Introduction

SPEAKER:

Sihame Bahri, Global Omnichannel Lead, CSL Vifor

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Machine learning-powered MMM optimized promotional strategy across eight European markets
• Analysis revealed 81% of promotional spend in lower-ROI in-person channels versus digital alternatives
• Germany achieved 10% incremental sales uplift through channel reallocation with no budget increase
• Minimum 12 months of robust CRM data is essential for model credibility with leadership
• CSL Vifor is scaling MMM capability enterprise-wide across the nephrology portfolio and pre-LOE markets

"Do you know what drives your growth or do you just think you know?" Sihame Bahri asked pharma executives. "Imagine this, your dashboards are green and your channels are active. But which one truly moves the needle?" For CSL Vifor's Global Omnichannel Lead, this captured the strategic tension as a mature IV iron therapy entered LOE in 2023. Despite sophisticated omnichannel campaigns and strong engagement metrics, there was still uncertainty.

"We still questioned, is it really driving sales? Are they vanity metrics?" Bahri explained. "My customers don't see your global campaign... we could not feel 100% confident that they were really driving growth." This confidence gap between promotional activity and sales impact pushed CSL Vifor toward an analytics-powered transformation.

"The loss of exclusivity for a pharma brand feels like the Great Depression when we're entering the loss of exclusivity stage," Bahri observed, drawing a parallel to a period when companies had to prove marketing's value rather than assume it. For CSL Vifor—a leader in IV iron therapies for over half a century—the LOE brand had delivered strong performance for 15-plus years through new indications, cross-therapy campaigns, and advanced digital execution. The product enjoyed "love brand" status among HCPs, supported by aggressive omnichannel integration.

Yet generic competition challenged whether promotional investments would continue to deliver returns. Instead of defensive budget cuts, CSL Vifor made a counterintuitive choice: invest in comprehensive analytics to "face the truth even if it would hurt." Initial MMM in two early-generic markets revealed that despite pricing pressure, the brand remained highly promotional and sales still responded to activity. This justified scaling the analytical approach rather than retreating from promotion.

"Marketing mix modeling is not just simple regression models as it used to be," Bahri emphasized. "Now in 2025 it's a very sophisticated tool combining machine learning and generative AI." The MMM capability CSL Vifor deployed shifted from retrospective measurement to predictive simulation—moving from "measuring the past" to simulating "the future, which I think we are all dreaming of."

CSL Vifor partnered with IQVIA to build an eight-market European model integrating global and local promotional data from CRM, including in-person rep activity, digital engagements, and global brand campaigns. Bahri positioned herself as a business rather than analytics expert: "I'm not an analytics person so I won't lecture you on analytics." That business lens was crucial for translating insights into action.

The data exposed a striking misalignment between spend and performance. "Across eight markets, eight European markets, the promotional mix was heavily weighted—81% of total spend toward in-person channels," Bahri reported. While face-to-face engagement remained critical for key accounts, "their ROI was lower than digital and hybrid channels."

She clarified this was not about undermining the field force: "I'm not saying that reps don't have a high ROI. It's more like they were not using properly the different digital channels that were offered to them."

The ROI gap was substantial. "Channels like rep-triggered email, phone calls and mass email campaigns delivered us outstanding ROI," Bahri said, "sometimes up to 18 times ROI and of course with lower cost and higher scalability." Not all reps recorded digital touchpoints in CRM, suggesting actual digital effectiveness may be understated. Global initiatives such as Home of Iron and Medscape partnerships showed consistent incremental sales impact across countries, validating investments that had previously faced internal skepticism.

CSL Vifor used a two-step modeling approach. Sub-national sales and CRM data quantified promotional responsiveness at account level, while national-level inputs captured pricing, market events, and global campaigns. Machine learning algorithms estimated the share of sales driven by promotion—"impactable sales"—separating promotional impact from baseline brand equity. With this relationship established, the team ran optimization simulations across different spend scenarios to identify sales-maximizing channel mixes.

Two core scenarios emerged. Scenario A reallocated spend with no budget increase, improving ROI from 5.1x to 5.8x across the eight markets. Scenario B modeled a 25% incremental investment into high-performing channels, projecting even higher sales impact.

"The insight is quite clear," Bahri summarized. "Simplify the promotional mix and shift from resource-heavy to data-driven digital engagements yields higher efficacy without increasing expenses."

Germany offered the most compelling proof of concept. "In Germany... we saw 10% incremental sales uplift with no budget increase," she noted. "Simply by optimizing the mix, it proves that data-driven decision-making can deliver real measurable impact." This was especially significant in Germany's highly regulated, access-limited environment and as the first LOE/generic market. The 25% investment scenario more than doubled incremental gains, giving leadership confidence that optimization could scale beyond a single brand.

Foundational requirements were non-negotiable. "If you don't have enough touchpoints recorded in your CRM for at least 12 months, just forget about it. It will not fly," Bahri stated. CSL Vifor defined robust models as those with R-squared above 0.1, deliberately excluding campaigns with weak statistical significance. This selective approach—prioritizing validity over exhaustive coverage—was critical for leadership credibility.

Partnerships operated on two levels. IQVIA provided technical and methodological expertise, while strong internal sponsorship—from CSL Vifor's Head of Commercial Europe—secured funding and organizational commitment. Country commercial teams joined validation workshops to ensure model assumptions reflected market reality. "We validated them with workshops to ensure that the model assumptions were meeting the truth. So we were always ensuring that what the model tells is matching the reality."

The cultural shift was substantial. Some marketers initially feared the findings would invalidate their work. Bahri emphasized the need for "resilience and continuous learning mindset" and readiness to "face the hard truth." Executive sponsorship helped the team "trust the process" through inevitable skepticism.

The benefits were tangible. A global team member secured budget for a previously overlooked campaign. Country teams had intuitive beliefs quantified and confirmed. Sales leadership used MMM outputs to prioritize activities for cycle planning.

"The true value of analytics is not just in the numbers," Bahri reflected. "Analytics brings confidence. Confidence that gives teams to make faster, smarter evidence-based decisions." This shift—from uncertainty about whether high-engagement campaigns truly moved sales to evidence-based resource allocation—was the core organizational outcome.

What began as an attempt to clarify whether omnichannel engagement translated to sales became a replicable enterprise capability. CSL Vifor is now extending MMM across its nephrology portfolio and, critically, into pre-LOE markets. This marks a move from reactive LOE defense to proactive lifecycle optimization.

Bahri reframed the central budget question: "Imagine if every budget discussion started not with how much can we spend but with how much can we earn from what we already have?" Scenario modeling enables portfolio-level trade-offs based on marginal returns across brands, rather than uniform cuts when financial pressure hits.

She reiterated: "The true value of analytics is not just in the numbers... analytics brings confidence," linking tactical channel optimization to strategic decision-making.

Beyond CSL Vifor, the LOE implications are broader. Their data indicated generic competitors typically do not invest in growing markets or addressing unmet needs, leaving headroom for branded leaders to continue driving category expansion post-LOE. "As leaders we still need to invest," Bahri stressed. But promotional responsiveness must be measured, not assumed, as effectiveness varies by therapy area, prescriber dynamics, and competitive context.

Machine learning models now guide investment decisions enterprise-wide at CSL Vifor, creating advantage not from one standout campaign but from superior resource allocation intelligence. As credibility builds, adoption spreads across business units. What started as an effort to optimize one mature brand's promotional mix during LOE has evolved into a core organizational competency—changing how CSL Vifor evaluates every marketing investment and, ultimately, how confidently it grows in the face of generic competition.

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.