Be more relevant to HCPs
When healthcare providers (HCPs) prescribe a medication, part of their decision is based on the clinical attributes of the drug. But recent studies have found that understanding a brand’s cost and coverage plays a big role in their choice as well. In fact, HCPs reported that more than 50% of their prescribing decision comes down to understanding the brand’s cost, coverage and expected out-of-pocket costs for their patients.
Is your sales team avoiding these conversations, or engaging with cost and coverage interactions head on?
It’s time to make your brand’s market access strategy more relevant. Successful sales teams incorporate cost and coverage data to correct market access misperceptions and overcome prescribing hurdles. Measure how effective your market access strategy really is, using industry expert benchmarks.
Ready to explore next-level results? Dive in for proven market access pull-through tactics and powerful market access messaging strategies.
- Understand how HCP perceptions of your brand’s market access impact prescribing decisions
- Improve your sales team’s pre-call planning
- Learn how to navigate cost and coverage objections
- Become a market access genius
- Make your market access pull-through more relevant
- Boost your sales team’s market access acumen
Understand how HCP market access perceptions impact uptake
According to a recent NIH study, 88% of HCPs have made changes in clinical management based on a patient’s insurance. Another study found that encountering drug restrictions like step edits and prior authorization requirements has an exaggerated effect on an HCP’s perception of a brand’s accessibility — and that negative perception influences their prescribing decision.
The key to breaking through perceived barriers is to deliver relevant, HCP-specific market access pull-through messages. Traditional geographically based messages are not always relevant to the individual HCP, leaving providers convinced that your brand is hard for their patients to access and ultimately difficult to prescribe. To shift the HCP’s mindset, you need data that drills down into their specific patient population with pinpoint accuracy.
Your target HCPs want a factual view of what it takes to prescribe your brand. And their patients deserve the drugs that best fit their clinical needs. With the integration of the right data and your brand’s market access strategy, getting there is within reach.
Level up your pre-call planning
Pre-call planning helps representatives prioritize their market access pull-through messages, convert HCPs to their products and boost market share. If you only arm your sales team with basic, geographically based formulary data, then they’re left making educated guesses around which HCPs to target and how to craft the most impactful sales message for each interaction.
Making pre-call planning truly successful involves better, more relevant data and more in-depth analysis. When sales representatives have stronger insights into who their top target HCPs are at the payer level, they’re empowered to dig deeper into factors like:
- If HCPs are writing your product as much as you’d expect based on local market access
- How the competition in your therapeutic area is performing
- What the best market access message is to deliver to each individual HCP
You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.
Albert Einstein, theoretical physicist
Effective pre-call planning isn’t easy, but laying that groundwork is critical for your brand’s success. Top brands are moving into emerging technology and deep analytics enablement tools to pull ahead. Don’t let your sales team fall behind.
Navigate cost and coverage objections
Your sales representatives may have gotten good at skirting tough cost and coverage conversations, but research suggests that the avoidance approach might be hurting your brand more than you’d think.
According to a recent study, HCPs base half of each prescribing decision on a drug’s clinical attributes, like efficacy and safety. The other 50% of their choice comes down to their perceptions of a brand’s cost and coverage.
Making the most of your HCP touchpoints demands a lot from you and your team. You hired sales representatives who are quick to think on their feet, but have you equipped them with strategic responses to the objections they are most likely to encounter based on your brand’s actual position and perception in the market?
Successful brands build data-driven scenarios that train their representatives to win. Dodging objections doesn’t work, but neither do halfway answers. To lead in today’s crowded pharma markets, sales teams need to lean into cost and coverage conversations with confidence.
Become a market access genius
You’ve probably been there: after exhaustive pre-call planning and practicing, halfway through a meeting an HCP dismisses your pitch because your brand is too difficult to prescribe. Caught flat-footed, you check your notes. The formulary data shows that 72% of the patients in the state are covered for your drug. Why does the HCP have misperceptions about your access?
