Pharma Sessions
Pharma Sessions
How to Actually Get the Stuff You Want Approved in Pharma
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Pharma Sessions is hosted by Jonathan Kaskey
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Hello, hello, and welcome to Pharma Sessions, a place for pharmaceutical leaders to come and learn from each other. I'm your host, Jonathan Kaskey. Technology and market trends are bringing change at an ever accelerating rate, and no person, team, or company can afford to be left behind. Here, we dive into the strategies and tactics that our guests use to tackle these challenges and create new opportunities, and how you can do the same in your own organization. This episode of Pharma Sessions is sponsored by Xunt, makers of the X1 reporting platform. Welcome. So today's episode is going to be a little different. It's just me. So you're stuck with me for the next 20 minutes or so, or whenever you decide to press pause or stop and uh move on to your next podcast. But thanks for joining. So, what I want to talk about is something I've been giving quite a lot of thought recently. And it's basically the concept of change management in pharma, specifically around implementing new technologies. This is something that has been essentially the main point of my career. I was doing some math back of the envelope. I probably helped pharma companies implement about $200 million or so in new software platforms over the past many years, a lot of years, I guess. So in that I've noticed some things, right? And this is me, this is teams that I've been on, these are teams that I've led, right? And so a lot of what I do is think about how to make this go easier, go faster, how to help my clients communicate value where things go right, where things go wrong. It's often not the tech themselves. It's often about change management, about setting expectations, about communicating value. Sometimes people do it really well. Sometimes people make mistakes. And what's really frustrating is when you see mistakes that you know are coming and that are avoidable, because I think there are ways to avoid some common pitfalls when trying to bring change to your organization. So for today's episode, I'm gonna spend some time talking about three things that typically determine whether a system implementation succeeds, right? And what this premise of this is, you are listening to this and you might be somewhere in the middle of things, right? Maybe your director level, maybe even VP level, trying to implement something that you think would be really cool, help you and your teams do your job better. But in order to do so, you need to go up at least one or two rungs, maybe more, on the management chain and communicate it in a way that everybody's in agreement because there's very infrequently one person that can say yes. It's much more common that there are many people that can say no, right? And sometimes we need to get alignment around all of them. So, what I want to talk about is pre-alignment, stakeholder management. What I want to talk about is building a real business case and then making change tangible. So I think if you can do all three of those things, you have a much better chance of executing on whatever it is your vision is. So let's start with something that many people that I've worked with really fail to put a lot of thought into, which is thinking about how to create alignment before the big meeting. There's very often a big meeting where maybe it's around the table, there's heads of various groups, and everybody's got their priority list, and it's like, how do you get yours to be the project that people say yes to? So I'm not going to pronounce this right, but it's a concept that I think is is really interesting. In Sweden, there's a word that probably somebody from Sweden can tell me how to actually say this, but it's about fronking. And it roughly translates to anchoring. But in the business context, it means building consensus before the formal decision meeting happens. And so when the actual meeting happens, not that it's a formality, but all the real conversations where you've addressed people's concerns have already occurred. So you're going into that meeting with a very significantly good chance of coming out of it with the results that you're looking for. In contrast, what we often see is that somebody might take it something to their boss, their boss is bought in. That person speaks on behalf of the project. Maybe the person speaking is the leader that hasn't really been intimately involved in the detail, but they're presenting their big initiatives in some type of a steering committee meeting. There's some debate. Sometimes the stakeholders feel blindsided. Sometimes they feel like they have to poke the bear a little bit and point out objections. So resistance surfaces publicly if your leader truly believes in it or not, right? Or maybe they're only 80% believing in it. You'll find out. And momentum dies. So I'm going to give an example. And it's kind of funny that this is a Swedish word, but this is a pro a project I did with a Nordic company. And it was a really, really large and transformative deal for a big part of the organization, right? So this was a part of the organization that had, I think, three or four hundred employees in it that had been doing things a certain way their whole career. And what we were saying was you should stop doing that and you should do things a new way because of technology reasons, because of quality improvements, because of efficiency gains. And we had an excellent internal champion who was actually able to get this pushed through or approved, I should say. And one of the things she did a number of things really well, but she was able to get both alignment at the top of her organization with leadership, but also ground up support. So she kind of created a scrum team, right? Or whatever you want to call it, a working team of about a half a dozen users who are very well respected amongst their peers, got them access to the system, got them trained on the system, did not do an intensive pilot. They were trying to move fast. So what we basically did was we said, rather than do a pilot of, you know, one therapeutic area working on it for three, six months, and then we see how they like it, which is how things are typically done. We're going to hold your hand through a start to finish project of just one project. And we're going to do it in three weeks. Again, it's not the you will have the user experience because you're getting in the platform and trying it and seeing how things this differs, but you'll be highly supported, right? Because nothing's ever as hard as your first one and you would hate to make a decision off of struggles with your first one that you won't have with your third, et cetera. We did it quickly. At the same time, we built an actual business case where we weren't just talking about there's an increase in quality. It was like, well, what does that actually