How to boost your next Cycle Meeting?

For the pharmaceutical industry, cycle meetings are an indispensable element to reinforce key strategies, provide a market update and educate the sales force. Today, the way to reach healthcare professionals and train sales representatives has changed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Adaptation to the new environment starts first within companies and especially in sales teams and other people who are in some way in contact with health professionals.

What is necessary to succeed in today and tomorrow's market?

The days when a sales representative could normally visit the doctor are a distant memory and the key to success lies in adapting the right technology tools. Healthcare professionals expect communications to be digital and of high quality. A study by the NIH (National Library of Medicine) reveals that 88% of doctors use their mobile phones frequently to keep up to date on new trends, drug launches or new treatments. 

The keys to driving your next cycle meeting to train delegates in this new environment are: 

• Address the new hybrid normal by creating new digital communication channels.
• Train delegates in new technologies and communicate through them.
• Create a digital experience that delegates will love. 
• Motivate and engage both delegates and healthcare professionals.

#1 - Addressing the new hybrid normality by creating new digital communication channels

Prior to the onset of the pandemic, delegates delivered information on products, diseases and current news through face-to-face visits. Now, information must be delivered in a hybrid way through new digital communication channels to complement the visits.
 
In addition to providing up-to-date information to doctors, the delegates provide information that refreshes all those product messages that have been launched. This is a lot of information in a context of fewer face-to-face visits. How can you do this in the new context? Deploy continuous communication with healthcare professionals (doctors, pharmacists, ...) through a digital omni-channel strategy that is not intrusive. More than 75% of doctors prefer virtual interactions with pharmaceutical companies as it allows them to consume content in a flexible way.

#2 - Train delegates in new technologies and communicate through them

To respond to the real needs of today's sales environment, a new approach to delegate training and communications is required. If your intention is to get delegates to complete training courses, avoid delivering huge documents full of dry information - you'll just make them drop out! The solution is to turn your training material into small doses of micro-learning that are easy to absorb and form part of a sales rep's regular day.

• Transform your training material into engaging, interactive and on-demand content!
• Available in digital format, consumable anytime, anywhere!

In this way you will enable delegates to internalise and retain all the information to be able to explain it in detail to healthcare professionals. Moreover, by presenting the information through micro-content and gamification dynamics, you will reinforce the delegates' commitment so that everyone consumes the information without the need for them to stop their daily work.

#3 - Create a digital experience that delegates will love

Sales team training is an essential issue that the pharmaceutical industry is well aware of. A recent Reuters Events report found that 72% of companies were training delegates to enable them to work remotely. But is it being delivered properly?

The most common way of delivering training in many companies is through a LMS (Learning Management System). What's the problem? These types of programs do not allow easy-to-digest courses to be delivered and feel like a huge daily workload - the user experience is very poor! Moreover, it does not provide training leaders with relevant data to assess the degree of knowledge acquired or less understood topics for further reinforcement.

What can you do?
Implement training through mobile applications, so that the information can be sent in micro-content, and this can be consumed at any time and place, making the reading more effective as each user chooses the best moment. You can also store all of the training content in the same place or even integrate the application with an LMS platform so that it can be consulted at any time. It is important to reinforce knowledge through gamification associated with each content in a fun way and the possibility for delegates to challenge each other, creating a healthy competition and obtaining knowledge data that allows reinforcement strategies to be applied when necessary.

#4 - Motivate and engage both delegates and healthcare professionals

Because of the current situation, healthcare professionals have little time to attend to delegates' visits and phone calls are not enough to make up for the lack of personal contact. How can you build a strong and stable communication with them? Despite skepticism about the possibility of health professionals switching to long-distance relationships, the majority of clients during the COVID pandemic have responded positively.

And not only that! Face-to-face relationships are expected to become more difficult and diminish once the pandemic is over. Today, healthcare professionals are experiencing the emergence of digital technologies in webinars, chat bots and other mobile applications. But reaching out to healthcare professionals with new digital communication channels is not enough, you must offer something beyond that. One of the most important elements in engaging doctors to interact with you is the user experience.

How can you deliver an effective and satisfying user experience for all?

Compettia's Atrivity is the gamified app for training in the pharmaceutical industry. What can you do with it? You can store all the content about a pathology in one place and create fun automatic challenges or competitive challenges between your audience. It's a method that will allow you to deliver all the necessary information and increase knowledge retention by more than +25%. But that's not all!

How can you take advantage of Atrivity's potential in your cycle meetings or event with doctors? Atrivity's mobile solution allows you, among other programs, to prepare an online event before, during and after the event, multiplying the contacts with your doctors. A differential factor for the user experience is to send pre-reading micro-content to reveal part of the content of the session. Once the event has started, you can send challenges to all participants related to the content presented and measure the degree of attention. Finally, once the event is over, don't let them forget everything they have learned! Reinforce the knowledge acquired with challenges associated with the most failed topics.

Atrivity team conclusions

At Compettia we have extensive experience working with the TOP 20 most relevant Pharma and Med-tech companies in the world and we have developed different programs to guarantee the success of your brand plans.

For this reason, we know that your next cycle meeting is key to drive and adapt your commercial strategy to the new normal. Keeping delegates engaged and motivated will help you achieve better results. It's also essential to gather the right digital tools that allow you to maintain constant and fluid communication with healthcare professionals.