First published in Pharma Industry 2/2023, May 2023. Republished in full, translated from the Swedish original.
The argument is that a sales campaign built for the room does not transfer to a screen, and that a customer segment described in six or seven sentences cannot carry the work the marketing department is expected to do with it. Written in 2023, it treats the virtual meeting as the normal case, not as a pandemic exception, and that has held. Two things date it, and both sit in the middle of the piece. The five points on relevance came from ChatGPT4, and the article presents the model's agreement as support for a position the author had been arguing for years; that was a common move in the first months the tool was widely available, and it is not the kind of support it was taken for. It matters here because the conclusion a few paragraphs later is built by combining that list with Carmen Simon's research, so a reader should know which half comes from published work and which from a model's output. The aside calling the model far better than Google belongs to the same moment. One further caveat the article does not raise: the 55, 38 and 7 percent split it cites is Mehrabian's, and that study was already contested in 2023, so it carries less than the text asks of it. The body is republished unchanged.
Reaching the right individual with the right message, in the right format, at the right moment: we know that this is decisive for how our medicines end up being used. It is a fact, combined of course with solid and favourable results from phase 3 and phase 4 studies. But where the latter is a given, otherwise we would not have a product on the market, the former remains a large problem. In this article and the one that follows, Fredrik Holmboe, speaker and digital strategist in the pharmaceutical industry, explores the different types of customer segments used by pharmaceutical companies, the challenges and the opportunities that come with segmentation done properly, and the importance of a clear focal point for tearing down the silo structures we all know are there and increasing cooperation between the sales, marketing and medical departments.
There is a difference between sales communication and marketing communication. Sales communication is about what happens in the room and what happens digitally, while marketing communication is about reaching the market, either in analogue form or digitally. The two can look similar. After all, "it is the same customers our commercial communication is aimed at". Right?
But the difference is enormous, and there is a great deal of research behind that claim.
With a background in cognitive neuroscience I find this area extremely interesting, and we start with sales communication, the conditions the sales rep works under, and the brain of the person on the receiving end.
Using a sales campaign built for face-to-face meetings in a digital setting does not work, because the conditions are completely different.
I have put that claim in italics because it matters that much!
They are completely different because they are completely different for the brain of the person receiving them!
Research by Erik Erhardt (2020), Jill Konrath (2019) and Lee Salz (2021) highlights the challenges of digital meetings. More about those studies later on, and more about how campaigns should be designed to appeal to the receiving brain. But first, let us look at the face-to-face meeting.
In the face-to-face meeting we have all the signals evolution has taught us to read:
Looking at that list, most of it seems achievable in a virtual meeting too.
Then we come to Albert Mehrabian, psychologist and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his well-known but in most cases somewhat overgeneralised study. He claims that body language accounts for around 55 percent of our communication when it comes to feelings and attitudes. Tone of voice accounts for around 38 percent, while the words we use account for only around 7 percent.
The study is considered overgeneralised because it was really about how people interpret contradictory information when they communicate feelings and attitudes, and not about communication in general.
But given how often Mehrabian's study is quoted, and how often it is used in communication training, then together with the three studies mentioned earlier we can draw one simple conclusion:
Using a sales campaign built for face-to-face meetings in a digital setting does not work, because the conditions are completely different. They are completely different because the conditions are completely different for the brain of the person receiving them!
There is that argument again, simply because I keep seeing, and I am sorry to have to say it, a sales campaign built for physical meetings being shortened slightly and then used in the digital meeting.
That is the wrong approach if the goal is to create change and move a customer along an "adaption ladder". Completely wrong!
Why am I raising this in an article whose focus is supposed to be customer segmentation?
Because there is a very clear reason, and I will come to it a little later. But first, one more dimension to the segmentation dilemma.
First we need to establish another hypothesis that I believe has a lot of bearing on the subject. It is an inheritance every commercial organisation lives with today.
It comes from the fact that the sales force was once the company's spearhead into the market.
As a result, a large part of, not to say all of, the internal structures and processes meant to identify the market's best customers and its greatest potential are built around the needs of the sales organisation.
Today that setup is no longer enough!
What is needed is a more nuanced approach to reaching the market!
Now back to the example above, where a sales situation was illustrated with the rep either in the room with the customer or meeting the customer virtually. Same rep, two different scenarios.
And, as noted earlier, almost always handled with no distinction at all between the physical and the digital.
The same opening, the same slides, the same close are used virtually as physically in almost every organisation which, at the risk of sounding like a parrot, is not good enough!
Why?
To answer that, let us take a short detour to Boston in 2018, where I had the privilege of listening to Carmen Simon, a world-renowned expert and researcher in cognitive neuroscience, at the Inbound conference that HubSpot organises every year.
