Introduction

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Mindset transformation requires both problem acknowledgement and willingness to act
• Joint MSL-sales onboarding breaks stereotypes and establishes collaborative working patterns
• Shared medical-commercial goals must operate compliantly across markets
• HCP burden from uncoordinated touchpoints creates urgent strategic vulnerability

The pharma industry has discussed medical-commercial alignment for decades, yet dysfunction persists. Saurabh Dayal, Field Medical Excellence Director & Global Lead at Bayer, confronts this reality with unusual candor. "I'm going to speak from my heart about a topic that I've been very passionate about since I joined pharma as an MSL," Dayal explained. "And a constant pain point that I've seen is medical vs commercial. It doesn't work. We need to work together."

As HCP access tightens globally, organizations that burden prescribers with uncoordinated touchpoints face strategic vulnerability. "HCP time is important," Dayal noted. "So our customers, seeing four people from the same company and seeing four different companies. So you do the math." His presentation offers a roadmap for transformation grounded in global implementation experience across diverse regulatory environments.

The Mindset Barrier Blocking Operational Progress

Dayal identifies three primary barriers to integration: siloed working, us-versus-them dynamics, and inadequate technology infrastructure. Yet these represent symptoms rather than root causes. "Sitting at the very core of all of that, what I've discovered is this mega beast, the mindset," Dayal revealed. "This is both the problem and the solution. You may have all the money in the world, all the resources, everything, but if you don't have the right mindset and you don't want to do anything about it, nothing will be done."

The acknowledgement-willingness framework provides diagnostic clarity. Many leadership teams possess extensive data demonstrating collaboration gaps, yet initiatives fail to launch or deliver disappointing returns. "There's two things, acknowledgement and willingness," Dayal explained. "We need to first believe that  there is a problem, this is not working and we need to do something about it. But that's not the solution because you need to get to the willingness part."

Dayal challenges both functions to examine their contributions rather than positioning themselves as victims. "The problem also lies with medical. I will not shy away from that," Dayal stated. "Medical often think, oh, brand strategies is commercial, not us. No, you are supporting that brand. You're very much part of the brand, so don't exclude yourself from that."

Organizations in denial about collaboration gaps should pause operational initiatives until cultural groundwork is established. Those with problem acknowledgement but low willingness must identify specific barriers such as misaligned incentives, compliance concerns, or skill gaps.

Joint Training Breaks Stereotypes at Formation

Dayal's primary strategy targets the formation period when field professionals establish working patterns. Rather than attempting to change behaviours after siloed habits solidify, joint training intervenes when new hires are most receptive to organizational norms.

The stereotype problem represents a significant barrier. "When I heard the word sales rep, I'll tell you the image that came to my mind. Does anybody remember the movie The Wolf of Wall Street?" Dayal recalled. "Sales rep for me was Leonardo DiCaprio, being cunning and shrewd and aggressive and all that. I couldn't be any more wrong." These misperceptions flow in both directions. A lot of commercial guys view medical as nerdy data people who have no sense of business! Again, this is a common misconception.

The global pilot combined MSL and sales representative onboarding, for customer engagement skill development. "We collected feedback from 74 individuals on a global level," Dayal reported. "And actually they had some very nice things to say. The two functions benefitted from each others’ perspectives. Follow-up tracking reveals jointly onboarded MSLs maintain significantly higher rates of ongoing commercial partner contact and brand strategy awareness. The proposal is to extend this approach across product and compliance training.

The intervention creates practical familiarity where field professionals know who to call, understand each other's constraints, and develop shared language. It also delivers resource efficiency by consolidating duplicate training programs. "And as part of that, we said, what you've got to do is you've got to speak to the other side. You've got to learn from the other side," Dayal explained.

Compliance Enables Rather Than Prevents Alignment

Many organizations use compliance as default explanation for medical-commercial separation. Dayal directly challenges this assumption with specific market validation. "I've tried some of the most compliant countries in the world. So UK, of course with PMCPA, you've got Italy, some of the APAC countries as well, US," Dayal explained. "And I've dug deeper into these and said, hey, can you share goals? Can you have shared objectives? And yes, you can, as long as you are careful about the promotional and the non-promotional aspects."

This compliance validation has significant implications for incentive design, planning processes, and technology architecture. Current firewalls may reflect outdated interpretations rather than actual regulatory requirements. Shared goals around common patients, products, and customers are feasible when focused on customer experience, access outcomes, and educational program reach rather than promotional metrics.

