- A pharmaceutical company were seeking to enhance sales reps’ performance through understanding the patient unmet needs
- A Life in a Day was brought in to drive empathy and encourage a shift towards emotive selling strategies
- A 20% increase in patient-focused conversations was recorded between the sales team and HCPs
Understanding Patients: A Critical Commercial Gap
With an upcoming product launch, a large pharmaceutical company was looking for solutions to improve their sales team’s performance whilst bridging the gap between the commercial branch and the patients they ultimately serve.
The sales team at the organisation held a strong product knowledge, however there was an opportunity to help further their empathy and understanding of patients and the conditions they lived with, specifically heart failure.
The Heart Failure Experience
Focusing on the need for greater emotive selling strategies, the team collaborated with A Life in a Day to empower their sales team by having them living for 24 hours as a patient with heart failure. The experience put the team through a series of challenges, choices, and conversations to emulate real-life scenarios that patients with heart failure may face because of their condition.
The experience exposed the sales team to a range of scenarios which drove home the physical, social, and emotional burdens of being a patient, and ultimately transforming their perspective on patient needs.
Bridging the Commercial Gap
Following the 24-hour experience the outcomes amongst the initial 162 that took part in the experience strongly benefited and advocated for this approach. 30 days after the experience, 98% of participants said they had increased their patient focus which translated to 75% implementing observable changes in their discussions with stakeholders.
The impact was sustained amongst the sales teams. With data validated by the company Advance Analytics commissioned on behalf of the client, their findings showed that following a three-month period there was a 20 percent increase in patient-focused conversations between the participants and external HCPs.
The pharmaceutical company identified that the benefits for the company go well beyond the increase in confidence and empathy but also in delivering on commercial objectives. Building on this success, A Life in a Day is collaborating with the pharma team across multiple therapy areas and departments, to improve wider business outcomes.
