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Greetings!
Demonstrating your value to your company is one of the biggest challenges that Medical Information departments face today. How do I know? You told me!*
Why is it so important? Survival of the fittest. This was the metaphor used by Charles Darwin to help explain his theory of natural selection.
We need to prove our value more than ever. You can only show value to your organisation if your service is valued by your customers.
How confident are you that you deliver value to your customers? Read on to get some ideas on how you are doing.
Sharon Leighton
* Results from 163 Medical Information Managers surveyed across Europe by Janet Davies and I. Presented at DIA Medical Information & Communications conference October 2008. |
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Why bother?
We all know that customers want the right information at the right time in the right format. But with the ease of using Google and tools like PubMed and eMC (electronic medicines compendium), doctors, pharmacists and even patients can do it for themselves.
Why would they want to bother with contacting a pharmaceutical company, when our industry is held with suspicion and mistrust by many healthcare professionals?
~ Because they can easily ask the sales representative?
~ Because they have no choice?
If value was a mathematical formula, we could express it as Value = Quality / Price. As the price reduces, for a set quality, a product (or service) increases in value. But since we offer our services for "free", how do we increase the value to customers?
Three common ways are
~ Do something your customer cannot do.
~ Give them something they can't easily get.
~ Give them something that is better than they have (and need) already.
Our unique value proposition is that we need to do an ACE job |
 ACCESS
- Better than Google
We have to prove that we are better than Google, hard when Google Scholar is so impressive! But we know that we have the best information collection and access to impressive resources. As the product manufacturer, we probably have the most comprehensive information collection (published or unpublished) on our products compared with other organisations. Information like scientific posters from conferences that are not published elsewhere is often retained by Medical Information departments. And we can access privileged company information like adverse events case numbers, clinical trial reports and other data on file.
We also have the legal status to provide off-label information to customers on request.
How many other organisations have the time to evaluate product information and aim to put it into a clinical context? One other unique factor could be provision of clinical articles. Customers may still contact us as they want to be given a package of relevant clinical articles that would be difficult, expensive or tedious for them to get for themselves.
COMMUNICATIONS
- easy and effortless
How we communicate with our customers is critical to our success, and I mean communication as a two-way process. Our service must be easy to find and access. Interactions with our staff need to make the right impressions - pleasant, professional and helpful. We need to understand what they want (even if they don't exactly know what they want themselves). We need to get information to them in the best format in the right timeframe. It all needs to be easy and effortless.
EXPERTS
- products and diseases
Lastly, our customers expect us to be experts in our products and diseases they treat. As we often evaluate information to compose customer responses, we need to sort and prioritise which information (or literature) is most useful, meaningful or relevant. As many requests are about off-label or novel clinical use, we can give some perspective on the topic as well as exchange scientific information.
How aware do you think our customers are that we have to provide balanced information; the good, the bad and the ugly?
Should we be "blowing our own trumpet" about this more? It's an important unique selling point. |
 How does your service measure up?
So, taking all these points into consideration, how does your service measure up?
If you're not providing an ACE service, your customer will find someone else who can! | |
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"Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count. Everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted"
Albert Einstein.
When I left the corporate world to set up my own consultancy business, I finally had the time & energy to reflect on what I learnt from experience. Those things that the books and courses just don't tell you about.
Some much about management is plain common sense.
Now you can benefit from my mix of pragmatism, knowledge and experience. |
DIA US Medical Communications Conference.
2 - 4 March 2009
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