Brand planning should involve medical from inception rather than after commercial strategy is set. "It's not a commercial strategy. It's a brand strategy. It's the company strategy. And we are all part of the brand," Dayal emphasized. This requires commercial leaders to genuinely value medical input during formative strategic discussions, while medical leaders must develop business acumen to contribute meaningfully to market-facing strategy.

Technology and Cultural Evolution Toward Excellence

Many organizations maintain artificial data boundaries between medical and commercial systems that prevent cross-functional visibility. "Should you be bringing down these barriers? And why not?" Dayal questioned. " do we need to be very old-fashioned, very traditionalist about it? Oh, no. Medical can't see this data. And the sales people can't see, commercial can't see the medical data. This can and should change, of course, within the framework of compliance."

Emerging applications extend beyond traditional CRM integration. "We have been experimenting with some of these initiatives, some of these technologies where we are building some practice tools with AI to get MSLs to practice and get the sales guys to practice," Dayal shared. "And within the practice, we could build this joint strategic component in."

The vision extends beyond episodic collaboration to cultural transformation where integration becomes unremarkable baseline expectation. "I would like my team, I would like my organization to get to a state where they think that excellence is just business as usual. That's just how we roll," Dayal stated. "They shouldn't be thinking about, oh, if I've spoken to my sales guy, if I've done a joint strategy, I've done brilliant. No, that should be how things are done normally."

The ultimate measure of success isn't how many joint meetings occur or how sophisticated the technology becomes. Dayal asked. "And of course, at the end of it, customer experience." It's whether customers experience the organization as seamlessly coordinated rather than competing silos that burden their limited time with redundant, uncoordinated touchpoints, so that they feel supported in the best way possible. Organizations that achieve this transformation gain sustainable competitive advantage in increasingly constrained HCP access environments.

To get you highlights of Pharma Customer Engagement EU faster, we are using generative AI technology to summarise the transcripts of the sessions. If you have any feedback about the summary, please contact lucy.fisher@thomsonreuters.com.

"Historically we always wanted to be customer centric, but now we have the data and the operations to understand our customers, evolve to where they are, and let them tell us what they require and what they need,"

Canlas explained.

SPEAKERS:

Chiara Bolognini, Global Lead CX, Marketing and Sales, Roche
Kruti Popat, Director of Customer Experience, Boehringer Ingelheim
Yvette Venable, Head Global Market Access, Payer Partnerships and Policy, AstraZeneca
Jalilah Gibson, Associate Partner, Wavestone (Moderator)
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
• Fragmented touchpoints erode trust when customers experience pharma companies as different people across functions
• Early R&D engagement with payers and regulators prevents costly market access evidence gaps
• Patients consolidate all stakeholder perspectives, making patient experience the ultimate engagement quality test
• Human expert interpretation prevents data misattribution that misdirects strategy and wastes resources
• AI-powered responsive ecosystems enable customers to choose content rather than receive pushed messages

Imagine meeting a pharma company representative who speaks eloquently about patient outcomes, then encountering the same company through customer service where the tone, messaging, and approach feel completely unfamiliar. This jarring disconnect defines the current state of pharma customer engagement. "If you move for example, from sales to customer service, they feel lost our customer experience," Chiara Bolognini explained at Pharma Customer Engagement Europe 2025.

As Jalilah Gibson reinforces, "Our customers don't care which company we work for or which part of the function that we work for, but they do care when they get a very disjointed experience."

From Fragmented Touchpoints to Unified Ecosystems

The pharma industry's traditional organizational structure creates silos that customers experience as disconnected interactions. Sales, medical affairs, market access, and patient support each optimize their own engagement models without coordinating on how the company's identity is expressed across the patient journey. Trust, the foundation of prescribing influence and treatment adherence, erodes when customers cannot recognize consistent company presence.

"It's designing ecosystems where our customers can thrive, where we build the familiarity with them and basically expose them to best attributes of our identity," Bolognini emphasizes. This shift from isolated touchpoints to integrated ecosystems requires governance that operates above functional levels, with authority to transfer methodologies across commercial, medical, and patient partnership organizations.

For Kruti Popat, the strategic imperative is clear. "Delivering a seamless customer experience is not nice to have. It's really important strategic imperative. It's a really great differentiator," she notes, particularly in complex environments like the UK's NHS where multiple stakeholders each have distinct needs yet expect coherent company engagement.

