Introduction

Key Takeaways

·      Fewer than 5% of pharma marketers truly understand their omnichannel business value

·      Measurement planning must begin day one, not after strategy and creative development

·      HCP trust in digital opinion leaders (51%) now exceeds trust in branded pharma content

·      High-value actions like dosing downloads predict prescribing better than reach or impressions

·      Measurement nirvana combines omnichannel data analytics with behavioral research and attitude tracking

When Mark Ralphs asked a room of pharma professionals at Pharma Customer Engagement Europe how many could honestly say they understand the business value of their omnichannel efforts, only 2-5 hands went up. That sobering moment exposed an industrywide crisis that Ralphs has spent over 20 years trying to solve. Quoting Oscar Wilde, he explained the core problem: "A cynic is someone who knows the price of everything but understands the value of nothing. And sometimes I think that when we're in our marketing bubble, we can easily get into that space where we don't truly understand the business impact of what we do. " The stakes for fixing this problem have never been higher. "There's a battle for HCP attention and guess what? We are losing it," Ralphs warned.

Building Measurement Into Strategy From Day One

The fundamental mistake pharma marketers make is treating measurement as a final consideration rather than a foundational element. "You've got to think about measurement right from the start, " Ralphs emphasized. "It's no good doing your insights, doing your market research, doing your testing, thinking about what your launch kind of strategy is, briefing your agency, thinking about the creative platform, thinking about your messaging passions, thinking about the content your audience is interested in and then asking, how are we going to measure this?" This backwards approach explains why so few marketers can demonstrate ROI on their omnichannel investments.

Publicis Health addresses this through what Ralphs calls the reverse funnel methodology. "We use a model called the reverse funnel, which always starts with the business outcome and that business outcome is a quantified marketing objective, " he explained. "You've got to be able to measure it, you've got to be able to count it. " That objective might be scripts or sales. From there, the team works backward through each stage of the customer journey, identifying measurable indicators at every point.

The approach forces uncomfortable discipline. Teams must define the total addressable audience for their brand, identify which actions demonstrate progression toward prescribing, and determine which metrics actually predict behavior change. Critical to this methodology is distinguishing between interesting data and actionable data. "There's not a lot of point measuring stuff you can't action, " Ralphs observed. "Yeah, it might be interesting, but it's not your focus. "

His framework divides metrics into two categories: measurable key performance indicators that demonstrate high business impact and can be acted upon, and diagnostic metrics that provide context but don't directly drive decisions. The goal is identifying four or five headline metrics that truly matter. Everything else is noise. For pharma marketers drowning in data from multiple channels and platforms, this simplification creates clarity about what deserves attention and what doesn't.

Confronting the Attention Crisis and Trust Deficit

The measurement discipline Ralphs advocates becomes more urgent when considering the market reality pharma companies face. He illustrated this with a slide showing the haemophilia treatment landscape where numerous products simultaneously target approximately 1,200 UK haematologists. The visual drove home a harsh truth: HCPs are being bombarded with content from multiple companies promoting similar products to the same small audiences. Their administrative burden is enormous and their patience for pharma marketing is declining.

In this attention-scarce environment, the quality of customer experience becomes a critical differentiator. Research supports this strategic shift. "According to a survey, apparently 35% of global HCPs say that customer experience is important in their prescribing decisions, " Ralphs shared. This finding suggests that how pharma companies deliver information matters as much as what information they deliver.

He pointed to AstraZeneca as an example of getting this right, noting they presented information HCPs wanted in a delightful and convenient way. That kind of single-minded focus on user experience encourages HCPs to return because the interaction respects their time and serves their needs rather than adding to the content bombardment. The trust landscape has shifted even more dramatically. Citing Sermo data, Ralphs revealed a finding that should concern every pharma marketer: "51% say the influencer. They mean digital opinion leader content is more trusted than branded pharma content. That's something we should all just pause for thought on when we're thinking about what the right omnichannel mix is for our brands."

