DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION SERIES - The evolving role of the pharma sales rep

I kickstarted 2023 by interviewing Sophie Graham-Godet from GSK as I continue my Digital Transformation Series.

If you’ve read any of my previous articles or have been following me on LinkedIn you will know that I'm incredibly passionate about helping pharma sales professionals get confident about using technology to improve the quality of their engagements with HCPs. Through these interviews, I  share nuggets of information that I hope will inspire other leaders to help their teams along their digital transformation journeys. 

Sophie Graham-Godet is an inspiring leader, during her career she has successfully led both industry marketing and consulting teams delivering award-winning transformational programmes in top pharmaceutical companies. She is currently leading the Omnichannel Capability acceleration at GSK. 

Sophie and I used to work together at Pfizer and reconnected at a Reuters conference in Nice last year. I am so glad we did and it was an absolute pleasure to catch up properly over this interview. 

All opinions and views expressed are Sophie Graham-Godet's own and do not express the views or opinions of GSK.

Can you tell me about your background/career path?

My interests in science and communications are what led me to the pharmaceutical industry as a whole. I initially started out in the industry working in a medical education agency, then at Pfizer and more recently in consulting and now at GSK. 

My new omnichannel capabilities role is very much a combination of all my different commercial, local and global experiences. Omnichannel and digital marketing are just part of our world and in the pharmaceutical industry, it's still a bit of an evolving frontier. I love new challenges and therefore being in this role is an exciting and dynamic place to be for me.  

How do you see marketing evolving in your organisation? 

That's a great question. The key word is evolution and continuing to evolve with agility. I really believe post-Covid that we need to be more responsive and meet our customers where they want to be met by us. The pandemic has accelerated our digital journey. Marketers, sales professionals and medical colleagues need to collaborate much more effectively to create content that's meaningful for our customers.  Whether that's with a face-to-face meeting, via email or through web portals. 

When you talk about agility, are you talking about speed or as a concept? 

A bit of both, we certainly need to move from a historical model of being focussed on campaign messages and communications that ran for very long periods of time through to something much nimbler that runs for shorter periods of time. This is more impactful,  current and will add more value for our customers. We've used internal agile methods to achieve that in terms of creating lots of content in a short space of time in close partnership and collaboration between medical, and commercial. 

Are there any specific capabilities that you can identify that marketers need for working in this new environment? 

Yes. They need a curious mindset as it’s important for marketers to be experimenting with new ways of connecting content, channels and experiences. There’s also a need for close collaboration. We've always collaborated with medical and field colleagues to generate great content and campaigns but there's a real additional need to do this at a global and local level nowadays to make sure we have value-added content. And marketers need to be competent with analytics and data analysis. We need to be able to analyse new channel formats and data points to measure our content’s effectiveness, the impact it’s having and how we are contributing to the overall customer &/or patient experience. 

What do pharmaceutical companies need to do to create an integrated customer experience? Are you doing anything specifically? 

As an industry, we've been successful so far and we want to continue to be that way so that we can contribute to better healthcare and patient health. To do so, the customer always needs to be at the centre. Today, we've moved well away from the “who shouts louder” model and we need to involve our customers with what we are designing and developing. We've always done regular, expensive market research. But now, the shift is to more specific online testing that is quick and will give us the right insight to develop the campaigns, content and materials that will really support our customers. 

The other big difference is connecting the dots, we are no longer able to simply provide the same content in an email as we do face-to-face or on a webinar for example. Our customers have much higher expectations therefore personalising that content as much as possible within the relevant regulatory frameworks is important so that we are really adding value each and every time.

In my current role, I'm responsible for developing a capabilities campus, a dynamic learning resource where everyone will understand how we do omnichannel at GSK. I'm interviewing customers to get their views on what it feels like to receive our content and materials. And those expectations are high in terms of the data and the ways they want us to interact with them. 

What are you doing to get marketing to work more collaboratively with sales and medical? 

The industry, the company and the marketing and medical teams have been working collaboratively for years already however what many teams are doing differently is thinking about how we can collaborate across brands or therapy areas, or across customer segments where there might be more overlap in interests. That collaboration is new and can be a little more challenging. 

Do your marketing teams get involvement from the sales teams with regard to the co-creation of marketing materials? 

Very much so. The sales teams are integral to a lot of our content and we look to them to provide the customer’s voice. Particularly within the different markets we work with, so that we can create local plans and appropriate customer journeys. 

In your current role, are you seeing any Global Trends for the adoption of omnichannel capabilities or does it vary from country to country, region to region?

From what I'm seeing in my first four months in this role is that there is a huge demand for omni-channel capability development across the organisation. The demand is universal, but the levels of needs are different based on market dynamics, experiences to date and customer channels and preferences. But what’s certain is that we will continue to keep evolving. 

What do you think the future role of the pharmaceutical sales rep will look like? 

 Sales representatives play a critical role in the customer experience as do other customer-facing roles. They are the face of the company and a key point of contact for our customers. There's a strong future for reps but their role is changing in terms of orchestrating and coordinating all these touch points so that it's easy for customers to get what they need when they need it and to feel that we are providing them with valuable information each time we interact with them.   

What's your top tip for other leaders in your position in marketing? What's your top tip for the human aspect of digital transformation? 

It's all about the people and the valuable content that they create! We can't deliver the value and input to improve patient care without our teams. We can have the fanciest databases and tools but all that's for nothing if we don't ignite that curiosity in our people so that they try it out and see how it goes. Our teams are fundamental to our success and their ability to listen to our customers and integrate what they hear to deliver more impactful content and value.  

Conclusion: 

It was reassuring to hear from yet another successful leader in pharma that people are the most important aspect of digital transformation as that’s what we are all about at Cheemia ReSET. It was also great to hear that Sophie also believes that the role of the pharma sales representative will continue to evolve, as this is something I wholeheartedly agree with. 

At Cheemia ReSET, we are constantly developing content to help global sales teams not only adopt omnichannel but change their habits and behaviours to be successful using these digital tools. Our award-winning remote sales engagement training platform has been referred to as the Netflix of pharma because our bite-sized videos are so easy for sales professionals to ingest and then implement into their daily lives. 

All opinions and views expressed are Sophie Graham-Godet's own and do not express the views or opinions of GSK.