Forward-thinking is critical to win in a disrupting healthcare landscape
Now, at time when the pace of change in the health care landscape is accelerating, companies must enhance the depth of thought and the timeliness of product, market and company shaping activities to maximize the commercial value of their portfolio. We have identified four components which are particularly critical to maximize opportunities and minimize risks.
- Focus on value creation
Success starts with a stronger alignment of product development with evolving stakeholders’ value drivers. Although best performing companies have improved collaboration among their R&D, Medical and Commercial organizations when defining the aspirational positioning and associated target product profiles, the frame of reference for product development often remains narrowly focused on the relative efficacy and safety benefits. Developing a thorough understanding of what drives value and behavior for the involved stakeholders calls for a deeper and more holistic analysis of the patient journey with a disease and of the local and national hurdles to access markets. Identifying and selecting the best partners to develop and implement holistic solutions to deliver health outcomes will require forging true partnerships with key stakeholders.
- Minimizing risks
Evaluating the attractiveness of a market and driving product development are challenging, with the need to base decisions on an anticipated standard of care, healthcare cost containment policies, stakeholder and competitor landscape as much as 5 to 10 years in the future. Structured forward-thinking based on scenario planning techniques can help teams proactively develop management responses to anticipated plausible landscape futures and ultimately fully capture opportunities and mitigate risks.
- Translating brand strategy into impactful tactics
To adapt to the paradigm shift in the stakeholder landscape, life sciences companies have developed new capabilities and tactics to enhance their value in the eyes of key stakeholders beyond physicians. However, conservatism and lack of adequate performance feedback mechanism represent barriers to reallocating resources and expanding stakeholder engagement. In most companies, 70% of resources remain allocated to the salesforce even though traditional detailing is decreasing in receptivity and overall effectiveness. Winning go-to-market strategies engage the network of stakeholders in an integrated manner and are driven by the delivery of value. This requires an alignment of cross-functional global and local teams (Medical, Market Access, Marketing and Sales) on the stakeholder influence maps and behavioral objectives. Another challenge for companies is to improve the cross-functional collaboration when designing and implementing tactics. As national and local hurdles to access are increasing, it is getting even more critical that those who are creating the tactics share an in-depth understanding of the critical dynamics within the local system of care.
- Delivering excellence at launch
The pre-launch and launch phases are even more critical for success than in the past. Launch preparation should start long before final decisions are made on label and price. Beyond the tailored road map that global and local teams need to orchestrate their activities, it is critical to define quality standards for crucial ones and use external objective to track launch progress. Setting up an effective performance management system to get dynamic market feed-back through lead indicators is essential to coordinate course-correction steps and ensure timely implementation. Finally, enabling launch teams to prepare themselves and stress-test their launch strategy and tactics through business simulation (war gaming) could be an effective technique. It is a particularly attractive approach to mobilize teams and to incorporate possible customers and competitors ‘moves in the action plan.