Read this blog to discover how Insocius can support your organisation to roll out and embed your global strategic direction in-country through a comprehensive pharmaceutical communications strategy and more.
When developing a global strategy, healthcare leaders are often so focused on their global vision that they may fail to give enough consideration to strategic positioning and direction at a local level.
They do this at their peril, with seven out of 10 strategies failing at an execution level due to poor planning, cultural blocks, and a lack of management experience.
The key to solving this is to begin global planning by consciously engaging with local markets and developing strategy and positioning with respect to the factors that affect these local markets.
At Insocius, our expert pharma marketing consultant teams help leaders build support and enthusiasm for commercial strategy across their global, regional, and country-specific teams.
We support leaders to articulate what that strategy will deliver, while helping to execute an effective plan that works across your organisation and into local markets. While every company is different, there are some shared best practices to designing and executing a successful plan.
In this blog post, we introduce our approach to programme activation, explain why global initiatives are prone to failure, and explore how we work with leaders to successfully engage with local markets.
When global is not enough
By their very nature, global strategies are homogenous, providing a clear business case and a detailed list of objectives, messages, and proof points. However, too often, they can become cumbersome, filled with high level messages and generic toolkits, which are not suited to the needs of many local markets.
When a country team receives a global strategy, they often need to spend time picking out arguments that are relevant to their local market, and then end up creating their own local programme to match their market requirements.
This is a highly inefficient way of working, where the resulting local plan may also deviate from the original objectives and deliverables of the global initiative.
Local teams are often not given the chance to contribute to the global scheme, making it difficult for the organisation to engage with and gain buy-in from local teams.
By not having a pharmaceutical communications strategy in place and proactively communicating with local markets early on, organisations may unwittingly discount country-specific expertise and/or fail to provide local teams with any strategic ownership when asked to execute global plans.
When developing effective global strategy, each plan should be framed for specific local markets and tailored to their requirements. To achieve this, you must engage your local teams. But how?
How Insocius supports you to roll out global strategy to achieve success:
1. Make sure your strategy is built on local market insights
Strategy design requires research to understand a local market and ensure the resulting global plan or playbook that is sent to country teams is relevant to that market.
An adaptable strategy, which is aligned with your global and local markets, is essential. To achieve this, local teams are consulted during the planning stages, where one of our Insocius consultants will interview key teams and stakeholders to gain their insights.
This is not just a tick box exercise – it is a highly valuable exploration exercise, helping organisations to understand what is real for countries and local teams.
Using this information, we can then assess a country team’s alignment with your global plan. Often, a two-tier approach is required to address the specific needs of a local market.
When this local programme is developed, it must be as specific and succinct as possible to provide a rigorous and consistent set of procedures.
2. Be relevant to different customers and market archetypes
You may need to create one playbook for your general managers, and a second targeted for another end user. These playbooks contain information relevant to that local market, helping them understand your strategic factors and positioning from a local perspective.
For example, when an organisation wants to roll out a value story across its business, the messaging must account for different country payer archetypes.
Local teams may be given a playbook that contains guidance relevant to all markets as well as concise information specific to each region. This allows teams to focus on identifying the right strategies and roll-out plans to realise market success in their specific location
At Insocius, we use this ethos across any strategy, helping organisations produce localised content and information, to help your local teams realise your global plan.
3. Embed for business success
Any business change meets some level of resistance. Collaboration and a clear pharmaceutical communications strategy is the key to overcoming this challenge. It can also help you identify any potential incubators and ambassadors, to drive further adoption rates.
These supporters can help you set up pilots, for example, and identify how to effectively roll out global strategy across markets.
This opens the communication channels across your business, boosting peer-to-peer engagement and allowing you to develop a network of business champions.
There are many ways to engage your local markets in an impactful way, to create streamlined, specific, and relevant approaches, which are embedded for business success.
Activating a global strategy and value proposition – our Payer Negotiation Toolkit for countries
Our Payer Negotiation Toolkit is just one example of how we embed strategies at a local level. The toolkit is designed to support market access teams, helping them engage with local markets through targeted messaging.
The first step is a conversation, where we gauge the requirements and pain points for each region. This helps build trust across regions, allowing us to conduct essential exploration work at the local level.
The resulting information is brought together into a toolkit. This helps country market access teams plan effectively for a new product, indication or line extension, while providing your organisation with the value message to help your local teams conduct relevant, targeted negotiations with multiple payer stakeholders.
Taking this approach provides local teams with a sense of ownership, opening the door to a two-way conversation about your strategic direction, allowing local teams to tailor each toolkit at a local level.
Because such toolkits are built using insights and key evidence from multi payer stakeholders, local teams also gain confidence in global direction, helping to build a strong rapport in every region, for a global impact.
This is just one example of how we engage with local teams at Insocius. We have many years of experience working with global and regional functional teams to help organisations effectively introduce and embed commercial strategies across markets.
At Insocius, we understand how to embed your strategies at different functional and local levels so that they land with impact.
Our expert pharma marketing consultant teams understand that every business challenge and opportunity is different. If you would like to find out more about how we work and the benefits we could realise for your organisation, contact one of the team today.
