#e-detailing

Introduction

One of the most impactful and active economic sectors is the pharmaceutical market. The global spending on drugs, as per IQVIA, will increase to about $1.5 trillion by 2023 at a 3-6% compound annual growth rate over the following five years, a considerable decrease from the 6.3% seen over the previous five years.

Pharmaceutical marketing initiatives change based on the target audience; they are not directed at the patient who uses the product but at the healthcare provider who is providing treatment.

The primary marketing strategy is hiring sales representatives who meet with medical professionals to promote the benefits of their products and go over the kinds of patients who can benefit from certain medications.

Numerous causes, including the decreasing efficiency of sales representatives, rising prices for traditional visits, the demand for medical physicians' services, and the popularity of internet resources, result in the greater use of electronic channels to communicate with health experts.

E-detailing, also known as electronic detailing, is a now-well-recognized method of enhancing pharmaceutical and MedTech companies' efficiency in customer engagement and enabling better service to stakeholders such as healthcare providers (HCPs).

E-detailing, often known as electronic visits or e-visits, is a word used to broadly define using digital technology for pharmaceutical product promotion, primarily online. The digital content makes sales material more engaging and interactive for HCPs.

Additionally, it guarantees presentation tracking, giving you information to assist you in better fulfilling HCP demands.

Top 6 Keys to Effective E-Detailing

Select the Appropriate Technology

The working environment affects your thinking and performance. Choose a location with good Wi-Fi that is peaceful, well-lit, and well-connected. It is best to wear a noise-canceling headset that is compatible with both your phone and laptop.

A digital platform that enables pre-call planning, post-call follow-up, relevant data collecting, intelligent analysis, and actionable metrics can help to enhance the experience.

Implementing a healthcare e-detail system typically involves overcoming any fear of using the technology, organizing successful meetings, and managing healthcare workers. The easiest method to overcome this phobia is to continue practicing and become acquainted with the features of your platform.

Create an Engaging Presentation

Although product information is crucial, a doctor is unlikely to be sufficiently encouraged to adopt e-detailing of its reception. Pharmaceutical companies will therefore need to think of additional incentives to persuade professionals to use the new avenues for communication.

E-detailing, when done well, is not a passive presentation.

HCPs (Healthcare Professionals) and other stakeholders should actively participate in the discussion. It also allows reps to employ effective information, like moving graphics and video, to draw attention to important concepts.

Using the device's features to convey the story allows clinicians to sweep, swipe, and push their way to understand.

Customer-facing workers, whether sales reps, medical science liaisons (MSLs), or other members of the team, can give a consistently high-quality experience with good e-detailing.

The Presentation Should Be Inclusive

Explain the value you hope to bring to the practice or healthcare professional before each presentation.

Choose the best time to reach out to your target audience. You can inquire about their lunch breaks or administrative times, when their clinics begin and end, as well as whether they accept phone calls or appointments.

Surveys, polls, games, and other interactive technologies can help keep doctors motivated and involved while also providing real-time learning.

For example, if you're demonstrating a difficult graph, explain it as you go through it, give them time to absorb and digest the material, and don't be hesitant to pause and silence. Since everyone reads at a different speed, you may read aloud alongside your client and then prompt them by asking whether they are done.

Be Professional

Always address the medical staff member by name, be assertive yet approachable, and if they seem busy express empathy. You must be ready for any potential complaints they may have.

When introducing yourself and the company you represent, always remember the name of the person you are speaking with. The most important thing is to let them know you are not a patient.

Depending on their jobs and available time, nurses, physician assistants, and support personnel can all be drawn in by engaging in conversations that go beyond the doctor.

Ascertain the Practice's Relevancy

E-detailing has a lot of advantages for both your company and your customers. Use a storytelling technique that provides control over the presentation's course to ensure that talks are pertinent to the present situation of each practice.

Doctors prefer e-detailing because they have the option to choose the most relevant content. Due to their digital nature, we can frequently update detailers with new information that incorporates the lessons discovered from customer data and applies to the provider's situation, even when sales representatives are on the road.

Data Collection for Customer Understanding

E-detailing enables company representatives to communicate individually with HCPs (Healthcare Professionals) and provide tailored messaging by analyzing how each consumer interacts and utilizing advanced analytics.

An electronic detailer can give buyers and MSLs (Medical Science Liaisons) quick access to all the scientific information on pharmaceutical items with primary product justifications (and additional content elements).

To achieve the best return on your goal, be aware of the key performance indicators and track them.

Conclusion

E-detailing is crucial for many pharmaceutical and MedTech businesses' larger digital communications strategy.

Furthermore, it frequently serves as the base for the addition of other networks to improve the quality of the services offered to customers. It is a great way to begin using digital marketing for businesses in the life sciences sector.

In addition to reducing marketing costs, electronic visits could improve patient access to physicians and preserve many benefits of conventional face-to-face consultations.

E-detailing is a cutting-edge strategy for promoting pharmaceutical items that can raise the standard and scope of pharmaceutical corporations' promotional efforts. It demonstrates its advantages for pharmaceutical firms and medical professionals alike.

The strategy guarantees high ROI while saving a significant amount of time. Instead of replacing routine visits, e-detailing makes medical sales representatives more efficient. We should consider it as an addition to the typical marketing mix of a company for strengthening and enriching its current strategies.

Hurix Digital provides services for content conversion. As they provide capabilities to support ebooks on all platforms, it is a comprehensive platform for digital publication. Hurix Digital is a good option if your company wants to digitize all of its paper records and store them in a database.

Gone are the days when reaching, communicating, and convincing HCPs for the medical product is a piece of cake. The doors that welcome the sales reps once upon a time are now nearly closed for sales reps. The HCPs claim to get busier and have little-to-no time during working hours for face time for sales reps. Of course, it makes no sense to capture some minutes from the busy schedule because the HCPs won’t communicate with interest.

