Pharma Sessions
Pharma Sessions
How Shionogi's VP Turns Data into Commercial Success
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Pharma Sessions is hosted by Jonathan Kaskey
Follow along on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonkaskey/
Or join the Pharma Sessions Substack:
www.pharmasessions.substack.com
We recognized, so we had done some pretty sophisticated analytics looking at our sampling strategy. They're not really going to know what to do with that. So we need to translate that into something tangible. So the first thing we did was we developed kind of a ratio to understand, all right, what's the ideal number of samples to leave and what ends up happening when you start leaving more, or what happens when you start leaving less? So we distilled it down to a very simple ratio of three to one. Three samples tops, don't leave more than that for a physician.
SPEAKER_00Hello, 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. Good morning, Ani. How are you today?
SPEAKER_01Good morning, Jonathan. Great. How are you doing?
SPEAKER_00I'm doing wonderful. So it's a pleasure to welcome you to the show. For those that don't know Ani, I'm thrilled to have her. Ani's an accomplished executive commercial leader with over 15 years of experience in pharma and biotech. This has covered strategy, launches, growth, both at startups and big pharma, which are perspectives that I love to have on the show. And what we're really going to focus on is kind of drawing out the passion about using analytics to turn market intelligence into actionable, patient-focused results. So currently vice president of commercial operations at Shinogi, although, as always, the views here reflect our own and not those of our employers. So welcome to the show, Ani.
SPEAKER_01Thank you so much for having me.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. The last time we met was at a conference in Philadelphia. And I think when we left, we were looking at somebody had set up a puppy booth.
SPEAKER_01I was just going to say it was all about the puppies. And then apparently they were competing with an audience for my talk. And then there was also champagne that was flowing. And I'm like, I can't compete with puppies at sample.
SPEAKER_00It's tough. Although not to nitpick, I think their definition of puppy was a little generous because some of those dogs uh, you know, had some great mouths, but still, you know, who can complain? They were still super cute. Excellent. All right. So let's dive in, right? Because you have a little bit of a unique background. Can you take me through your path? What drew you to the pharmaceutical biotech industry? How you got to this point in your career?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, no, happy to. So when you refer to my unique background, it's because again, I don't have an MBA. I actually have an MPhil, and I was doing my doctoral work in microbiology. So that's really kind of the start of, you know, the story of Ani, if you will. I was firmly expecting to be a scientist. And that's why I kind of dove into laboratory work and laboratory research when I was in undergrad. And then, of course, went into a doctoral program thinking that was going to be my destiny. And in all fairness, when I started thinking about a career in pharma, it was really driven by a consulting gig that I had while I was in graduate school. So me starting to understand the ability to ask a question, but then kind of break it apart, answer individual parts, and then put it all back together for an answer. That was effectively what I was doing as a scientist. But it was just a completely different question that I was now being exposed to and a different type of answer that I was now being exposed to. And for me, that was very exciting. And I think that's really what propelled my interest in biopharma, biotech. At the time, I thought I would stay in consulting. So I kind of finished my degree and then ended up in consulting. But what was interesting for me there is I always thought a career in pharma potentially would be on the scientific side. So maybe a little bit more RD and I would be consulting in that way. A lot of the work I was getting as a consultant was all on the commercial side, as you can imagine. And so I started to really shift my thinking, recognizing that my background in science, even though my pipetting skills were not going to get me to where I wanted to go, but it was actually my analytical capability that would help me get to where I wanted to go. And that's really what kind of propelled my interest in my career in pharma. I mean, I've been, again, very, very fortunate. I've had people who have believed in me along the way, given me chances. And as a result, ended up in commercial operations today. Very up and down kind of journey through analytics, market access, global, US, launch, mature, small company, big company, a lot of different channels and methods by which I got to this point today where I'm sitting and talking to you. But I think again, when I look back on it, that was really the uh linchpin for me. That was really the turning point.