The ecosystem approach extends beyond commercial interactions to the earliest stages of development. Yvette Venable describes how AstraZeneca's "Transforming Healthcare" framework orients all teams toward patient outcomes and health system resilience. "It's crucial that we're talking to patients, to payers and policymakers, and also to clinicians very, very early on in R&D in order to make sure we can change those paradigms over time," Venable explains.

This early engagement prevents the costly disconnect between regulatory approval and market access that plagues many launches when evidence generation fails to address payer requirements.

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Discover more on this topic at Pharma 2026 (22-24 April, Barcelona) - the global collaborative network for leading pharma innovators. Visit the website here.

The Patient as Universal Stakeholder

Patients aren't just another customer segment; they represent the consolidation point of all stakeholder perspectives. Healthcare providers treating patients today become patients themselves tomorrow. Policymakers making reimbursement decisions will eventually navigate the healthcare system as caregivers or patients.

"The patient is the consolidation of all our customers. Each of us in the company, so experiencing the perspective of the patient and the customer experience is fundamental," Bolognini emphasizes. This perspective shift has profound implications for how companies design information architecture and support systems across disease awareness, diagnosis, clinical trial participation, treatment initiation, and long-term management phases.

Yet the industry still struggles to move beyond transactional engagement models. "We as an industry do so much better today than we ever have on patient engagement, but at the same time, we're still not doing it well enough," Venable observes. The gap lies in viewing patient engagement through the lens of extraction rather than true partnership with mutual benefit.

Structural issues within organizations, where patient advocacy teams, patient support programs, and commercial patient engagement operate independently, create the same fragmentation patients experience externally.

The solution lies in persona-based approaches that maintain message consistency while adapting delivery. "It's understanding what is important to these personas, what's the value, what language resonates for them. You're still using the same content thread, you're not amending the content," Popat explains. For HCPs with high empathy toward patient journeys, the same clinical evidence is delivered with emphasis on patient experience rather than purely clinical endpoints.

Bridging the Evidence Gap Through Multi-Stakeholder Dialogue

A critical challenge in pharma development is the misalignment between regulatory requirements and payer value recognition. Clinical trials are designed using validated endpoints that satisfy regulatory approval, but health technology assessment bodies and payers often require different evidence, particularly hard outcomes rather than intermediary endpoints.

Venable shared a powerful example from AstraZeneca's experience with a chronic condition therapy. The regulatory-approved intermediary disease progression endpoint wasn't acceptable to payers demanding solid heart outcomes. However, extending trials to capture those outcomes would take so long that withholding new treatments from patients would be unethical.

"We got the regulators, the payers, clinicians and patients in a room together to have a conversation about how meaningful these endpoints were," Venable recounts. The resulting dialogue revealed striking disconnects, with clinicians sometimes "literally head in hands going, how do you not understand how important this is to clinical practice?"

While the immediate outcome didn't change payer positions on endpoint acceptance, it initiated the long-term process of building shared understanding across stakeholder groups that often operate in isolation from each other. This example illustrates why early multi-stakeholder engagement in R&D is essential.

When market access teams, medical affairs, and R&D collaborate from early development stages, they can shape trial designs that satisfy both regulatory approval and value demonstration needs. The alternative creates costly delays and restricts patient access to innovations.

Insights, AI, and the Human Interpretation Imperative

The pharma industry is investing heavily in data analytics, real-world evidence, and AI-powered insights to understand customer behavior and optimize engagement. Yet without human expert interpretation, these investments can generate misleading conclusions that misdirect strategy and waste resources.

Venable illustrated this risk with a striking anecdote about real-world evidence analysis. Data showed consistent patient treatment drop-offs at six months, which analysts attributed to intolerable side effects. "You bring a patient expert in and they look at that data and they go, well yeah, you need refrigeration and cold chain and everybody goes on holiday in August," she explained.

The operational reality was invisible in the data itself but immediately obvious to patients living that experience. As Gibson reflects, "Too often we've sat in data point and go, why is that happening without asking actual customers." This gap between data observation and customer validation leads companies to address the wrong problems.

The solution requires building patient expert consultation into data interpretation processes, not just data collection phases. Roche has developed sophisticated infrastructure to consolidate insights while enabling actionable application. "We have actually created a wonderful insights platform called Before Insights Intelligence, linking to our R&D excellence program to basically identify commercial ability of our molecules," Bolognini describes.

