measuring what shows them in the best light rather than what needs to be measured.
Watson notes:
HCPs don’t see themselves as persona X or persona Y. They have their own specific needs, questions, understandings and preferences.
Designing engagement as though a rigid journey will work for everyone means that for the 1% who follow it, great, but for the other 99%, the system has no answer. Because teams don’t measure whether engagement was meaningful to the individual HCP, they don’t know when something isn’t working, and they run the same approach again.
These days, companies are expected to produce a large volume of personalized content across therapeutic areas, personas, and localizations. This creates an unbearable production and regulatory burden, even with AI. Yet, volume is not actually the constraint.
Between content factories and AI and different service provision, volume is never the issue. The issue is prioritization. We can only get so much through MLR, so what is genuinely going to make an impact?
Intelligent content design becomes the key here. Who are we trying to speak to? Why? What should we say? What do we want them to think or do differently?
Strategic editorial calendars are essential for this, as they allow organizations to know what is happening and when, ensuring content can be aligned with the MLR process windows. This alignment helps ensure that materials are approved on time to be meaningful for clients, such as hitting the right moments before a webinar or after a congress.
More is not better until we understand what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.
When content cannot carry the strategy, Watson says, it is a signal that something upstream hasn’t been fixed. “It’s not the content itself that is the problem.”
Watson has seen effective HCP engagement work in “small little pockets” and, from experience, knows what makes the difference. It comes back to starting with the customer first.
When a rep or medical science liaison (MSL) begins a conversation, they need a genuine understanding of where that HCP is in their patient diagnostic and treatment world.
What are they engaged with? What do they think? What do they want? What is their starting point from an attitudinal and behavioral perspective?
That’s what allows us to avoid starting a conversation from zero every time, or relying purely on “it’s week six, so it has to be message number four.”
From an HCP’s perspective, Watson says, this is significant. It means the relationship and trust are better embedded. They are more likely to engage, follow up, ask questions, and come back because it begins to be a real conversation.
The mechanism that makes this possible is a feedback loop: engage, observe what happened, learn what went well, adapt, and start again.
Digital channels are not capable of conversation on their own. But when content is built so that it makes sense in context because the HCP asked for it, or it fits the conversation they just had, or it follows up on the webinar they just attended, it becomes part of a conversation.
That is what good looks like.
For organizations already mid digital transformation, Watson’s most important point is that order matters.
The journey logic has to exist before you start building the content.
That means understanding the narrative first. What story are we trying to tell? How does it break into pieces that create a natural flow across channels, timelines, and segments?
And the measurement framework has to be designed and deployed before content goes out. What are we trying to achieve with this email? Why are we inviting people to this webinar? What does a meaningful response look like?
Without that clarity, execution becomes what Watson calls “launch and hope.” Watson argues:
We need to understand what we think is going to happen and then measure whether it really does.
For commercial teams already committed to platforms and processes, Watson’s recommendation is to pause before adding anything else, like another channel, another service, or another piece of content.
I know that’s the hardest thing to do. We often talk in pharma about fixing the wings whilst we’re already flying. So, pressing pause seems very dangerous. But just pause and take a breath and really define what working looks like. Not at the activity level, not in terms of volume, not in terms of ticking a box, but at a genuine behavioral level. What are we trying to get our HCPs to do differently, to think differently, or to believe?
When teams can answer that question, the rest falls into place. If they can’t, then launching a new channel or producing new content won’t change anything.
If you don’t know what you’re really trying to achieve, what is launching a new channel or a new bit of content actually going to do for you?
Watson closed with a challenge rooted in the Pareto principle. The top 20% of an HCP audience are the most important relationships a commercial team has. The question he would put to every commercial leader:
For that top 20%, can you say, hand on heart, from actual data, not gut feel, not what the sales director said, not from marketing, whether they are more engaged and have improved their behavior in the direction you want, compared to last quarter, last cycle, last year?
If yes: keep going, you’re ahead of the curve. If no: you really need to start to look at — are we just doing stuff for the sake of doing stuff? Or is there a genuine strategy to how my content is going out into the world, to create a narrative that is genuinely going to improve patient outcomes?
If you need help shaping the right omnichannel strategy, our team is ready to support you. Just reach out.
