Executing a successful pharma product launch not only hinges on clearly articulating the customer value proposition and points of differentiation to healthcare professionals, but also the close, continuous monitoring of alignment to brand strategy.

Launching in the pharmaceutical industry has many challenges: complex pathways; more personalised therapies; a need to demonstrate value to payers; intensifying competition, and the need to launch and ensure access in multiple diverse markets.

Given these challenges, strategic alignment is even more important.

Despite a well-crafted leadership vision, at both a macro and micro level, strategic drift can often occur as information cascades through an organisation.

A simple example occurs at the macro level. Global leadership launches a campaign that a team rolls out and communicates to affiliates. Unfortunately, this is where the first dilution occurs. The affiliates then translate information for their local market and make some changes in messaging – potentially deviating from the target patient. At the micro level, the company sees further drift from country leadership to field managers and country field teams.

Understanding of and alignment to the various elements within the brand strategy or campaign then begins to erode to a level where field teams are collectively not positioning the product according to leadership guidance and direction.

To prevent this drift, organisations require an objective pre-launch view of cross-functional alignment from global leadership to local field teams and across every layer in between.

A pre-launch checklist to prevent strategic drift:

• Launch readiness: do individual markets and teams understand the strategy and have what they need to cascade this locally?
• Team alignment: does every cross-functional team understand the strategy and link its own objectives and actions to this?
• Account management: do teams have joined-up plans and objectives that allow everyone to be aligned to pulling in the same direction?
• Framework: what is the framework for collaboration and communication between teams?
• Coaching: is the coaching model enabling line managers to rapidly identify any potential drift and reasons for this, and then course-correct to maximise the trajectory of the sales line at launch?
• Monitoring: is there a robust process to continuously ensure tight alignment to strategy across the various cross-functional teams?

Companies in the launch phase often want their sales teams to be singularly focused on delivering the new campaign, believing this is necessary to be as successful as possible – and any benchmarking efforts are often perceived as a distraction. However, pre-, peri- and post-launch alignment and insights at these early stages, when they still have time to course-correct, should outweigh any perceived burden.

Where team execution is below industry benchmark, there is commonly a root cause that is often intertwined with issues around strategic alignment – the two are inherently linked.

Before the global team decides on the launch strategy and critical success factors, it needs to build in-depth market insights and ideally work with a partner that can share lessons learned from launches in similar areas.

The three Ms must align from when a first concept is developed to strategic launch and reviewing performance; capturing their insights early and effectively, ensuring collective buy-in, and then bringing them through cohesively into the launch execution is essential.

Pharma companies acknowledge that measuring team alignment against industry benchmarks for launch execution and preventing strategic drift is critical. However, the how, when and value of doing so early and continuously is yet to be fully realised.

Pharma must objectively measure that the three Ms are aligned with leadership and their data is being leveraged up to and during launch appropriately and continuously in the immediate months post-launch.

The need for quality interactions built from pre-launch insight that translates from the boardroom to field-based teams is now critical for launch success.

1. Prevent strategic drift: organisations require an objective pre-launch view of cross-functional alignment from global leadership to local teams and across every layer in between.
2. Launch readiness: the three Ms (medical, marketing and market access) must align from when a first concept is developed to strategic launch and reviewing performance. Capturing their insights early and effectively, ensuring collective buy-in and then bringing them through cohesively into the launch execution is essential.
3. Early benchmarking: pharma must objectively measure that the three Ms are aligned with leadership and field teams – that their data is being leveraged pre-launch appropriately and continuously in the immediate months post-launch.

Adam Boucher is Head of Innovation and Product Development at STEM, an Inizio Advisory company