Even if you planned ahead to answer common objections that might arise, without real-time, practice-level data you’re left guessing about what’s driving the concerns an individual HCP has, and what message would best counter them. Skillful questioning can uncover the root cause of an objection, but can it get your reps there fast enough? In limited face-time situations, your team might not have that luxury.
No rep is born a market access genius. That status can only be reached with hard work and more data.
Modernize market access pull-through
You’ve taken the time to craft competitive market access pull-through messaging that gets traction in face-to-face meetings with HCPs. But a few minutes of face time may not be enough to cut through the information overload your target HCPs experience every day.
Today’s leading pharma brands prioritize and address pull-through as part of their overall market access strategy. Reaching HCPs demands an omnichannel approach, but deciding where to focus, and updating each platform or outlet with the right message can be time-consuming and difficult to keep up with long-term.
- Map the full range of market access pull-through possibilities: Make a complete list of opportunities, beginning with channels your brand already uses
- Think outside the box: In addition to traditional outlets like printed leave-behinds and Veeva-approved email, consider options to make your brand more visible in the EHR environment
- Maximize your platforms: Provide the same cost and coverage information you give HCPs in face-to-face meetings on your website
- Meet HCPs where they are: Tap into the time your target HCPs spend on social media
Once you’ve identified potential channels for expanding your market access pull-through efforts, look for ways to streamline your process. Prioritize efforts in areas where your HCPs spend a lot of time, where your messaging platform can automatically push the right messages at the right time, or where your brand could stand out compared to what your competition already has in play.
Market access pull-through is evolving as HCP presence extends beyond the exam room. Meet your target HCPs in the digital spaces where they’re spending more of their time and match them with the message they need to hear when they are ready to hear it.
Start by mapping the full range of pull-through possibilities, beginning with channels you already use. Think outside the box: in addition to traditional outlets like printed leave-behinds and Veeva-approved email, what if you worked on EHR visibility or tapped into the time your target HCPs spend on Doximity?
Once you’ve identified potential channels for expanding your pull-through efforts, look for ways to streamline your process. Prioritize efforts in areas where your HCPs spend a lot of time, where your messaging platform can automatically push the right messages at the right time, or where your brand could stand out compared to what your competition already has in play.
Pull-through is evolving as HCP presence extends beyond the exam room. Meet your target HCPs in the digital spaces where they’re spending more of their time and match them with the message they need to hear, when they need to hear it.
Boost your sales team’s market access acumen
Even experienced sales teams can struggle to overcome HCP objections around cost and coverage. Making the most of your HCP touchpoints demands a lot from you and your team. But does your sales force know how to navigate and lean into these high-stakes conversations?
Market access pull-through training helps your sales representatives multiply formulary wins faster and reap the rewards from your investment in pull-through.
When your team understands how to maximize the market access pull-through tools available to them, their pre-calling planning becomes much more impactful.
Then, when the time comes to put your market access strategy into action, being familiar with the pull-through tools at their disposal empowers your sales representatives to have more successful sales interactions.
Whether you develop your own onboarding and upskill training or purchase customized modules from a vendor, be sure to include key topics like:
- Maximizing market access pull-through tool functionality
- Selecting the best pull-through messaging that fits your brand’s strategy
- Navigating market access objections in real-world selling scenarios
Interactive content, real-world examples and direct applications improve confidence and effectiveness with new and experienced sales teams alike.
Boost your brand’s Rx growth with a hyper-targeted market access strategy
Access Genius takes formulary information further – driving radical results.
Pharma sales representatives who use Access Genius are more confident leaning into cost and coverage conversations.
In multiple controlled studies including tens of thousands of HCPs, Access Genius outperformed traditional formulary tools to a radical extent.
One study tracking a major brand launch demonstrated a 4:1 return on investment for target HCPs exposed to Access Genius messaging. Another ROI study, with an established brand, revealed a sustained 2x propensity to prescribe for HCPs targeted by reps equipped with Access Genius Messaging.
Make your market access pull-through messaging relevant. Let’s get started.