Executive Summary of Keynote Presentation by Karl A Braun, Vice President, Sales, Ophthalmics and Endocrine Care, Pfizer Inc.
Presented for the first time outside of Pfizer, in a rousing keynote session at PharmaForce 2009, Karl Braun, Vice President of Sales at pharma giant Pfizer, gave fascinating insight into breaking down Marketing and Sales departmental silos and obtaining buy in from both teams.
Coining the term "SMarketing" as the process for using collaboration and teamwork between Sales & Marketing to enhance execution, Karl outlined the key principles for delivering this transformation:
- Trust: the key for high performing teams. Too often Marketing may be out of touch with "realities" on the ground, and the realistic "executability" of campaigns
- Commitment to the common purpose: do both teams have the same goals?
- Candor: ensuring that hallway and water cooler conversations are brought into the meeting room in a spirit of open, frank discussion. Warts n all!
But what was the silver bullet that facilitated "SMarketing" to happen? Simple (in concept not in practice!): ensure Sales participation in market research and promotional material development. This ensures joint ownership and "buy in" from the start of the process. In a sliding scale of responsibilities, Marketing "owns" the front end of the campaign development and Sales "owns" the execution end. However, the Sales "SMarketing" champion is responsible for presenting the marketing direction to the rest of the sales team. Thus Sales understands why the research was done and why the campaign has been built in the way that it has. A permanent sales advisory board is set up, and Marketing has continual, ready access to this group to run ideas by and sanity check strategy.
The next critical piece of the jigsaw was to get Marketing out in the field to actually witness how the carefully crafted messaging is working. This allowed real time tweaks in strategy and yet more buy in from Sales. There can be first hand evidence gathered on how physicians are actually responding to the messaging in the field and how effectively Sales is executing the message.
Integrating the two processes helps build a unified vision and focus and ultimately will result in exquisite execution.
Keep an eye on next year's agenda developments, visit: www.pharmaforceus.com to sign up for our newsletter or call 1.888.482.6012
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