mean? What risks does that mitigate? Put that in dollars and cents. She had a very good sense of what the approval process was going to be. And she did her for ranking, or however you pronounce it, so that by the time that meeting happened, everybody was aware of what was coming. Nobody was getting something sprung on them. And it went through. There were no surprises. Nobody felt like they had to make a big show of resistance. It was great. And it was great for her organization. And quite honestly, it was great for my organization too. We were absolutely thrilled to have them on board. Very large transaction happened very quickly compared to everything else. But I think one of the key things there, and I touched on it very briefly, was this idea of a business case. And Ken purposefully left some of the details out on that because I don't want to spill somebody else's business, right? I no longer work for that company. I no longer am involved in that particular project, so I don't want to share that. If you've been enjoying the conversations here on Pharma Sessions, you should know they're made possible by the team at Xunt. XSunt helps life sciences companies turn complex data into clear, actionable insight. For years, XSunt has made complicated data sets simple to help commercial, medical, and operations teams map what's happening, predict what's next, and make stronger decisions faster. And now there's an added AI layer that makes everything work so much better. I was actually pretty jaded about some of the AI approaches I had seen, but when XSunt showed me theirs, I actually left my job to come work for them. It's really awesome. So if you want to understand your market, your customers, or your performance with more clarity than ever, check out xsunt.com. That's xsunt.com. All right, let's jump back into the episode. What I will share is a business case that I recently did at my current company. And maybe some of the plus the differences between what a good business case looks like versus a weak business case. So, what this specific thing is talking about was this client wanted to move from Power BI to our reporting platform, X1. They saw it, they loved it, like, oh, this is gonna make my life much better. I think it's better for my team, blah, blah, blah. How do we do that? A weak business case would be this will improve efficiency. This will give better visibility. This will modernize reporting. This will integrate AI. These are all abstract. They're true, but they're abstract, and pharma leaders really hear them every day. So what we did was we we actually talked about what does a day in the life look like, right? So this is again field team reporting software. When you go with on a ride along with a rep, oftentimes they start by pulling into a Duncan or a Pranera or something like that, and they spend an hour planning through their day. This person, in talking with their team, estimated savings of about two to three hours per rep per week. They've got 200 reps. Why? There's easier UI, there's this like it's AI interface, it just is much better user experience. Power BI takes a long time to build, et cetera. And we have some stuff where you can chat with them while you're driving, right? You can ask things via SMS. It's just not we're not claiming huge, huge things, but could you justify savings? It was their estimate of two hours per rep per week. Yeah. But we reframed that. And because for them, what they said is okay, two hours to three hours a week, that's kind of going to get a so what response. So they reframed it as the difference between two and a half calls per day and three calls per day. Again, not a huge justification, but when you actually do that math and quantify it, which they did, 125 more calls per rep per year, 50 weeks in the year, right? 200 reps, that's 25,000 calls. That's the equivalent of 40 additional reps. We sort of stop there, right? Because sometimes the numbers start to get a little bit silly. And my take on this is you could be like, oh yeah, well, the average rep has has territory, call it $10 million or whatever their territory is, right? Are you really going to claim that better reporting is going to get you $400 million? No, I don't think that's realistic, right? But really what how they presented it is this is the math of where we think we're going to see actual changes in behavior. Take our estimates, cut them by, cut them by 80%. We're still doing okay. So I think the key insight is, you know, executives aren't buying time savings. They're buying revenue impact, they're buying headcount equivalents. The less you are forcing them to use your their imagination, the better off you'll be. So you're translating efficiency into calls, revenue, market share, headcount, et cetera. It should be something your CFO can repeat in a sentence. And I think the other piece that is important is creating an understanding that adoption will follow. So that gets back to that earlier example of building a scrum team, right? How are you going to prove that? How are you going to get feedback from the end users and do that in your business case? That's really sort of the crux of what I want to share. It is when you're trying to implement change, make sure you understand what's important to the various people that are involved in that. Take what you think are going to be the benefits and translate that into speak where you're not asking people to make logical leaps. You're really putting numbers and estimates in front of them that are justifiable. You can feel confident and say, okay, well, this is my estimate. Cut it in half, see what happens. You need to make sure that innovation can be both innovative, but also feel safe at the same time. Right. Because it should be, right? No, the numbers are so big in pharma, right? Nobody can is putting it all on black and spinning spinning the wheel. We need to have good reasons for doing what we're doing, but then make it really tangible as part of this. Not save you each of our reps two hours a week. It'll give each person an extra half call a day. It'll take us from 12 visits a week to 15 visits. Whatever you actually believe, these are the terms that people are used to thinking about. And if you can do this and get buy-in ahead of time, there's a much much more likelihood of success of introducing something new that hopefully you're very excited about. So, all right, I'll leave it at there. Just something I've been thinking about, something I wanted to share, and I hope people find it useful. Take care. This episode of Pharma Sessions is sponsored by Xunt, makers of the X1 reporting platform. And that's a wrap on today's episode of Pharma Sessions with me, Jonathan Kaske. If you enjoyed today's conversation, don't forget to hit follow or subscribe and share it with someone else in the pharma world who might need to hear it. For more on pharma trends, career growth, and business strategies, connect with me, Jonathan Kaske, on LinkedIn. Until next time, thanks for listening.