SPEAKER_00I think that's a fascinating story. And selfishly, it makes me very happy to hear because I actually just hired somebody with a PhD in biochemistry for to join my team on the analytics side. So do you see? I mean, you went a lot of places before you ended up in analytics, but I would imagine so much of your graduate work was dealing with statistics, right? And like trying to find truth and data. Do you see a direct parallel there? Or am I kind of just making leaps and reaches?
SPEAKER_01No, I think actually you bring up a great point. So candidly, so the work that I was doing and in graduate school, the research was in bacterial genetics. So even though it was in under the umbrella of microbiology, I was really looking to understand the role of a very specific protein in basically antibiotic resistance and antibiotic resistance mechanisms. Now, statistics didn't really play a role in that. It was definitely a data-driven discussion, as you can imagine, and the data-driven project, where I draw the parallel to what I do today or what I think I was able to distill from that work and that kind of skill set that I built to what I can do today is problem solving and really recognizing, like, okay, there's a question. It doesn't matter what the question is, but do you know how to approach answering that question? Are you going to approach it in a very kind of shotgun method and just ask a whole bunch of additional questions and get confused and then not really know how to piece together all this random information that you collected? Or do you have the ability to be very structured and thoughtful about how you answer that question so that each piece of evidence you collect actually is helping you get closer to a sustainable answer. That to me is the tremendous value in the skill set that I gained as a graduate student and in doing scientific research.
SPEAKER_00Well, there's something there too about feel like a really good commercial analytics team gets good at telling a simplified story because there's endless reams of data that pharma is looking for. Let's say somebody's coming to you and they've got some launch initiatives. Where do you start? Right. And how are you supporting your commercial organization from an analytics perspective?
SPEAKER_01That's the question I'm asking every day. And if we're seeing breathing at right now, but the simple way to answer that question, Jonathan, is when somebody comes to me with a launch initiative, I usually uh distill it down to two things. The first is like who is the launch initiative aimed at to? Like who's the key stakeholder, who's the key customer, who's the key uh object, if you will. And then the second thing is what are you looking to achieve with what what behavior or what outcome are you looking to drive? And then based on those two answers, we can start to craft the analytical plan, if you will, to either support or negate what that initiative is. A lot of the analytics we do is really to understand our customer base and our stakeholder base and understand kind of what they're looking for. And then hopefully we can find solutions to match what they're looking for or to even be better than what they were expecting. A lot of it starts with understanding kind of what the goals of the marketing team or the brand team in this case really are. And then also to some extent, you know, the organization as a whole.
SPEAKER_00When we had met at that conference, you had talked about this idea of essentially helping your team or your cross-functional teams come up with a go-to-market plan that can be explained in say three sentences. Can you give me an example of what that might look like and then how that helps analytics to support that plan?
SPEAKER_01So it was funny. I was thinking about this question. So I'll draw on some experience from a couple companies ago where we recognized, so we had done some pretty sophisticated analytics looking at our sampling strategy. And one thing we uncovered uh pretty clearly is that the field wasn't, they didn't really have a strategy around sampling. So what ended up happening was we were oversampling quite a few positions. And in a way, we were probably hurting our actual, you know, kind of paid script volume because we were oversampling in the way we were. So, in terms of how do we translate something complicated like that into a three-sentence, so maybe not a go-to-market strategy, but I'll say like a change the market strategy. How about that? So, what we ended up doing was we tied the oversampling to their incentive comp plan and helped the field really understand. So we first started, so it was really a three-prong approach. So I'll take it one prong at a time. So the first thing was how do we distill down this complex kind of finding? So just telling the field you're oversampling, they're not really going to know what to do with that. So we need to translate that into something tangible. So the first thing we did was we developed kind of a ratio to understand, all right, what's the ideal number of samples to leave and what ends up happening when you start leaving more, or what happens when you start leaving less? And are there different kinds of combinations or permutations of that that we can share? So we distilled it down to a very simple ratio of three to one. Three samples tops, don't leave more than that per physician. Great. Prong number two, it was all about communication. So now we had to have a communication strategy to the field. This is a really important part of the go-to-market strategy or the distilling down into three sentences. You have to make sure you have a good communication plan and you have to bring people along and have the right influencers kind of influence with you. So it's almost like a cascading effect.
