Shaping up for launch in ’24: three areas to explore for pharma

At Wilmington Healthcare we believe the challenges of a successful product launch can be divided into three distinct areas: shaping the market; shaping the proposition and shaping the organisation. All three areas relate to one another and have some cross-cutting activity; nevertheless they each require different skills and insights in order to deliver them.

First is the need to thoroughly get to grips with the sales environment that forms the background of your launch activities.

An understanding of the policies, national priorities and gaps in provision should undoubtedly shape your go-tomarket approach. What issue are you trying to solve here for the NHS?

This also means understanding patient market dynamics and the therapy area landscape. Crucially, in the NHS, this means the local therapy area landscape, where patient populations, needs and the services established to meet them all vary from region to region, system to system.

And who are you actually trying to sell to here? In each system, who are the disease treaters? You may easily come upon lists of customers who work in, say, cardiology, but how do you know which ones treat your precise condition and, of those, which ones have disproportionate influence or are actively engaged in service transformation, pathway change, formulary or regulation and local guidelines?

And what are these influencers prescribing? How are your competitors faring? Are there some areas with additional unmet need? Do some areas stand to particularly benefit from your product?

Ever greater numbers of our customers are coming to Wilmington Healthcare to exploit our vast experience in setting out market conditions prior to launch, underpinned by our comprehensive and granular customer data.

In a time-poor NHS, the messaging is crucial during launch. Few clinicians or managers have time to engage with pharma unless the reason for that engagement absolutely aligns with what they’re trying to do.

While efficacy, safety and acquisition cost are vital considerations, increasingly the effect on staff time, productivity and the way a branch of healthcare works is becoming important.

Any evidence you can muster on the effectiveness of your product on improving capacity, shortening the pathway and reducing the number of patient access points, allowing healthcare settings closer to home or allowing pharmacist involvement in diagnosis and treatment – just some examples – should be marshalled and used to boost the value of your product offering.

At Wilmington Healthcare we have been helping companies with all aspects of this for years. Versatile and powerful data tools such as our product Quantis can look at real-world evidence, then tabulate, visualise and create a story to take to decision-makers to create a compelling case for change.

The customers you need to persuade should be brought to the table – perhaps literally, via a roundtable event to discuss the challenges and future requirements of a disease area and to boost its visibility in the NHS; thought leadership, content and storytelling are also paramount in shaping the value proposition.

Lastly, companies must ensure their field force, MSLs, digital marketing strategy and clinical specialists are correctly deployed for launch.

Different groups of clinicians relate in different ways to pharma, as do different systems. It’s crucial that the right roles are deployed in the right areas with the right messages for those clinicians and decision-makers.

Sometimes, use of a traditional, clinical-sell field force is appropriate; sometimes omnichannel; sometimes MSLs are the only people a system will deal with and in some areas no one engages with pharma at all.

How do you train that field force? What aspects of the customer landscape do they need to know about in order to optimise the use of their time? How are they segmenting accounts? How are they performing key account planning, mapping and management? And how do you measure success?

Wilmington Healthcare has been working with companies to do just that – optimising their resources, looking at field force sizing and matching the right roles to the right areas.

Launch is often the most crucial point in the pharma product life cycle. There is a lot to think about, a lot that can go wrong and a lot of unexpected pitfalls in local market access, the way prescribers relate to wider systems, finance and resource restraints and transformed pathways.

This needn’t be a cause for alarm, however; companies like Wilmington Healthcare can ensure you enter the market in the best possible position – by helping you shape that market, shape your proposition and shape your organisation.