DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION SERIES - You need a lot of luck in business

Dr Paul Tunnah has a passion for telling authentic stories and helping companies to co-create solutions to unlock the power of digital. He is also a man of many, many talents!

Paul is the Chief Content Officer and Managing Director for Healthware International, a global health innovation and technology leader providing transformational advisory and technology services for commercial, medical, and R&D operations of life-sciences and digital health companies, combined with design and development of digital medicines and digital therapeutics products. He is a recognised author, speaker, moderator & industry advisor with a passion for helping organisations tell authentic stories that resonate, co-create solutions and unlock the power of digital and social media in connecting with stakeholders and understanding markets.

Can you tell me a bit about your career path and what inspired you to found pharmaphorum in 2009?

A lot of people probably know me from my pharmaphorum background, but I was a scientist at one point. In the late 1990s, I was doing my PHD, and by the quirks of Oxford, they call it a doctorate of philosophy rather than science. I always found science really interesting, but at that point, my passion for communications really came to the fore. I found myself surrounded by incredible people, who were much smarter than me, but some of them were terrible communicators. They were doing amazing science that they couldn't convey to the rest of the world. I knew I wasn't going to be a scientist as you had to be so focussed on one tiny piece, and I was looking at the bigger picture.

My career took me into consulting, doing marketing and sales consulting projects for Pharma companies. The reason pharmaphorum came about as it got to the late 2000s, there were online forums like Facebook coming through, and people were starting to engage with these mechanisms. I looked at the Pharma industry, and I thought Pharma was a bit disconnected from this. The Pharma publications at that time were very insular, industry talking to itself or service companies. I thought, why don't I launch a new publication that embraces social media and actually helps connect the industry with the other critical voices: the patient, the prescribers, and the payers? So I did just that!

You grew the business from the beginning to seven figures. What kind of challenges did you overcome during this?

A lot of challenges! I think a lot of it was perseverance or, as my wife would call it, stubbornness. I think you need a lot of that in business. I had a passion for communication, digital and social media but like a lot of first-time entrepreneurs, I was a bit wet behind the ears when it came to the commercial side of it. I did have a business plan, but anyone who has started a first business will tell you it doesn't always work out that way. I think there was an element of I'll do this, and the audience will come. But in reality, it's much harder, and you've got to work to get people engaged.

I've learned over the pharmaphorum journey that you need passion to grow a business, but you are probably going to need investment at some point, and you're going to surround yourself with the right people as you can't do it all yourself. Those are the kind of challenges and opportunities that I've encountered, plus we had to pivot the business plan on several occasions.

What are you currently focusing on within your role at Healthware Group?

Healthware Group overall is quite a large company, with about 300 people in Europe. We're focused predominately on what we'd called advisory and agency services within the life sciences space. We offer digital transformation advisory but also classic agency work such as brand marketing, medical communications, and corporate communications. We also do a lot of work advising companies on how to structure and partner in digital health. Then we have this media and community arm, which looks at publications and events. All of that existed before I became part of Healthware Group. I'd known Healthware Group and Roberto the founder, for about seven years

before pharmaphorum became part of that. I found somebody in Roberto that was just as passionate about digital, communications and doing the right thing for the patient as I am. We started to partner together, and then it reached a point where I saw a real synergy in what we were doing. I wanted to scale pharmaphorum and do more of what I love on a bigger scale, so the acquisition by Healthware Group seemed quite a logical thing for either side. Neither of us knew at the time that the pandemic was around the corner, but in hindsight, the timing was super good. My current role is more on the advisory and agency side. There's a fantastic team at pharmaphorum now running that publication, and I spend more of my time advising our life sciences clients on their strategies.

When it comes to Digital Transformation or shall I say enlightenment, how can Pharma companies do better?

I've been monitoring this space since the inception of digital, and I'm always the optimist. I think Pharma companies are doing pretty well, different companies are at different stages, but there are a lot of people within Pharma companies that really get digital.

It comes down to change management and how you can break down old processes. There's so much good technology out there, and we're getting to the point where we can start to link the data and insights together. But these projects take a while to get going, and for me, it's because you're trying to change how people work within companies. So, for a lot of the projects we do, my advice is how do you drive that change, how do you do the internal communication, how do you link systems together, and how do you incentive people to embrace that change?

