The story began with a question we saw on Zhihu: "I'm in pharmaceutical sales. What should I talk about during customer visits?" (click to view the original Zhihu Q&A). The original question has been viewed by more than 200,000 people, which shows how painful "having no topic for customer visits" can be for many pharmaceutical sales professionals.
As a long-term digital intelligence marketing partner for many pharmaceutical companies, we naturally had to step forward and offer some advice. The answer is simple, just a few words:
Find the right people and say the right things.
More specifically, it follows the logic of collecting, integrating, analyzing, and using physician big data.
01 The Premise of a Topic Is the Person You Talk To: Are You Visiting the Right Person?
It is not true that every physician in the corresponding department deserves the same maintenance effort. We should spend more energy on the "right people" with high potential and strong support.
First, you need to understand the departments and disease areas corresponding to your product and know where your customers are.
Region, hospital, department and disease area, physician list: you filter layer by layer. This step is relatively complex for disease areas that involve treatment across departments.
Then, you need to understand these customers' dynamics through various methods. This step is quite tedious.
Customers have new updates every day: major ones such as who published relevant papers or conducted relevant research; detailed ones such as the latest online consultation information; who shared what at an academic meeting; broader ones such as policy changes in the industry, collaboration between customers and competitors, and updates from other physicians in customer networks. These customer dynamics are the foundation for later visits, and they are compliant data available from public channels.
Most importantly, you need to integrate the collected information, conduct quantitative analysis, and use data to guide action.
- Are those with higher academic society positions necessarily the right people? Not always.
- Are the physicians with the most papers necessarily the right people? Not necessarily.
- Are those with the largest online consultation volume necessarily the right people? Also not always.
This step is both the most important and the most difficult. The difficulty lies in the word quantitative. Although no single data point can directly serve as the basis for judgment, the more customer data you integrate, the closer the "right person" becomes.
02 After Finding the Right People: What Should You Talk About?
When you have academic data:
Customer A published a paper last week in a disease area highly relevant to your product and also shared content related to your product at an academic meeting yesterday.
Customer B has always been relatively cold toward you, but today you discover that Customer B and Customer A both attended yesterday's academic meeting.
When you also pay attention to online consultation and physician relationship network data:
Customer C's visits have been smooth, and you see that in recent online consultations, they recommended your product several times.
Customer D has worked deeply in the field for many years and often favors your competitor in articles. You are not very familiar with this physician. Recently, however, you discover that Customer C's doctoral advisor is Customer D.
Collaboration between pharmaceutical companies and customers is long-term and gradually progressive. The secret to always having rich topics is continuously understanding your customers. At the same time, the difficulty is obvious: everyone knows how to search online, but where do I find information for so many customers?
Exactly. It may be manageable for individual representatives to collect information on their own specific physicians. But what happens when there are many customers? Or if only a few people in the representative team have the ability to integrate and analyze information, how can management quickly replicate that ability across other representatives?
When individual techniques gradually become a team project, especially when they rise to enterprise-level precision visit needs, tools are required.
MeDomino's HCP360 tool integrates public data from 4 million HCPs nationwide. From basic identity, positions, and education background to Chinese and English literature, academic meetings, online consultations, official-account-related data, and relationship networks, it integrates target customers' online data for pharma and medtech companies. Algorithms then match group and individual physician profile data and continuously track shifts in customer mindsets, all to help teams find the right people and say the right things.
Click here to learn more about MeDomino HCP360
The HCP360 tool we delivered for a global top pharmaceutical company achieved a voluntary usage rate above 70% among sales representatives. I have also seen usage behavior data from sales reps: usage peaks occur around 8 a.m. and 2 p.m., mostly for checking physician updates. It is easy to infer that they are generally looking for topics for upcoming visits.
Finally, if you want to know how useful MeDomino HCP360 is, contact us and try it.