SPEAKER_00These are internal influencers you're referring to.
SPEAKER_01Yes, exactly. So in this case, we started with sales leadership. We explained to them kind of what was happening and we walked them through the full analysis. And then with their help, we kind of came up with, well, what was the messaging that we needed for the field and what was the plan to roll that out? But then the third prong of it was again distilling that message down into something super simple that the field could understand. And that's where the tie-in to incentive comp came in. We basically said, hey guys, look, if you oversample or you don't provide this ideal ratio of sampling, guess what? You're actually hurting your incentive comp because you're giving Grady scripts for free and you're preventing them from writing because their closets are stuffed with samples. That was candidly one of the most effective changes and campaigns ever. I mean, yes, this was a product that was a fairly mature product. So it's not exactly a go-to-market strategy, but as I said, it was like a change the market strategy. It's okay, let's help sales organization make sure they're really set up for success.
SPEAKER_00I love that story because it touches on a number of things. It's like you're treating your sales or your commercial field team kind of as partners, where you're explaining the rationale, right? And then you're kind of touching on the emotional element of it, with you having the influencers who are theoretically people that are trusted and known getting behind it. And then practically, it was literally the first day of business school that they said, like, don't incentivize somebody to do A if what you want them to do is B. So it's like you're looking at it and saying, okay, we really believe in this, but also you should really believe in this too, because it's going to affect your compensation at the end of the day. So I think that's a really, and it's so clear. It's like you look at all of these reams of data with everything that you're going after, and then you're coming up with the number of three. So I think that's really great. I mean, it's worked with a lot of salespeople and hired a lot of salespeople. I think sometimes we, I'll put myself in that bucket, have a tendency to be people pleasers. And you can very easily, I can see how oversampling can happen because it's like, well, these are the doctors that like me. They take my appointments. I want to keep them happy. And it's like, well, that's not actually the job, right? That's part of the job, but that's not the whole job. That's very cool. So, what about like in in today's environment? Again, there's I think commercial analytics is so interesting because it's like everything could flow into that from how doctors are behaving online to what they're writing with prescription to call volume to NPP or rep triggered emails. Every touch point Congress advisory board flows into this. What's sort of the role, what's the role of technology in helping you parse through all of this these days and maybe not create your strategies, but implement your strategies or find those insights?
SPEAKER_01I get asked that question quite a bit. And and I think the way I always try to recontextualize it or reframe it for me is the technology should really enable one of two things. The first is it should help us get more efficient in what we're trying to do, or it should give us a competitive edge, or ideally both. And so when I think about all of the different, I'll say projects that we work on and all of the different analyses that we are responsible for. When I think about how technology is helping us, it's either helping us get better and faster at conducting those analytics. So this is where using cloud-based platforms and really bumping up our kind of analytical sandbox capabilities are so important. So that's a very technical technology kind of solution, if you will. But it is again important because one thing I've really spent some time educating any organization I've been in is if you hinder us with the wrong tools, we can't actually help you get to insights faster. You have to give us some of the tools, you have to enable us to have the right opportunities to actually do the work in order to be able to deliver what we need. But the other perspective from technology is well, how can we leverage technology to get to some of our stakeholders faster? So this is where when we think about digital initiatives, when we think about leveraging technology to engage with customers remotely, when we think about technology to enable very specific triggered messages to those stakeholders, whether it's on a personal or non-personal perspective. These are all elements of I'll say tech enables marketing campaigns that really are important for us to understand what the impact of it is, but then also for us to be able to measure and kind of look back and understand the effectiveness of them. It's kind of a twofold equation at that point. And so that's probably how I would answer like, how do we use tech to enable? I was like, some of it's really practical and some of it's a little bit more theoretical, or I'll say the art of the possible.