This trust deficit fundamentally challenges assumptions about channel effectiveness. Ralphs illustrated the principle through Publicis Health's work with Valneva, which needed to raise awareness of chikungunya, a rare mosquito-borne disease that nobody had heard of compared to malaria or dengue. The campaign targeted millennials and younger families booking holidays, using travel influencers to deliver educational content about mosquito-borne disease risks. The unconventional channel choice reflected where the audience actually paid attention and which voices they trusted.

What Matters Through Real-World Application

The difference between vanity metrics and meaningful metrics crystallized in Ralphs' discussion of what Publicis Health actually measures for clients. "We're not interested in the reach potential, the reach you buy, the impressions you buy, " he stated.

"What we're interested in is the engagement. It's showing that people have engaged with the content, they've listened to it, they've taken note of it. "

This distinction between exposure and engagement drives how his team evaluates campaign performance. For the Valneva campaign, engagement metrics demonstrated whether people actually absorbed the educational content.

The high-value action, a travel checklist download, provided tangible evidence that the campaign moved people toward protective behavior. The Philips Blue Seal MRI campaign illustrated these principles for a high-value B2B sale. Philips had clear business objectives: increase market share after a difficult launch and add specific revenue. Reach mattered, but the critical metric was capturing attention in the form of data that sales teams could convert.

Marketing qualified leads became the headline KPI because approximately 50% of them turned into direct sales for six-to-seven figure purchases. Supporting metrics included video view-through rate, which showed whether people watched content end-to-end, live event sign-ups that demonstrated serious interest, and Net Promoter Score as an indicator of customer experience quality. Each metric corresponded to a stage in the journey toward purchase, creating a clear line of sight from marketing activity to business outcome.

This focus on practical application reflects Ralphs' broader philosophy about measurement frameworks. "There are as many customers as there are customer journeys, " he acknowledged. "It's really, really complicated out there. All these things. This is just simplicity out of complexity and chaos. " Planning models like the reverse funnel don't claim to capture every nuance of customer behavior. Instead, they provide simplification tools that make measurement actionable across global teams, regional teams, and local markets. The framework succeeds when it's simple enough to implement consistently while sophisticated enough to capture meaningful business indicators.

Integrating Data and Behaviour for Complete Evidence

What Ralphs calls measurement nirvana exists at the intersection of two data types: omnichannel analytics and direct behavioural feedback. His personal journey into pharma marketing provides context for why this integration matters. "I'm a marketer and I like to sell. Yeah, I like to sell stuff, " he said with characteristic candour. "And before I used to like selling cars and selling fizzy drinks and selling pizzas and then I had kind of marketers remorse and I thought, right, it's time to get into health. So at least I know what I'm selling is actually going to make people better. " That values-driven motivation explains his insistence on proving actual behaviour change rather than just digital activity.

Congress measurement demonstrates this integration in practice. While digital tools can track numerous touchpoints and interactions, Publicis Health always conducts pre and post congress surveys. At ESMO, they measure whether launching a new drug increased education levels among target doctors. At EULAR, they assess whether activities encouraged actions that inform future prescribing behavior. At ECTRIMS, they evaluate whether a new product launch actually shifted prescribing intent. These surveys provide direct evidence that marketing activities changed how HCPs think and intend to act, complementing the digital data about what touchpoints occurred.

The organizational challenge of implementing consistent measurement emerged during the Q&A session. When asked about cultural and organizational barriers to global or regional measurement, Ralphs offered pragmatic advice. He encounters highly successful pharma companies whose markets and affiliates won't share campaign performance data back to regional or global teams. The solution, he argued, is getting everyone in the room from the start to agree on measurement frameworks, assess whether they have bandwidth and skills to execute, and implement something they can actually apply.

Measurement discipline starts with upstream inclusion and realistic scoping. Without that foundation, even the best framework fails at the adoption stage. As omnichannel strategies grow more sophisticated with AI-powered next best actions and complex customer engagement platforms, the ability to prove business value through disciplined measurement becomes the differentiator between pharma companies that optimize effectively and those that simply add more complexity.

