Pharma Sessions
Navigating pharmaceutical launch excellence through strategy, technology and career stories. (And sharing fun moments too!)
Pharma Sessions
Sales Leadership Mastery: People + Tech
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Pharma Sessions is hosted by Jonathan Kaskey
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If it is overwhelmingly directionally correct, it's doing a really good job. Nothing's going to be perfect, but if it overwhelmingly, you know, is correct, we're doing well. It can help us, certainly can be a co-pilot, immunity towards any trademark, their trademark here, immunity. It can be a co-pilot in regards to helping us. And then the learning for me is how to help people blend that artificial intelligence with what they believe to be true on the ground.
SPEAKER_01Hello, hello, and welcome to Pharma Sessions, a place for pharmaceutical leaders to come and learn from each other. I'm your host, Jonathan Kaske. 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. Good morning. On today's episode of Pharma Sessions, I'm thrilled to welcome Trevor Landry, a dynamic and seasoned sales leader with over 25 years of experience in driving product launches and revenue growth across the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. Trevor is currently the executive director of CNS Sales at Atsuka, where he leads a national field team focused on treating agitation associated with dementia. As always, the views here are own and not those of our respective employers. So with that, welcome to the show, Trevor. Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it. Absolutely. Before I even jump into any of the questions, I always start with a little icebreaker. So it's about 10 a.m. Eastern. It's 9 a.m. central down in New Orleans. What have you had to eat so far today?
SPEAKER_02Oh wow. I've had one protein shake, two scoops, and then some milk and stirred it up like on the heartbeat, and probably like four or five cups of coffee.
SPEAKER_01Four or five cups of coffee. Oh my goodness. All right. So we should be rolling through this. You know what's so funny? I've asked that to a bunch of people. A lot of people will skip the food part. Nobody skips the coffee part.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01It's required. So you've been in the sales game for a while, but before that, actually, this being behind a mic is probably pretty natural to you. Tell us a little bit about your early experiences in media.
SPEAKER_02So long dead dreams of uh play-by-play voice for some university for 30 years. That that died at some point. But there was dreams of whether it be on ESPN or dreams of being a play-by-play guy on the radio for someplace for you know your entire career and you do everything you can to pursue it. And at some point, life just you never know what to expect. And you go from being a local media, you know, television sports anchor on the local news to suddenly you find yourself in pharmaceutical sales uh in a matter of couple months. Like, wow, this was a significant change.
SPEAKER_01I love that dream though, because if you watch sports, especially local sports, sometimes the local play-by-play guy almost feels like it's part of a family. Like when I was up in Boston, I think I heard Jerry Rabbit speak for more hours than literally some of my own family. And now I'm watching the Sixers and it's Kate and Allah in the every evening, and they they add so much to it. So I love that as dream, even though hey, it's not too late. Maybe that's your next go.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I would seriously, but you know what? Thanks.
SPEAKER_01All right. So you've been doing the sales leadership for a bit now, and how has your approach evolved over the years? And today I'm sure we'll we'll talk a lot about kind of data, AI, and and the future from a mindset standpoint, continue to evolve as things change.
SPEAKER_02So it has been a while. And at the same time, you look back, you think about the teams that maybe you started with, and you're like, oh my goodness, I probably made so many mistakes back when I was a young leader and a new leader, and you're you're thrown into this. At the same time, there are a couple of things that have remained the same, which is great, about authenticity and putting people first as much as you can. Those are some leadership characteristics that have remained true. What has evolved over time, I think, is perspectives. And you know, you start out as a frontline leader, you have a team of seven reps, and you have this bubble that you exist in, and it's just a completely different mindset. It was all about those seven folks and what it was for that. As you move through the progression within the organizations and now at several different organizations, you see things through an entirely different lens. You look at things from the bottom line PL, you look at things from revenue growth, sustainability, how to impact larger groups, not just the seven or eight folks that you have, at the same time trying your best to remain true to those leadership qualities that you believed in in the beginning and they're still true. There's something and like what are some of those qualities? I do believe in authenticity. What you see is what you get from me. Um, I believe in the people side of it is that you have to help people grow and help them meet their personal and professional goals. It's not about me, it's about them and helping them grow. And if you continue to remember that, despite the things I said about perspectives and all the bottom lines of the business, you'll continue to be able to connect with them in their heart and in their mind. And that is what helps you inspire and motivate people. The last is building cultures of trust so that especially when you have leaders of leaders, or you know, I'm leading leaders of teams, second and third line. The teams that work with me, my leadership teams, it's incredibly important that I build trust among us because we're gonna have tough discussions, we're not always gonna agree. How do you have those discussions and walk out of that room in full alignment and still liking each other and still like each definitely?