SPEAKER_00Have you seen that change over the last five years as far as what is possible and what's not possible? Or is it kind of just the same, getting to the same place faster?
SPEAKER_01That's a good question. Candidly, it's probably we're getting to the same place faster. I wouldn't necessarily say that there have been, you know, major kind of shifts in how we're really executing against some of the more basic, I'll say tenets of how we engage in pharma and how we work with our customers and our stakeholders, our patients or caregivers, et cetera. We become definitely more efficient and we become a lot more targeted and specific. So that one could argue is a way of improving and evolving the methods and the techniques. But fundamentally, we haven't really changed how we're approaching our stakeholders. We're still looking to obviously deliver the right message at the right time for the right person. It's just how do we get there?
SPEAKER_00Can I ask along those lines? One of the trends that I'm hearing talked about is sort of the rising importance of medical in this whole plan and a lot of companies starting to shift some more of the conversations from what might have traditionally been on the commercial side into the medical. And it seems like it's a very organization by organization thing of where that wall is between those groups and how much they're able to collaborate. So, what's your take on all of that? Because I have to, I feel like in some cases, it seems to me just talking to people, like some people don't want the commercial side to even know what the MSLs are doing. But it's like, well, if they're both talking to the same doctor, shouldn't they understand that? So, how do you look at that? And is that something that you think is legitimate, that trend?
SPEAKER_01So absolutely. I think it's a legitimate trend. And I am happy to see that as an industry, I think we're moving in that direction. Some companies, to your point, are obviously moving a little bit more rapidly than others. But in general, so my philosophy and my take on it is obviously compliance is king. Like we have to be compliant in all of our interactions, all of the information that's shared, potentially not sharing certain types of information, like all of that has to be, of course, front and center, because we want to protect the company, we want to protect the integrity of the folks that we are sending out there on behalf of the company. And of course, we want to protect the privacy of the information we collect. That being said, from a strategic standpoint, so medical plays such a powerful role. When you think about shaping the market, when you think about education, when you think about answering honest questions in a way that allows somebody to have a true dialogue with another medical professional, I can't underestimate or really extol their contribution really anymore. Like they are so, so critical to those very fundamental expectations when you kind of go into a market for the first time, or if you're in a market and you're continuing to evolve how people are thinking about that market. Where I'm seeing some really positive trends is where medical and commercial are at the same table and are actually reviewing some of the internal analytics together, which again, I think is completely compliant, completely reasonable. We're not one of the main issues is that we never want commercials to be directing medical. Medical is truly there from an education standpoint, from a scientific standpoint, and they have to keep that very closely protected, which makes sense. But there's no harm in us reviewing data together. There's no harm in us reviewing an internal analysis, talking about stakeholders and their behaviors and what they think. It's sometimes very valuable for medical to hear what the commercial organization is in fact learning. Again, we're not directing them, we're not telling them how to use it, but we're all singing from the same song sheet because we're all reviewing the exact same insights together, which I think is really important, really wonderful trend that I'm seeing.
SPEAKER_00These insights, these are things like gaps in educational understanding of the product. What is legitimate to share or what's allowable to share? I'm sure this is a company by company decision. What types of things can you talk about? And I'm and what is forbidden?
SPEAKER_01So it is company by company. So, you know, I'll keep it broad, but in general, what I'm typically, I'll speak for myself when I'm comfortable including medical. So we're doing market research. That's an area that I'm usually very comfortable including medical, just because, again, it's all double-blinded. We're not giving them the information and expecting them to do anything with it per se. But I think it is important for them to hear the voice of the customer and the voice of the stakeholder as we are asking those questions and then being able to kind of match that up or contextualize what they're hearing from their KOL customers. So I think there's value there. So market research is typically an area that I'm pretty comfortable sharing. I think another area is so in several companies I've been at, I've had to kind of build from the ground up a little bit of a background or in terms of, well, what's the actual market potential? What's the landscape of the market? So thinking about, you know, you do some pretty extensive claims analysis, you try to understand the journey of the patient, you try to understand prescribing behaviors, things like that. I'm always very comfortable including medical in those conversations because, again, it's information. It's it's not directive, it's not direction, it's insolution about the market. Again, if you have, and this is where it's a two-way street, if you have a medical affairs professional who is very analytically driven, who also understands that if you put prescription data in front of them, you're not doing anything wrong. You're simply telling them what the trends are. You're not pinpointing a specific physician and saying, wow, that person is a high doctor, or we need to go after them. No, we're not doing that. We're simply talking about this at a macro level to help us all understand. That's totally fine.