What's the future of the sales rep role, in your opinion?

If you're a doctor or a payer or any of those external customers, they don't see sales reps or MSLs; they just see people representing these companies. For me, the future of the sales rep is slightly broader. We are starting to move towards a space where we have this orchestrator field force that perhaps is bridging the above brand and brand discussions that need to take place. I know there are lots of compliance issues around that before the alarm bells start running. But if you think about it from a customer perspective, they want to get the right information that they need at the time they need it.

I still see a future for the human people within these organisations. They may not be called sales reps, but I think their role will be to bring that right information to HCPs, when they need it and facilitate those virtual interactions.

You're really experienced in social media. How does/can social media benefit the pharma industry and how we communicate with HCPs/patients?

A lot of the work I was doing at pharmaphorum was around social media. Ten years ago, I was moderating tweet chats with some of our Pharma clients with very nervous-looking compliance folks sitting in the room. I think Pharma has come a long way with social media, we see more companies engaging, but we have to acknowledge it's not without its challenges.

Pharma is a regulated industry, and Pharma companies can't talk about prescription drugs through open channels like social media. It's not a channel that naturally endears itself to that regulated environment and the speed of response that it requires. Having said that, I think companies recognise the value of social media; in many cases, its access to all healthcare professionals, patients and doctors. It can give enormous insight into what's going on in the real world, but it's also a good channel for sharing information, disease awareness and connecting with the influencers.

What does it say about social media that one of your most engaged with LinkedIn posts in the last six months was you in a Christmas jumper?

I think what it genuinely says is that what people are looking for on social media is the same as what we're looking for in the real world, some kind of real interaction with people. We all see a lot of stuff on social media that is kind of putting the shine on things.

You look on Facebook, and your friends are all living amazing lives, and then you look at LinkedIn, and everyone's doing fantastic in their careers. Sometimes we like to see a bit of reality behind that. Me wearing a stupid Christmas jumper says this is the real me. I think people really connect with that.

I'm really curious to know what your definition of the omnichannel experience is?

It's one of those terms that if you asked a doctor about their omnichannel experience, they'd probably look at you like you'd gone nuts as it doesn't make any sense to them at all. When you talk to someone in the industry, they'd probably relate it to the customer experience. A lot of our language is about the channels and not about the story. We're losing the art of telling a story.

One of my hot topics is how can we go back to thinking about what behaviour change you're trying to make when you're engaging, what is the message and the story you need behind that, and how can you break that down into bite-size chunks and tell that story cohesively across a number of different touch-points and channels that will drive that behaviour change. Recognising that your customers are in a different stage of that journey, that's what the omnichannel channel experience should be, about how you tell that story in bite-sized chunks to change behaviour.

Do you think Pharma companies are good at telling stories?

I think it's a very company-by-company thing. Some companies really are, but it requires a lot of investment in time at the start of the brand journey.

What is the one thing companies should really consider doing to improve the connection between field teams and healthcare professionals?

Just listen internally and externally. We spend more time thinking about the change management process with our customers, and you need to do that internally as well.

Any tips for someone just starting their own business, particularly in the pharma industry?

I'd probably share two tips. One is slightly stolen from a friend of mine Frederic Bon, who started My Sugar. He said eloquently: 'Learn what you are really bad at doing and get other people in to do that as no one is good at everything."

The other tip is don't just speak to your friends when starting a business and ask them if they think it would succeed because they're going to say it's going to be amazing. Go to people and ask them to rip your business plan apart and tell you what's not going to work. Sometimes, you need to ignore these comments, but it's beneficial to have that stress testing early on. Not everything you will do will work, and that's ok. Just learn from it and move on.

Conclusion

I loved my chat with Paul, and as an entrepreneur myself, I related to the challenges he faces! I think I will need to turn to him for advice if I'm ever looking for investment since he's already faced that hurdle, and I haven't yet.

It was also refreshing to hear that Paul sees the future of the Pharma sales force as human, and I couldn't agree more. We just need to remember how to effectively communicate a story via

whatever channel we choose to communicate, at the right time, with the HCPs so that we can better the lives of patients across the globe.

At Cheemia ReSET, we are helping 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.