June 19, 2023
3 min read
Top Gun approach gives you an edge
You may not know that the Top Gun films featuring Tom Cruise are actually based on a real academy in Miramar California. (back story here). The SFTI Program (Top Gun academy) was established because despite superior weaponary and technology, during the Vietnam war, the Americans were losing too many planes in the air battle against less capable Mig aircraft. Their counterparts were trained better. As they say in the film, the US pilots had "lost their edge". Read on if you want to find out why it's so relevant to Pharma sales and marketing professionals today. And how you can raise your game to be Top Gun.
OODA - What they actually taught at Top Gun
When two aircraft are 12 miles apart approaching each other at Mach1 they'll meet in less than 30s and be in range in far less than that. The advantage is going to go to the pilot that sees the other first Observe. Once you've seen it you've got to Orient yourself (friend/foe, higher/lower, angle, distance, capability, time to range) and then you've then got to call from a world class playbook and Decide on the best course of action (that's the really complicated flying tactics). And finally that's no good unless you Act upon it quickly and execute flawlessly. The advantage goes to the person who can reduce the time taken to go around the OODA cycle and execute consistently. It’s a game of seconds.
Pharma is like the US Airforce
Billions spent on R&D and the most advanced molecules ever made, which should be a slam dunk when you apply the latest digital sales and marketing techniques. So if that's the case why do 36% of new drug launches fail to meet expectations? Leading causes (46%) are market access and lack of understanding of customer needs.
No plan survives first contact with the enemy (or the customer)!
However well you plan a launch, your messaging and its delivery, as soon as you get into the field you find new requirements, come across embedded beliefs, attitudes and behaviours that get in the way. And when you have ten years of a patent to get your return, a slow start can fundamentally damage the return on all that investment.
Traditional techniques just don't cut it
Thousands of conversations between customers and your teams exploring the disease area and your place within it. And yet the insight is lost with at best some notes in the CRM. Organisational Insight is anecdotal at best.
Hoping isn't a strategy, neither is flying blind
And with no lead indicators, other than activity rates, commercial teams are left flying blind. Sales Audits are used and can reveal some insights, but they are manual, have low sample sizes, and introduce human bias. They also take months.
So how can Commercial teams improve OODA
Leading Top Gun pharma execs are deploying the latest AI based technology to shrink the OODA cycle from months to weeks. Imagine what you could do if you could aggregate the insight from all your launch conversations on what messages are being shared, how they are being received and crucially identifying the underlying category beliefs that are barriers to adoption. Analysing these conversations with precision and without bias.
KAI can help you be Top Gun
Observation - KAI can observe remote audio and video conversations more deeply and accurately than any person. Isolating barriers, identifying competitor threats and quantifying so you can turn anecdote into insight.
Orientation - Within two weeks week sufficient aggregated anonymised insights by HCP-type, region can be gathered so commercial teams can get the feedback from the horses mouth. And that can de done consistently across all geos in local language.
Decision - enabling patterns and key insights to be surfaced so fact-based corrective action can be taken quickly overall and by individual.
Action - Tracking Monthly can show the impact of any campaign changes so the cycle shortens and performance accelerates.
Top Gun graduates improved the kill to loss ratio from 2.5:1 to 12.5:1. What type of impact could shortening your OODA cycle time have on your next launch?