It doesn’t mean the HCPs are unreachable. Instead, wearing the HCPs lens, it’s better to reach them at the time of their convenience with the succinct and easy-to-consume content, which is easy to understand. The pharma companies should stop reinventing the wheel with generic brochures and begin engaging the HCPs digitally.

However, the pharma industry is slow to digital adoption, but the leading players have buck-up the speed to step in with the digital revolution. But the companies that are getting the digital marketing campaigns right are reaping good rewards.

The pharma marketers spending a good amount of time and dollars in understanding new digital channels and tools to implement the marketing strategies that deliver outstanding results. They leverage the blend of physical and digital interactions to distribute the content and strengthen relationships with HCPs. Here we have designed the best-integrated sales and marketing strategies that allow pharma companies to engage the busy HCPs.

Let’s dive in!

- Create HCPs persona

The marketing campaign is futile if it fails to impress the HCPs and make them interested in the medical product. The marketing tactic that’s working most these days is- personalization. Personalized marketing requires building the persona of every HCP that they want to target. The HCPs persona is about creating an imaginary presentation of HCPs based on the location, daily activities, and needs. The information extracted from the previous meetings occurred with the HCPs.

Collectively creating templates for HCPs of different specializations help the sales reps to approach the HCPs in an individualized manner. When the approach is unique, targeting even the same product appears different to the HCPs.

- Wrap the emails under the personalization layer

Email marketing is an old digital marketing strategy that still works if the personalized emails sent in a segmented fashion. The research had proven that HCPs prefer to get connected with pharma companies through email, which means they are interested in getting connected through email medium.

When the marketers customized the email content depending on the HCP’s preferences and needs, the chances of opening, reading, and responding to the email are high. Plus, email marketing won’t put a deep hole in the company’s pocket, so it’s worth investing efforts and resources in sending custom emails to a segmented list of HCPs.

- Make e-detailing- part and parcel of meetings with HCPs

With reduced face-to-face time, paper brochures or booklets are becoming an extinct species, which is even less favored by the HCPs. When virtual visits or web meetings are gaining traction, it’s essential to transform the paper content into digital content. That’s product e-detailing.

The e-detailing includes text, animated videos, and images that make presentations and interaction appealing. Plus, it’s found that physicians spend an hour or two watching videos, so if you convert the product description into short self-explanatory videos, the probability of getting the product heard increases. What’s more?

The mobile device always in HCPs pocket or desktop/laptop on their desk, the access to your medical product information anytime, anywhere becomes possible.

- Include fact-based case studies that add weight to the conversation

When you sell something to the buyer, they want to know the product performance in the market such as how well it’s performing, customers’ reviews, and other things. The digital marketing campaign to sell pharma products is no different. That’s where case studies help in showcasing the positive effects of the product, patients’ testimonials, and the success story alongside statistics.

Displaying the complete story in the form of video increases its reach to the HCPs. When leveraged during web meetings, the scientific information help in pushing the lead down the sales funnel.

- A laser focus on the funnel is vital

The single type of communication won’t work for the HCPs that are standing at various positions in the sales funnel. The HCP at every position needs to be handled with a unique sales pitch and updated marketing material. Dynamic messaging and sequential communication play an important role in controlling and converting the HCPs.

Summing it up

Pharma companies are ramping up their digital marketing efforts, but they pay off when the efforts are optimized. The pharma marketing tactics help in getting the product message heard at scale, better targeting on the right channels, and tracking all the outcomes in real-time. It helps in better assessing the marketing campaign performance and the tweaks that can boost the conversion. Follow the digital marketing strategies when you are in trouble to reach and convert the HCPs.

Every business has its monthly, quarterly, half yearly and yearly goals. Every time it achieves a target, it sets a bigger one. It is the story of every organization, operating in whichever part of the globe. But, as a business owner, have you ever realized is it really achievable for your sales team to draw better results and achieve a further target, while following the same marketing strategy as earlier? No it is not!

To accomplish a greater sales target, you would need a different marketing strategy; the strategy with which you will be able to attract new, and retain your existing clients; the strategy that will improve your sales revenues.

Sales Enablement Applying Sales enabling techniques will add depth to your marketing and promotion campaigns. It works as a bridge that helps you reach your exact audience. To improve your sales and to leave your contenders behind, you would require a more aggressive marketing technique. To enable the door of better sales, you would need a new-age marketing strategy, popularly named as sales enablement.

What is sales enablement? The answer for what is sales enablement can differ according to various marketing experts. But in the simplest definition, ‘it is a kind of training or tool that cheers up your sales team to sell more aggressively’.

Your key purpose of assigning new targets to your teams is of course not to trouble your employees. All you want is increased revenues. For this, you need to train them in understanding the dimensions of the market; you need to implement the sales enablement strategies in your business practices.

Frequent Training To fight the market war with your competitors, your sales team needs to learn the behavior of your competitors and customers. 

What is it that your target audiences find attractive in your rival’s products or services – your employees need to be trained over this. Understanding the transforming trends and moods of the market is very important for sales professionals.

Creating effective marketing content Creating extraordinary marketing contents that interact with the audience is another key to success. Using the same old age methods aren’t very effective nowadays. When you increase the customer engagement, you actually increase the visibility of your products and services. Sales enablement is not just about training the sales professionals and creating interactive marketing contents, but also about utilizing existing contents in a more effective approach (the contents that were rich in quality, but weren’t be employed due to some misunderstandings and confusions). The deployment of e-detailing, sales applications and smart devices would benefit in increasing the performance of sales team.