SPEAKER_00And because you can imagine a scenario where it's like, hey, these you have all sorts of data, right? These doctors are we're seeing these prescription trends amongst doctors that have patient populations that, you know, use Medicaid or whatever the example is, right? There might be different things that you have have available to share with them that can actually help them with their strategy and understand exactly how they can be providing more appropriate and informative messaging to people.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. And and again, I think the other thing I'll just point out, just to make sure I'm staying in compliant, and it also depends on who on the medical team you're including. So obviously, there are just like when you think about from a commercial standpoint, you're not going to share some of these more, I'll say, sensitive analyses or controversial analyses. You're not going to share them with the lowest common denominator on the field team. Similarly, you're not going to necessarily share all of this with everyone. Everyone in medical affairs. But if you have a strategic medical director who's aligned to your brand, well, that's probably the right level and the right person to share some of this with. They have the ability to contextualize what we're learning in home office versus what needs to be disseminated to the field.
SPEAKER_00Interesting. If you've been enjoying the conversations here on Pharma Sessions, you should know they're made possible by the team at Excent. XSunt helps life sciences companies turn complex data into clear, actionable insight. For years, Exunt 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'd 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 xunt.com. That's xsunt.com. All right, let's jump back into the episode. So let's uh just uh in the last couple minutes here. Can you share any examples of when all of this goes really, really well, right? Like you're collaborating with your teammates, you've got a clear strategy, your field is bought in, it's tied to their IC. What does it look like? And do you have any examples of using market intelligence to really empower field teams?
SPEAKER_01Again, I'll say I've been very lucky that I've worked with and worked for professionals who are just a lot of it comes from the top, right? You have to have, you know, your chief commercial officer really setting the expectation that everyone here is going to be working together and going to be talking to each other and sharing and learning from each other. And I think that learning part is really where I see the greatest success. Multiple companies I've worked at where I see different groups are sharing, but they're also including the right people at the table. So it is always a truly cross-functional discussion. And I'm also seeing those cross-functional folks who maybe didn't generate the work ask those questions and actively learn. And I think that's really where I see it the most successful. Again, it's hard to kind of tie some of that to things like performance and trajectories because every product and every launch is so different. But I would say that when I see the foundation being set in a really productive and constructive way, that's usually you're more likely to be successful at that point.
SPEAKER_00It is hard to tie it directly to that. And this is something that just like we struggle with at our company. Because for example, we have a reporting tool, right? And one of our clients said to have about $50 billion worth of products on it. And it's like, you can't sit there with a straight face and claim we did 10% of that as for us or 1% of it, right? We cannot claim that we're delivering $5 billion worth of value to this company. But at the same time, like there's an understanding that it is helping people to get out and do that, right? So, how do you look at in this space? This is a purely selfish question, creating a legitimate ROI story that you can tell for some for some of these tools when the dollars are so high on the pharma products.
