The Reuters event - full presentation of Valentin Moinescu and Quentin Duartre

With more than 15 years in the pharma industry

My name is Valentin. I have quite recently joined Connectmedica, having more than 15 years in the pharma industry. I had various roles, I worked in SFE, multichannel sales, and marketing. I want to share with you together with Quentin, a presentation concerning the new reality that we all live in and the prospect for the future. 

The question is, for now, if the winter is coming or if it has already come. I think it’s really close to us if not already here. Why? In my opinion, times have changed and the most dramatic change in communication. It is tough to stay in touch and conduct business during the COVID-19 pandemic because everything suddenly had to go virtual.

You can see that the majority of the customers attended the meetings in person before the pandemic. There are various reasons for that, the main one being - those meetings tend to be more engaging. In the new reality, in those COVID-times, they all had to switch to virtual meetings.

How will it look like after the pandemic? Now they all switched to virtual meetings and other on-line occasions. There is a lot of fuzz about the future of all events. Many of HCPs say that it is going to stay like this, but more of them, nearly 87 percent, suggest that it will be a mix between F2F and virtual events. We’ll probably transfer our meetings from 100% virtual to a hybrid model in the future if you like.

What do the HCPs expect from the pharma industry? For sure they would like to access virtual services such as digital patient indication, information on how treatment options may change post-COVID-19, education on how to better treat patients remotely, and so on. 

In conclusion, at all times we need to focus on creating valuable content for HCPs to easily access.

We need to think of customer-centric

We have identified three of the main aspects that are considered a ‘pandemic’ challenge for business. Some of them are called new but actually, the pharma industry has dealt with them for quite a long time. The difference is, now those challenges cannot be avoided and are especially relevant now. 

The first one that we need to really keep in mind is digital differentiation. This is maybe the most important one. Why is that? Simply because all the pharma companies are choosing similar channels or similar ways to communicate with HCPs. Lots and lots of emails, some containing information about real events, some not relevant at all. The bottom line is that it’s very hard to manage to stand out from all those emails that the HCPs are receiving. And here comes digital differentiation, concerning either the content, the way of HCP engagement, or the communication channels that are used. This is also one of the very new challenges that we have nowadays.

The second one is a challenge that we’ve all heard of for a very long time. During COVID-19 times though it has become so much more true. We need to think of customer-centric. Before the COVID-19 outbreak, we had a chance to force interact with the physicians in some way. Basically, we could wait in front of their offices just to have a face-to-face meeting with them. Now every pharma company ended up with similar solutions that the others have. Sending an e-mail, reaching them through their smartphones and laptops. How to stand out? We need to think about what do the physicians want? What could help them? What could make them want to engage and to stay engaged with us? Focusing on the customer-centric aspects of our activities, focusing on what our customers want is a need.

Also in order to use our communication abilities to the fullest, we have to reach a hybrid model. Before the pandemic, we used to have the digital model and the Salesforce model separately, no matter how hard we tried to achieve a hybrid model. Between those two fields, the interactions were not necessarily great. There weren’t any strong bridges built. The pharma companies used to engage the HCPs in two different, not cohesive ways. Nowadays we’ve all reached a situation when those two have to get combined. Every organization, every pharmaceutical company, needs to adapt to that change. We need to embrace the change and make sure that we offer a consistent hybrid model of communication with HCPs. We have to be certain that the focus is put on the customer experience.

For more information please contact

Valentin Moinescu
Valentin.Moinescu@connectmedica.com 
https://www.linkedin.com/in/valentin-moinescu-95556916
 

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