In order to get you the highlights of Pharma Customer Engagement EU 25 faster, we are using generative AI technology to summarise the transcripts of the sessions. The conference organiser is checking the summary for accuracy. If you have any feedback about the summary and the postevent report, please contact Emma.Haslam@TR.com

"For a generic company, one of the most important factors to always dig into and analyze is the resource optimization because medical sales representatives are the most expensive and the biggest asset for such a company."

This clarity about the business problem— optimizing the allocation of the most expensive resource across therapeutic areas, brands, and geographies—drove requirements for advanced analytics, cross-country comparability, and transparent performance dashboards. The CRM selection became less about acquiring technology and more about solving a specific strategic challenge: enabling headquarters to make evidence-based resource allocation decisions across affiliates with an "apples-to-apples comparison. "

The problem-first methodology requires organizations to define success before evaluating vendors. Does the company need to drive digital transformation across affiliates? Establish stronger governance and standardization? Improve field force effectiveness through better targeting? Each problem demands different capabilities and implementation approaches. Companies that begin with technology evaluation inevitably select solutions optimized for the wrong outcomes.

Medical sales representatives remain the highest-cost, highest-value asset in generic pharma commercial models. Unlike originator companies where product differentiation and patent protection create market advantages, generic companies compete primarily on commercial execution efficiency. Every % point improvement in representative productivity or targeting accuracy directly impacts profitability. This economic reality makes resource optimization the central CRM problem rather than a secondary benefit.

The Data-Transaction Duality and Change Management Reality

Sergio articulated a core architectural principle that challenges how most organizations approach CRM implementation: "A transactional system, a CRM, is nothing without a data platform on the other side balancing each other. Because you can record every single transaction, you can ask and you can force your people to do what they don't want to do. But if you don't use those data, it's just wasting your time and their time. "

This data-transaction duality drove Trueblue's integration of 400 pre-built pharma KPIs and 200 dashboards with the CRM platform. For field representatives, the value exchange is simple: provide data, receive decision-making advantage. Without embedded analytics delivering immediate insights, CRM becomes pure compliance burden rather than productivity tool. The 25-year pharma specialization enabled Trueblue to build industry-specific data models that understand promotional cycles, prescription dynamics, and customer segmentation patterns without requiring custom development.

But technology architecture represents only part of the selection challenge. Andrea's closing advice emphasized the organizational dimension: "CRM harmonization is not only changing a system because this can be done professionally, but there is changing of the SOPs, the processes, the marketing approach, the budget planning, the brand planning. So everything behind has to change, otherwise it doesn't work. "

This recognition elevated vendor change management capability to a primary selection criterion rather than an implementation detail. For organizations managing transformation across 18 countries with varying market maturity and entrenched local systems, the vendor's experience navigating organizational resistance and process redesign matters as much as technical architecture. The change extends beyond IT departments to marketing, sales operations, brand management, and finance—every function that touches commercial execution must adapt workflows and governance models.

Organizations that treat CRM implementation as pure technology deployment consistently fail to achieve projected benefits. The system goes live, training occurs, but underlying processes remain unchanged. Representatives enter minimum required data while maintaining parallel systems. Marketing continues campaign planning in spreadsheets. Sales operations generates reports from legacy databases. The new CRM becomes an expensive data graveyard rather than a strategic asset.

Strategic Implications for Pharma CRM Consolidation

The Egis selection journey reveals how CRM evaluation has evolved beyond feature comparison toward strategic problem-solving. Sergio's final guidance captured this shift: 

'I need to change the CRM' is not a problem, it's not something to be solved. You need to have in mind what do you want to achieve with this product, with the CRM? Do you want to drive a transformation? Do you want to drive stronger governance for the affiliates? Do you want to standardize the processes?"

This problem-first discipline becomes particularly critical for mid-sized pharma companies where resources for experimentation are limited and margin pressure demands that technology investments deliver measurable operational improvements. The emphasis on adoption architecture, integrated analytics, and change management capability reflects a maturation in how organizations evaluate CRM vendors— moving from technology procurement to strategic partnership selection.

Gábor's closing observation offered a market perspective that challenges incumbent dominance: " So now we know it's not only Veeva and Salesforce for sure."