Her research goes deep into how our brains create memories tied to engagement and decision making, and her presentation, perhaps not entirely surprisingly, really stuck in my memory! It was superb, with everything that happened in it, animations and sometimes something as simple as a subtle wave of shading sweeping diagonally behind the text. Purely to keep our brains engaged.
In her groundbreaking and very readable book from 2016, "Impossible to Ignore: Creating Memorable Content to Influence Decisions", she presents a fascinating "formula" for creating memorable content.
Carmen Simon's model for creating memorable content rests on the idea that effective communication should engage the audience, hereafter "the customer", and help them remember the information so that they eventually make decisions based on it. Here is a short overview:
2.1 The author's addition to Carmen's model: in connection with encoding and storage, something called cognitive consolidation takes place. This is the process where the brain converts and stores information from short-term memory into long-term memory. The term is used in neuroscience and psychology to describe how our brain handles and stores memories in a more lasting way. Cognitive consolidation is an important part of learning and is part of why we can hold on to information over time.
By following this model, commercial organisations can create content that not only gives the sales force the support it needs in terms of sales material for virtual meetings, but also captures customers' attention and in the end influences how they decide.
But what is it that makes a sales campaign appear to work in the physical meeting, you are asking now, right?
The answer is that in the physical meeting there is a skilled rep who can adapt the message, the body language, the energy level, the ability to hold the room's attention, and everything else that makes a skilled rep skilled. With a skilled rep in the room it can turn into a show, and a show is memorable in itself. That rep's skill in the room falls flat in a virtual meeting. There, the rep needs support from the sales campaign.
I hope it is now clear that what is needed is a sales campaign built from the ground up to suit the digital meeting, which in short means more storytelling, more video, more animation, and a structure that leads the customer's eye the right way. Above all, fewer static slides with black-and-white scientific curves.
That kind of static, information-heavy slide is known in some circles as "death by PowerPoint", which also happens to be an interesting TED talk that I can recommend.
Back to sales campaigns and the rep's meeting with the customer, because this is where I come to what I promised earlier, that is, to explain why I spend such a large part of an article about segmentation on the difference between a rep's physical and virtual meeting with the customer.
The reason is that to succeed with our goal of moving a customer along an adaption ladder, of helping that physician give our medicine to the right patient at the right time and in the end lay the ground for better care, we have to be relevant.
We have to be relevant.
And what does it mean to be relevant?
Simple. You just have to say the right thing at the right time. Then you are relevant. Right?
Not if we approach the concept of relevance through first principle thinking, which means breaking a problem or a concept down into its basic elements and building an understanding up from those elements. When it comes to being relevant to a listener or a customer, we can use first principle thinking to identify the basic factors that create relevance.
Those five points came straight from ChatGPT4, which in so many cases is far better than Google, for one simple reason: to see whether what I have been lecturing about and claiming for many years has been correct. I am glad to say that ChatGPT4 and I agree.
Compare the list that comes from Carmen Simon's research with the list of the fundamental building blocks of relevance for a listener and you will see a great many similarities, and by combining the two lists it is possible to deduce more insights still.
Above all, it is possible to arrive at one fundamental conclusion, and this is where we get to segmentation of the customer base.
Finally, you are thinking. Is he going to write a whole d*mn book before he gets to the point?
If you know me, you know that I like to put things in their context before I get to the point, so that the point lands in a clear context.
This subject is important enough that it needs a proper context.
Let us start with how it usually looks today.
The customer base is often divided into five different segments, each of them usually described fairly briefly. Briefly in the sense that an entire customer segment, "Cautiously progressive" for example, is described in 6 to 7 sentences, and that those sentences are then meant to form the basis for the marketing department's work.
But we have longer descriptions, you say now. Yes, you probably do, but they are usually produced at global or European level, and produced with the "most important" markets in focus, meaning the EU5 markets.
I know, because I have helped create that kind of global segment description. Even though we produced reasonably good personas, which is better than segment descriptions, they still did not fit very many markets. That was the reason we had Brazil and Australia as pilot markets in the project where I led the content strategy.
With just over four years as a product manager behind me, I also know how that kind of work is received up here in the "cold north".
With these observations about customer segmentation and how it usually looks, I come to the most important point of this article:
It is not enough to build the organisation's entire commercial communication on the inherited view of competitiveness that lives on, that is, from the time when the sales department was the company's spearhead into the market, now that the marketing department's contribution to the company's competitiveness has become so much more important.
Since that paragraph is the foundation of this whole article, please stop here and think about what it means in light of what you have read earlier in this article. Stop and think about what it means. Really.
You can read the continuation of this article in Pharma Industry 3/2023. Until next time, I wish you all the best.
The Swedish original is published at pharma-industry.se, and Part 2 is here. Segment descriptions, personas and the joint work between sales, marketing and medical are what the Omnichannel Journey Sprint is built around.