SPEAKER_01That's a very fair question. Um, so probably I would answer it a couple different ways. So, first of all, I have the privilege of having been part of multiple kind of like data infrastructure and data management type of initiatives, which tend to be some of the most expensive projects that you're going to ever lead at a company. And unfortunately, they're not super sexy. So people don't really understand the value of it until they don't have it. And when they have experienced the pain of not having clean data or not having accessible data or not having master data or what have you, then they start to understand the value. But it usually that would take a while and probably leads to disaster. So you don't want to get them to that point. So backing up a little bit, so when I think about some of those larger initiatives that I've been a part of, I think where the ROI concept comes into play when you really start helping people understand not just the return on investment from a performance standpoint, which again can sometimes be a little bit tricky to do for things like that that are just so fundamental to the engine of the company. But the ROI concept really gets pulled through when you talk about time saved and you talk about ease to insights. So I think those are kind of the two main criteria that I use to communicate the value of something. So, for example, when we talk about when we talk about clean master data, again, that's a very technical concept. A lot of folks don't really understand what that means. And they're kind of like, honey, like, what are you talking about? So then I explained to them, okay, well, think about how much better it is for your field rep that instead of getting a drop-down list and they have literally 20 options of the same physician and they don't know which one to record the call against. Oh, and by the way, when they do that, if they pick one of the 20, but there's still 20 sitting out there, well, then how do you roll them all up to know that, okay, in fact, this rep has delivered this right number of calls to this physician as opposed to, well, it looks like they've delivered one call to 20 physicians. It's examples like that where when you give folks a very tangible, very practical example, but then also help them understand how that impacts the business overall and how you can then tie that information to others. Nothing is simple. That's the thing. Like none of this is simple. I can't just say A plus B equals C. But what I do need to be able to do is stepwise walk people through the value of step A, step B, step C. Then they start to get it and then they appreciate, okay, fine, this price tag, it's actually amortized over two million interactions. It's not a cost of, you know, one quarter. Oh my God, Ani's budget's out of control. It's more around, okay, well, this is the sustainable value that we're trying to build and we're trying to get in people.
SPEAKER_00I think that idea of ease to access information, it sort of reminds me, I had a different conversation with somebody in Access, and he had shared this like quote of vaccine has never helped a single person, of vaccination has helped millions of people, right? Like the idea that if it's there but it's sitting on the shelf, it's not doing anything for for anybody, right? And I think the same thing kind of applies to your reporting tools.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. No, I think that's a great example. I might actually borrow that. That's a great quote.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Okay, good. Well, we'll leave it on a positive note then. But let me just ask you, well, two questions. Outside of your professional achievements, what personal habits, mindsets have have most influenced the way you approach your career?
SPEAKER_01I think probably uh one, I'll give you something that's like very tangible. So I think um I'm a big believer in making sure one takes care of himself. So self-care, I always make time for that. It sounds a little silly and it sounds a little self-indulgent, but I recognize that look, if I don't take care of myself, nobody else will. So, you know, running yourself into the ground doesn't do anybody any good and it usually creates a lot more problems. So firm believer in making sure, you know, people take their PTO. When they're on PTO, they're actually like on PTO. They take that time. I'm not always poster child for that, but I try. I always, you know, again, little things like making sure I'm getting time for massages, making sure I'm exercising, making sure I'm giving myself that space um to think to really kind of incubate my thoughts. That's an important part of, and that's really a big part of how I approach everything, not just my career, but just everything in life. But I would say also uh probably a more kind of uh a sillier approach is I do like to run. So I am a runner, and I do know that there's a certain amount of discipline that comes with running, especially when you were training for races and such. I'm not training for a race right now, but I do think that the discipline that I was able to really empower myself with while I was training for half marathons and 10Ks reminds you of the power of the mind. And it reminds you of how strong people are and how committed to things people can be. And I think that's a valuable lesson.
SPEAKER_00I love that. I'm a runner as well, and I always run without headphones because I think that there is it forces you to be off screens off everything and kind of just alone for your thoughts for however, however long you're out there. And I think that that more than anything else, I mean, obviously it's good to get exercise and the like. Almost moving meditation, right, is an amazing, amazing way. I was out before this podcast. Hopefully, hopefully that's that carries through. All right, excellent. Well, Ani, thank you. It's been a pleasure talking to you and getting to know you, and I appreciate your time and your thoughts today.
SPEAKER_01No, thank you so much for having me. It was fun.
SPEAKER_00And 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.