The platform uses large language model interfaces, allowing marketers to request insights for specific strategic needs rather than analyzing dashboards themselves.

Responsive Ecosystems and the AI Transformation

The convergence of these themes points toward a fundamental transformation in pharma customer engagement. The future belongs to responsive ecosystems where customers choose their own content through AI-powered interfaces rather than receiving pushed messages through predetermined channels. Large language models connected to validated company knowledge bases can provide instant, personalized responses while maintaining narrative consistency across stakeholder groups.

This technological capability must be balanced with human insight. Emotional journey research, patient expert validation of data interpretations, and persona-based delivery ensure that efficiency doesn't come at the cost of empathy. "Delivering a seamless customer experience empowers accelerated decision making and therefore ultimately patient outcomes," Popat notes.

The companies that will differentiate themselves are those that establish governance above functional silos, co-create narratives across medical affairs and commercial teams, and engage multiple stakeholders from early R&D through market access. Technology enables scale, but human expertise ensures relevance and trust.

The pharma industry's ultimate customer, the patient, navigates a complex ecosystem involving diagnosis, treatment decisions, adherence challenges, and disease management. When companies design experiences that support patients through these transitions with consistent identity, validated insights, and responsive support, they build the trust that influences not just individual treatment choices but entire standards of care. The shift from fragmented touchpoints to unified ecosystems isn't merely operational improvement. It's the foundation for delivering meaningful health outcomes at scale while strengthening relationships across every stakeholder group that influences patient access to innovation.

To get you highlights of Pharma Customer Engagement EU faster, we are using generative AI technology to summarise the transcripts of the sessions. If you have any feedback about the summary, please contact lucy.fisher@thomsonreuters.com.

"It's the combination of the patient and the HCP journey. As the patient is living with their disease for two years, three years, the information that physician needs is very different than the patient that walks in and says, 'I have these symptoms and I don't know what's wrong with me.'"

explained Dalton.

Wall highlighted the importance of considering the entire patient journey, not just the initial prescription: "One of the things I think we don't talk enough about is that it isn't just that first script. Part of the journey is also when you stay on something, and your physician helps you throughout the entire journey."

Cross-Functional Collaboration and Implementation

Successfully implementing omnichannel strategies requires breaking down traditional silos between departments. Canlas emphasized the importance of cross-functional teams that include "the entire commercial customer engagement, commercial operations team, the brand team, medical, legal, regulatory, and privacy."

The panel agreed that involving compliance teams early in the process is essential. "Having very good conversations and transparent conversations with your compliance colleagues are just key," said Canlas. "Leaning in, bringing them in that level of inclusion earlier in any experiment that you're looking to do, any sort of journey mapping exercise, is so key."

Measuring Success Beyond Activities

When asked about the most impactful KPIs for omnichannel marketing, the panel emphasized business outcomes over activity metrics. "MBRX [market basket Rx]," Canlas stated firmly, "because that is the culmination of all of the efforts. That means that physician and that patient have made a choiceful decision to start therapy."

Wall cautioned against metrics that focus solely on output: "Often I hear my friends and colleagues talk about how much they did, how many assets they created, how many channels they're on... if at the end of the year those people write in their self-input, 'I created a lot and I did more,' then we're measuring the wrong things."

Key Takeaways

1) Patient-centricity drives effective omnichannel: "It's the combination of the patient and the HCP journey... You start with the patient, identify then who are the HCPs in that moment," said Canlas.

2) Content strategy requires fundamental transformation: "Instead of that claim, chart, and table, we need to think about five claims, three different ways to display that data, and four different charts," explained Dalton.

3) Cross-functional collaboration is essential: "It's bringing the entire commercial customer engagement, commercial operations team, the brand team, medical, legal, regulatory, and privacy together," noted Canlas.

4) Measure business outcomes, not activities: "MBRX is ultimately the most customer-centric KPI," stated Canlas, emphasizing the importance of measuring actual patient impact.

5) Consider the complete patient journey: "Part of the journey is also when you stay on something. And your physician helps you throughout the entire journey," Wall emphasized, highlighting the need to support patients beyond initial prescription.

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Discover more on this topic at Pharma 2026 (22-24 April, Barcelona) - the global collaborative network for leading pharma innovators. Visit the website here.