SPEAKER_01And I think that's something to that, and this was when I think kind of when I first became started managing people, I was fortunate enough to work for a really good CEO, and he was talking about both of those things. So one of them was I think the way that he sort of framed it was assume good intentions, like assume everybody wakes up, right? We all know our goals and we're all trying to actively work towards those goals. So if somebody's doing something different, it's usually not because they're dumb or lazy or anything. It's maybe they just have a different perspective. But the other thing was about the culture of trust is it's like if you ever mislead somebody, that relationship is pretty much toast. Yeah, that is really hard to come back from, right? And I actually just had this with somebody on my team. He was asking me uh for something really kind of related to money. Like it was kind of a squishy situation around who's eligible for what bonus. And I was pretty honest with him where it's like, listen, I will have this conversation. I have to present it honestly, and my perspective is not a hundred percent aligned with yours. And I feel like that just felt like the way that you have to do things because you can accept that, right? You can understand that and that we could have a little conversation, but the last thing you want to do is like, yes, I'm going to back for you 100%. And then you go and you're squishy about it and gets back to that person, and then that you just can't come back.
SPEAKER_02That is so true. Early days, it was funny. I just became a frontline leader. I picked up a book. You've heard of them, Patrick Flincy owned five dysfunctions of a team. I still use that five dysfunction pyramid as the basis of what I do 20 plus years later. And it's so simple, but yet it still resonates. And most people have read it, and of course, he's built every single book on it since. But it's amazingly how it builds out of that. And where we land today is clarity, simplicity, and you get alignment. And if you can do those three things well, especially the leader when you're leading large teams, you can provide clarity, you can simplify things and gain alignment amongst your leadership team. You're gonna do pretty well.
SPEAKER_01One of my previous guests, she leads, I think, data sales analytics for uh Shinogi, and she talked about she wants a goal that's so simple you can say it in a sentence. And so that idea of clarity, it's like, what is your goal? How do we get alignment? It can't be a screed, right? It needs to be a couple bullet points, right? Like super, super tight. And then all the strategies or the tactics that roll up to that start to become much more clear as to why you're doing things. And then that helps bring in alignment as you're bringing change, right? And you're saying, I want you to do something different for certain reasons. And it's people understand that, right? If they understand the goals.
SPEAKER_02To build on your point, and it goes to when you talk in the broader organization, the same goes for any of the cross-functional teams in some future discussions. Nobody wakes up with the intention of, I'm going to confuse the heck out of people today, or I'm going to make it so complicated for people to do their job. Everyone has good intentions, whether it's the tools and resources they bring, what they're trying to add value to, you know, their co-partners in the organization. However, sometimes all of that funnels down to a few individuals. And, you know, as a commercial leader, it's usually the sales team who is then everything good is funneling down to them, but it becomes a lot. So that's where the clarity and the simplicity really helps is become that middle person to help clarify and simplify all of the good stuff that folks want to do for the sales organization and make it simple and digestible.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. And so, so you've spoken in the past about the importance of incorporating digital components and AI into sales strategy. What techniques have you taken to do that that sort of align with that simplification? Because it can go one of two ways, right? It could be a lot of digital noise, or it can use it to hone in and really get people focused on the right areas.
SPEAKER_02It has been a learning journey for me, as it I'm sure it is for a lot. Um, I think what I've learned over time, it started simple with me now. I will be honest. On the social media side and all of that, I'm probably the last. My kids are doing all the social media apps, and you know, I'm still saying, hey, you're in my space. All right, come on down. It did take me a while. And then you do realize a couple of things, and I'll just probably ground this and into a bucket of three. If it is overwhelmingly directionally correct, it's doing a really good job. Nothing's going to be perfect, but if it overwhelmingly three-quarters of the time is correct, we're doing well. It can help us. It may not be the only pilot, but it is certainly can be a co-pilot, immunity towards any trademark. It can be another trademark here, immunity. It can be a co-pilot in regards to helping us make better decisions, which become makes us more efficient, helps us in the best spot more often, and puts us in the higher places of ROI. The learning for me is how to help people blend that artificial intelligence or that type of guidance with what they believe to be true on the ground. And those two might be distant. They seem very distant, but in reality, they can actually be a lot closer than you think.
SPEAKER_01Let's sit on that last part, right? Because convince a lot of it comes down to change management, right? And convincing sales reps to trust data and segmentation, especially if it contradicts some of their instincts or some of their past experiences, uh, can be a challenge. So, what strategies do you use to ensure buy-in and shift mindsets honestly towards a more data-driven approach?
