The maturity of Strategic Account Management in most healthcare markets and in Pharma organisations is behind that of many other sectors, particularly in areas like the portfolio management of products and solutions, matrix working across multiple functions and external partnerships to enable wider and more compelling propositions in designated therapy areas.

Pharma Account Teams gain success through localised insights that help them position, message and where appropriate, tailor products & services, to enable the creation of mutual value.

This requires deep account, environment & stakeholder understanding built on key insights, which in turn support Account Teams to enable powerful customer  engagements .

There are various ways to identify the level of value your organisation is bringing to your nationally important and regionally important key accounts, but a simple ‘red flag’ we often see is replicated objectives across very different key accounts. Creating more ways [Opportunities] to work with customers is a sure way to solve this.

Pharma’s maturity of working in multi-functional teams is low - when compared to many sectors. What we see in Pharma across the different functions that engage with stakeholders, is a dominant focus on function (functional plans, functional goals, functional rewards) which causes angst when working in Account Teams to pursue shared goals and objectives at an account level.

In our experience of working with clients in a variety of complex and highly regulated sectors, we recognise that Pharma faces challenges unique from other sectors, it also excels in areas where others have challenges. For this reason generic industry account planning systems or software do not produce the required results for Pharma.

The management of our stakeholder relationships are moving from a dominance of face-to-face engagement to interactions using various channels [Multi-Channel]. This has driven Pharma to adopt a product centered Multi-Channel Engagement [MCE] approach, and latterly a customer experience centered Omni-Channel Experience approach [OCE] - This latter approach seeks to focus on the Customer and deliver a seamless experience through all interactions, whichever the function engaging, whatever the channel.

Measuring the effectiveness of an Account Team and this way of working is often seen as a real challenge. Moving from a focus of simple hard measures like coverage and frequency to begin to assess the quality of engagements, rather than quantity of engagements, necessitates an entirely different approach.  This more collaborative approach introduces new challenges for the performance measurement and governance of field-based Account Teams.

Whilst capability building is often desired at many levels, at Imonic we repeatedly see that certain capabilities really move the dial more in terms of success and have become critical success factors for Strategic Account Management [SAM] or Key Account Management [KAM] programmes for many organisations.

Workshops are a great way to create fast progress, identify competitive innovation and stretch the expertise in the room to develop new strategies, differentiation opportunities, and all importantly, make aligned decisions.

They are hard to beat for co-creating ways to build value for all parties and build great relationships.

Designed to suit the objectives of your event and bring a positive external perspective. Examples include dealing with a specific organisational challenge - to providing external input to demonstrate that what your organisation is trying to do - is already proven somewhere else in the industry.