Thanks to industry consolidation and other long-term healthcare trends, there’s a growing recognition among pharma companies of the importance of engaging strategically with large, organized customers. In 2023 ZS and Valkre partnered with Pfizer to build and deploy the Valkre platform across its U.S. organization.
The following article includes a conversation between ZS’s Mike Powers, Valkre CEO Jerry Alderman and Pfizer’s Jason Kraft, Director of Commercial Effectiveness and Key Account Management.
Mike Powers, ZS
Jason Kraft, Pfizer
Jerry Alderman, Valkre
Q: Can you describe the state of technology supporting your KAM teams before teaming with Valkre?
Jason Kraft, Pfizer
“It was inconsistent and generally left to each individual KAM team. Some were using our traditional CRM platform, some were doing everything in Excel. Even for the teams that were using a traditional CRM, the platform was built for reps and lacked functionality specific to KAM, so they were doing a lot of work in SharePoint, in an Excel tracker, or somewhere else. We saw a big opportunity to establish a more consistent user experience for our KAMs.
Our KAM teams tend to operate in silos, so it took time to build awareness at headquarters that our KAM teams all had different systems and different ways of working — and that having one tool for all KAMs would be beneficial. Because we have different therapy areas within shared accounts, the more we can speak the same language, the stronger we are collectively and can show up as “One Pfizer” to our most important customers.”
Q: As part of the implementation, why did you decide it would be important to have an early experience team made up of KAMs from across business units to help co-create the solution?
Jason Kraft, Pfizer
“It was important for two reasons. First, getting information from KAMs helps to build a better launch experience. If there’s a bug or something that’s creating a subpar user experience, it’s critical for the project team to hear that directly from users. But also, it helps create buy-in from the individual KAM teams. We had five KAM teams, with five different remits, reporting to five different leaders. We brought those teams onboard at the start of the journey so we could hear their feedback, number one, but also so we could explain certain design or functionality decisions to them. You know, “We can’t make this or that change because it’ll have this effect somewhere else downstream.” So, as we were building up to launch, not only did we have this core group of committed users, but they were acting as internal champions and experts for the rest of their teams.”
Jerry Alderman, Valkre
“It’s critical that you don’t just throw a piece of technology at people without helping them understand the ‘why’ behind it. Because the reality is, when leadership introduces a new piece of technology, alarm bells go off for the rank and file. So, communication is very important: ‘Here’s what we’re trying to and this is how this technology is going to help us get there.'”
Q: What is some of the early value you’ve seen from this Valkre implementation?
Jason Kraft, Pfizer
“The data we’re developing through our KAM platform is integral to how we demonstrate to senior leaders the impact we’re having by engaging differently with our key accounts. At Pfizer, we collect data on everything. But it’s critical we look at the metrics that are appropriate to key account management, not just sales. Obviously, we look at sales data. But we’re also looking at execution data, and engaging key stakeholders — things we just didn’t have a way of collecting or communicating before. One of the key things the system allows us to do is look at leading indicators of success. The actual outcomes may take longer to show up, but we’re able to show leadership leading indicators as a bellwether of our success moving in the right direction as an organization to manage our key accounts more strategically.
In this first phase, we now have a harmonized key account management process across our business units and greatly improved KAM team satisfaction. As a result, we’ve seen much higher adoption and have enabled ourselves to collect much more — and more granular — data about what we’re doing with our key customers.”
Q: Can you speak about other critical components you thought about when building out your new key account management tool?
Jason Kraft, Pfizer
“Number one, we wanted to increase efficiency by negating the need for KAMs to go to SharePoint for account planning, Teams for collaboration, and Excel for something else. Number two, we wanted to increase effectiveness. And number three, we wanted the technology we use to directly support and enable our existing strategic account engagement model.”
Jerry Alderman, Valkre
“To me, it starts with effectiveness. Because it doesn’t do any good to make something efficient that’s not effective. And when we think about effectiveness, we’re thinking both in terms of the KAM program and individual KAMs. You need to raise the level of both and, when done well, technology can play a critical role in doing so.”
Q: You had five business units involved in this Valkre implementation. How did you create buy-in across your organization?
Jason Kraft, Pfizer
“Our leadership uniformly agreed that our current customer engagement platform wasn’t working for our KAM teams. Our KAMs were also onboard, as they saw the limitations of our current system day in and day out. For senior leaders outside of KAM, we benefited from a headquarters-sponsored initiative to implement a “One Pfizer” approach to account management. This work surfaced the need for a single account management tool to enable work across shared accounts. And finally, our IT teams were flexible and supportive because they’d seen the various overhauls we’d had to do on our systems over the years.”
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