SPEAKER_02I think transparency is important, first of all, in that it is helpful. It's almost necessary to share with people what is as much as you can, because some of it's complicated. What is behind the data? When you receive a certain amount of input, whether it's next best actions or dynamic targeting, what are the factors that have led to that output? And it helps people feel more comfortable and it gets their hands around what that is. The second part is when you can celebrate the wins. What does that look like for you? What that looks like is let's talk about mindset change for a moment. You might be asking individuals to go to a segment of customers that are more difficult to access, more challenging, but we know and all of the data supports that they have a longer runway. There is significant ROI because the population that they can treat or the ecosystem they environment that they operate in is significantly deeper. When you're able to produce wins in those customer segments, whether it's individual groups or what have you, and it leads to that longer term sustainability or factors such as depth versus just where we can broadcast those, celebrate those, demonstrate and make and have those individuals who've done that become mouthpieces, showcases for that type and put it in plain speak. Why were you skeptical at first? What did the data or the AI or the next best actions tell you to do? What did you do? And talk about the win. And then over time, you can see the longevity of their success, come back to it and show that this is not just a quick burst. There is longevity in the success for these type of individuals.
SPEAKER_01There's somebody that is on the team here that he actually came from BMS and he was killer sales rep, actually, one of the salesperson of the year, but he has this great story of them kind of doing that. So the situation was he's in a, I think, a mirrored territory, right? Where it's him and another rep are calling on a certain set of providers. The data suggested that there was one that was treating an ideal patient population and was writing competitors left and right and just not writing their product. He kind of took that as a personal challenge and was like, listen, we're not calling on this person because they're hard to talk to and they don't really like talking to us, but they should be because it would be really good for the patients, et cetera. And he's like, I'm gonna make an omission to stop by there on a whatever the cadence was and just make this happen. Eventually that person became a major writer for the team. This is like a huge value, right? In the $10 million plus because it was a really expensive product. Him and it, this partner, right, got to go to Hawaii. They get on the president's club, they make him the person that goes and talks to all of the other teams about how to use data for sales strategy and what it's done for him personally. Then he shifted to analytics. And it was actually kind of like a defining moment of the trajectory of his career was having this understanding that honestly in pharma sales, your needs change, right? It's like if you've launched something, you need to hit a certain set of providers. At some point, those providers are kind of capped out, right? Like they're either writing you or not, and they may like talking to you, but you kind of need to push outside your comfort zone and find those others. And so the question then becomes like, well, how are you identifying those others based on what? And that's I think where data can play a really big part.
SPEAKER_0220 years ago, when you're leading that originally, we joked about that small young leader who's you know leading a district. We pretty much looked at targeting as look at the competitor market and then say, okay, here's a market size based on competitors or in your space. Therefore, that's a good target. And that was at the extent of probably how we looked at things. The beauty of this data that we're talking about is you can incorporate yes, market size, but you can incorporate beliefs in terms of how you treat. There's obviously a payer mix. There is insights that can only come from some of this where you collates it and integrates it into the model. There's also the component of the omnichannel. Do they respond? And what does that provider respond to? Those are things that a simple spreadsheet of competitors can't tell anyone. That's where I think harnessing that power into one output that can help you lead to those more, those deeper ponds or better, if you will.
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SPEAKER_01And so are you looking, where is artificial intelligence factoring into this? Is a pretty complex scenario and it could be approached by like a traditional big data approach. It could be AI in any numbers of those. Where are you looking at AI factoring in?
SPEAKER_02So there are two, it seems to surface itself for me. One is actually on the target list that you had and what has generated that target list. I firmly believe and know that AI has played a factor in creating the segmentation. So we take whatever the customers might be in your geography and you put a label on it. It's usually based on some type of mix between beliefs, insights, treatment algorithms, and of course, the mix of patients that they see and competitors and so forth that they write. You prioritize yourself into however many segments. We have three. I had uh four tiers at the other organization that I worked with. One of those or two of those segments or tiers are going to be the most important, both to value short-term business and long-term sustainability. That's one way it can manifest itself. The other is on this concept of the next best action, which is a little more dynamic, where there are other factors, everything I just talked about, but also did they open up a rep-triggered email? Did they respond well to something omnichannel and a non-personal type of promotion? Or did they write without even having a call or an engagement with a sales representative? Then you become into this different category where the constant, I'm gonna call it AI, we're gonna just call it, tells the individual that you should go here. This is ideally what the next best action should be, and this is why. The individual can then accept and act on that or ignore the suggestion. Those are two ways I think it's trickled down for the sales representative to feel that almost.
