My various experiences have given me a good understanding of the needs of in-house teams, particularly for the field team, and of the issues they face.

There are several methods that can be applied to successfully support this new paradigm in customer relations, but the teams in the field remain essential because they are always the key contacts for customers. We realise that the main failures in this transformation are due to the lack of involvement of operational staff.

Of course, change must be driven by management, but the medical/marketing teams must take the lead, as they are the drivers of the brand’s strategy.

Supporting change is therefore fundamental, both in terms of soft skills and hard skills, with all the new tools available to both marketing and medical head office staff and field teams.

This support needs to be regular and repetitive, which requires planning and a method that is adapted to each company, its culture and its level of maturity.

And after a few years of following this customer approach, I realise that transformation projects are not carried through to the end, for a variety of reasons, the main one being the frequent change in priority internal strategies and dedicated teams. For the moment, this doesn’t seem to be jeopardising performance, but in time the impact will be felt. There’s just no sense of urgency to change the older methods, as in any transformation project, especially in the pharmaceutical industry, which hides behind regulatory constraints…