For pharma companies managing complex multi-country operations with diverse market maturity, the expanding vendor ecosystem provides alternatives that balance platform stability with pharma-specific functionality—if organizations ask the right questions during selection.

The decision to select a tenth vendor after managing nine existing systems demonstrates confidence in the problem definition and selection methodology. Rather than defaulting to the path of least resistance—standardizing on an existing vendor—Egis prioritized solving the actual business problem over minimizing short-term implementation complexity. This willingness to embrace organizational change in pursuit of strategic capability separates transformative CRM initiatives from incremental system upgrades.

For pharma companies evaluating CRM consolidation, the Egis experience offers a replicable framework: define the business problem with precision, prioritize adoption architecture over feature lists, demand integrated analytics that create value exchange with users, and evaluate vendor change management capability as rigorously as technical functionality. Technology selection becomes simpler when organizations know exactly what problem they're solving.

In order to get you the highlights of Pharma Customer Engagement EU 25 faster, we are using generative AI technology to summarise the transcripts of the sessions. The conference organiser is checking the summary for accuracy. If you have any feedback about the summary, please contact lucy.fisher@TR.com

"If what we do is improve the optimization of the message, improve the efficiency of how that communication happens, that it is tailored and personalized to the customer, not just the HCP, but the customer we're dealing with, then we're going to improve overall healthcare,"

Francis emphasized. AI applications extending beyond physician engagement to patient education, adherence support, and community connection could address systematic barriers preventing marginalized populations from accessing care.

Human Barriers Constrain Technical Possibilities

Despite AI's technical sophistication, the binding constraint on pharma ROI is not algorithms, data, or compliance but change management. Organizations underestimate the human barriers including works council concerns, job displacement anxiety, discomfort with changing physician relationships, preference for perfection over iterative solutions, and resistance to new working methods. "I think the biggest bottleneck obviously is compliance tools, data mindset," Francis acknowledged. "I think people's mindset, if they're close to it, they're worried about it getting through works councils, just getting people to embrace something that's completely different and new."

Even technically successful deployments fail without addressing training needs, demonstrating short-term wins, and phasing implementation to avoid overwhelming teams with simultaneous initiatives. The anxiety around AI displacement, while understandable, may be premature. "This idea that AI is going to take away a job, we're going to disappear, then a bot or an agent, which is for me still a glorified bot, can take over our jobs is not a scenario that's going to happen in the next two, three, four years," Calliano assessed.

The hard work required to make AI functional and accurate ensures human expertise remains essential. Organizations transparently communicating AI's role as augmentation rather than replacement, involving users in co-development, and demonstrating productivity gains rather than headcount reduction will accelerate adoption and capture value faster than those treating AI as cost reduction mechanism.

Sandoz identified medical inquiry management as a high-impact AI entry point. With nearly a billion patients treated globally, the company faces massive inquiry volumes from patients and healthcare professionals across markets like the US, Germany, and Japan. "Today there is a big budget," Pagano noted, describing the current manual process requiring medical affairs personnel to answer within strict timeframes. AI triage could perform initial question categorization and solution matching, routing inquiries to appropriate medical personnel rather than forcing 48-hour waits through multiple channels.

"There is still a human element because the final decision is taken by a human," Pagano emphasized. "But AI can help a lot."

The session concluded with a provocative challenge cutting to the heart of AI's paradox in pharma engagement. "If everyone is creating more content faster, but the HCP's time is capped, are we all at risk of spamming doctors?" Walton questioned. The answer may lie in using AI for restraint as much as generation, determining when not to engage rather than maximizing touchpoint frequency. Organizations that combine AI personalization capabilities with content discipline and attention economics will likely achieve better outcomes than those simply accelerating production.

The path forward requires balancing competing imperatives. Organizations must experiment to discover high-value applications while maintaining discipline to scale proven use cases. They must leverage AI's speed while respecting regulatory processes ensuring patient safety. They must pursue efficiency gains while investing in change management ensuring adoption. The companies successfully navigating these tensions will separate themselves not through superior algorithms but through superior organizational capabilities translating technical possibilities into business results.

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.

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