SPEAKER_01That makes a lot of sense. And it's always interesting to me where I think pharma sometimes has a really good opportunity to look at the way other industries are managing some of these types of things. So what comes to mind is you're describing that. Like I've always been on the vendor side working essentially for tech startups. And that what you're describing is not new at all. If you're in a non-regulated industry, like there are if somebody hits your website that call it lead scoring rate, like that bumps them up a little bit. Then if they respond to our version of a retro record email, that bumps them up and eventually they hit a threshold. It's like, okay, this person merits some attention. So I'm just wondering when you're talking with your marketing people or some of your contacts across these organizations, how often are they looking outside the industry for things where there are less constraints, right? If you're not in the pharma world, so they're able to be a bit farther advanced with some of this digital understanding of the people they're trying to talk to.
SPEAKER_02Excellent question. And one that I would say I don't know for sure how much they're looking outside. I would make the large, small assumption or easy assumption that they are. Where I've really seen the merging of the two is probably taking a lot of that outside influence and exactly what you're talking about, this lead generation, is the responses and the click rate, the open rate to the variety of different inputs and touch points that Pharma now is exploring with customers. That's probably where I've seen a larger integration and getting to a point where we're using all the resources that we have and all those touch points to make better decisions on customers that could be open to us. And then categorizing some of these as digital only promotion or non-personal only promotion, and as opposed to wasting or spending the time of a sales rep, very valuable FTE time on these Yolloi customers. Let's put them in the non-promotional category. I'm assuming that a lot of that influence is coming from outside portions or other industries.
SPEAKER_01I would think so, right? Because it's almost like what you said at the very beginning about, you know, I'm not on any social media. So you might have the best Instagram targeting in the world. I'm looking for a couch. You have perfect couch ads that are hitting exactly what I'm going for. I'm not seeing it, right? Just because that's not a channel that I choose to engage with. And doctors are are the same way, right? Like some of them are not accepting a visit, some of them, I don't know, go to Doxibia or whatever. And so I think that that to me is also where it gets really interesting, is there is all that segmentation, but I feel like that is still an opportunity with Omnichannel today, is understanding where those different people are living. Because we all have our habits and usually we follow the same habits on a pretty regular basis.
SPEAKER_02Those are investments to be made. I mean, you just brought doximity, but depending on the therapy area that you're operating in, the HCPs that are the most engaged in that particular therapy are probably utilizing, whether it be, you know, various sites, associations, they're using you within their EMRs that's created just tremendous amounts of promotional opportunities, but engagement platforms that are going to target smaller specific groups, it's not going to hit the mass group. It's such precision of what's happening in all channels, including the promotional channel. It's definitely more precision targeting that we're doing.
SPEAKER_01And what's so interesting, so this might be a little bit of inside baseball from the other side. But so for example, when I was at Hippocrates, right, which is a major place that Pharma spends advertising budget, at the time, this is like 10 years ago or something. So I'm sure it's fine. But CMI, who's one of the big agencies, was what they were really trying to force everybody to open up their data so that they could be like this aggregator and say, okay, yeah, we can compare apples to apples, Hippocrates to WebMD to Medscape or whatever, right? And none of the vendors wanted to do that because like there's a lot of money to be made in that opacity of data. I have no idea where it's ended up. I've kind of left that space, but it's like some of these things are such so good in theory, and then you get down to the nuts and bolts of it, and like it doesn't pan out. And sometimes it's because of conflicting interests, right? Or Other things. So it's just this is to me one of the most interesting things about the pharmaceutical commercial world is just like how complicated it is. Because there's so many ways that things can go wrong no matter what your plan is. Bringing it back to this conversation, a lot of the stuff you kind of want to adjust in in real time, right? Or as close to real time as you can. So how do you weigh that? How do you weigh, okay, this seems like a really good strategy? We're gonna put let it play out versus let's look at how this is actually working and when do we need to adjust? How do you manage that balance?
