Field force excellence: driving personalised engagement in life sciences

Life sciences has mountains of data. How can it improve HCP engagement?

Life sciences companies know a great deal about healthcare professionals (HCPs), yet much of that insight remains difficult to use face-to-face. Improving field force effectiveness means giving reps the intelligence, skills and support to understand individual prescribing barriers. AI can help, alongside closer cooperation across commercial, marketing and medical teams to make each HCP interaction more useful.

Time with HCPs is harder to come by every year. And when a rep does get into the room, a fixed call plan and a standard product message give them very little to work with.

Influencing a clinician starts with understanding them as an individual, from their beliefs about a treatment to their history with your organisation. Yet most engagement models still rely on broad segments and predetermined contact schedules.

Closing the gap between what your organisation knows about HCPs and what your reps can use in the room is essential to improving your influence over prescribing decisions. And it starts with giving reps the freedom and support to move away from standardised conversations.

Help reps challenge HCP assumptions constructively

Fewer meetings with HCPs mean each conversation has to work harder. Every rep should go in with a behavioural objective, such as addressing a specific barrier to prescribing or agreeing a concrete next step.

Face-to-face conversations give your field force the opportunity to hear an HCP’s response and adapt their approach in real time. A clinician may raise a concern nobody anticipated and that’s often the most valuable part of the meeting. It reveals what is driving their thinking and gives the rep the chance to explore it directly.

We experienced this recently with one life sciences client, where we coached reps to use the opening minute of every call to challenge one of the HCP’s assumptions. It’s an unconventional approach but it helps reps move beyond familiar product messages, steering the discussion towards a more productive commercial outcome.

Use AI to improve how reps prepare and engage for HCP engagement

When we speak to field teams, it’s striking how much of their time goes on establishing the basics about the clinician they’re about to meet. Reps can spend hours piecing together CRM records, previous conversations and old call notes to get a sense of the HCP’s priorities.

AI can take on much of that workload, giving your reps a fuller view of each clinician in a fraction of the time. By analysing prescribing behaviour and previous interactions, it can highlight potential prescribing barriers most likely to be holding an HCP back and recommend content and approaches tailored to that individual.

For one client, Gate One developed an AI-powered pre-call planning tool that brings customer intelligence from multiple sources into its existing CRM. Reps use it to create a detailed, personalised plan for every meeting. Integrating the tool into the client’s CRM was central to our approach, as a standalone app would have added effort to meeting preparation and scattered customer data even further.

AI also has a role after the meeting. With appropriate consent, it can analyse conversation data for sentiment and agreed actions, and assess effectiveness against a defined framework. Over time, that gives your organisation a richer view of clinicians, and recurring barriers can inform marketing content, coaching and training.

With a joined-up view of every relationship, AI can help your teams decide which HCPs to prioritise and how engagement should develop over successive visits. Reps spend their limited time more wisely, and your commercial leaders can align field activity more closely with brand priorities.

Give your field teams cross-functional support

Reps are the face of your organisation but they can’t deliver field force excellence on their own. Everything behind their conversations, from customer insight to coaching, influences what the HCP experiences. And when your teams work in silos, clinicians notice; the message they hear from the rep doesn’t quite match the one in their inbox.

Commercial, marketing and medical teams need a shared view of HCP priorities, while respecting their distinct remits and compliance guidelines. Achieving this is harder than it sounds.

We’re currently helping one client address siloed working through the training programme for its twice-yearly cycle meetings. Medical and marketing colleagues want the sessions to be content led. Customer engagement colleagues want them designed around the rep’s experience. Unifying these priorities requires a shared vision for field force effectiveness, so that scientific knowledge and engagement skills reinforce each other.

The silos that separate commercial, marketing and medical teams often carry through into technology decisions, with each function investing in tools that serve its own priorities. Reps are then left to work across all of them. Bringing these systems together requires agreement across functions on data integration, accountability and how the technology should support a consistent approach to HCP engagement.

Measure field force effectiveness beyond visit numbers – HCP impact should be your marker of excellence

Your organisation may have extensive customer data, but its value depends on whether it influences what happens in the room. Your reps should arrive knowing which prescribing barriers an HCP may raise, have the skills to explore their reservations and leave with insights that inform the next engagement.

One of the most revealing exercises you can undertake is to examine how effectively customer intelligence reaches your field force. Choose a priority group of HCPs and follow the information gathered about them across teams, systems and successive interactions. Where is valuable insight being lost or overlooked? Who is accountable for getting it to the field?

You may find the greatest improvements come from making existing data more accessible or strengthening how you coach your reps, rather than investing in new tools. Use your findings to guide investment decisions and reconsider how you measure success.

Field force excellence should be judged by the impact of HCP conversations, not the number of visits completed. Giving the quality and outcomes of interactions greater weight in your targets and incentives encourages reps to deepen relationships and deliver stronger commercial results.

If stronger HCP engagement is part of your growth strategy, is your organisation set up to deliver it? We’ll work with you to connect customer insight, technology and ways of working, so your field teams have the support to build stronger HCP relationships and improve commercial performance.