SPEAKER_02That's it probably the toughest one because at some point you have to have this agility, but when does agility override any type of ability to just find out if we're what we're doing works? You know this. Anyone? It does take a little bit of time. It takes a little bit of time to change habits, it takes a little bit of time to make impact. The world that we're operating in, access takes time. I call it scheduled access, right? I can't do a lunch for a month. That might be the first time. That's a month from now. Do I want to change my strategy before that without getting stale? To answer that question, right up front, you need to know, or at least I've tried to become clear back to that clarity and simplicity, be very clear of what are we trying to impact by doing X. For example, in the segmentation at the current organization, there are three. The first, we have nearly everyone in that segment has tried the product once. That's great. So your breath component, the breath of prescribers, that's a checkbox. We don't even need to worry about that. Where they fall in short is it's not a lot of depth. There has not been a lot of repeat writing. There's your marker of what you want to accomplish by doing whatever the strategy might be. So if we consider that there is a capacity of work that exists for any individual, field sales rep, for example, deprioritizing that activity from low-value targets or low value customers and reprioritizing that into these high value, if that indeed drives that debt component, which in this case is what your end goal is. It's a very simple, measurable goal. Give yourself six months. I'm making that up. You know, give yourself three like utilizing the segmentation, the reallocation of effort or call activity, and any of the resources that might be associated with this. And if that's Nest Best Actions or whatever might be the set that time limit and make a decision quickly and firmly based on the inputs and the results at that three, six month time frame. And if it doesn't work, move off of it. It's okay, but fail fast, fail forward, all those good sayings are very true. Do not stick something that's still, but I think it's very clearly identifying what you're trying to accomplish up front. And it can't be very complicated.
SPEAKER_01It needs to be one or two things. And I think there's some element of what are the leading indicators to where you're getting some direction. Because in the example you gave, you know, even if somebody can't meet for a month, if you're tracking, well, they agreed to a meeting, so there's some level of interest there, right? Then you know things uh a month sooner. And at that three, six month time frame, whatever it is, it's not, it's hopefully not necessarily a complete surprise how things are going well or not. And the other thing that I think feel like is a bit dangerous with the fail fast thing, although I do think there's a ton of value there, is it it almost like creates this binary mindset of like, well, did it succeed or did it fail? And it's usually a little bit more great where you still have to make a decision. There's nobody with a sign that says you failed, move on, right? It's like, well, it's kind of working, it's not quite everything, and you still have to make a decision at the end of the day. And I feel like that's where the very human element is really, really important to, I don't know, have those conversations and use all that trust that you were talking about earlier and really dig in and try to figure out if this work or not.
SPEAKER_02There's um, because there's change management that comes with that to your point. Every time you change, you're having to resell, retell the story, get recreate the buy-in. I think it's probably a little bit of depending on your organization, your tenure in your role, the tenure of your leadership team. I think that the one thing it's not talked enough about is the probably a different topic, but it's you know, the quality of the leaders that work in for me, the quality of the leaders, both the frontline and second line leaders, you know, do you are they skilled enough, tenured enough to be able to be agile like this? If they are, that might change your decision. If they're not, that may put some limitations on the other thing. To the leading indicator part is a great one. I think that you can wait around for X amount of time for prescription habits to change, behaviors to change. But what about the activity as the best leading indicator? Are you shifting your efforts promotionally from the deep prioritized, low value customers? That's something you can see almost on a daily basis, right? When you look at the type of work, you can see that in real time. Are we making instantaneous seismic shifts to placing the allocation of time and resource from the low to the high priority targets that we're seeking impact?
SPEAKER_01That was an interesting learning when I started working at this current company, which does a lot of sales dashboarding and stuff like that, is the amount of time that sales leaders just spend looking at the execution data. The changes might not even be that big, right? It might go from like 7% to 8%, but they pay a lot of attention to that. There's like multiple dashboards built into that to make sure that the strategy is getting pulled through all the way down to a rep level. So let me just ask you on the, because you had mentioned leading leaders, right? Which of you like better, or which should you find maybe easier? Leading a sales team of doers or leading a team of managers?
SPEAKER_02I love them both. I have truly valued the leading leaders on two different fronts. One, it becomes about storytelling for a lot of the leaders and helping and brainstorming and learning from them. How do you frame up various situations to impact the greater collective? When you're leading a smaller team, it's it's easy to kind of five or six people and you have individuals, but when you start broadening that out, I love that experience because that's what it's all about. Telling stories, being able to shape situations into one that gets people's buy-in. The other part is helping coaches grow. I learn every day. I'm always uh I've been lucky and blessed in my career to be with really great teams. I have one now, I've had one in the past. I learn from them every day. And at the same time, hopefully, I impart some of my experiences, both my successes and my failures, into this group that we can learn and grow together. And watching the light bulbs go off with leaders as you kind of bring them up to see different perspectives in the organization is so rewarding. It truly is so, and then hopefully they move on and do things that they want to to fulfill their career and other aspects of leadership. So I'd probably lean toward the latter group, but they book a fantastic mocker.
SPEAKER_01Well, that feels like a great place to end the conversation, Trevor. And I appreciate your time, and it was a pleasure talking to you today. Thank you for having me. 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.