Key Account Management in pharmaceuticals and medicine
If you think that
- customer-orientation should be created in the heads of employees and cannot be attained by more advertising, more visits to conventions and trade fairs or more field service,
- customer-orientation should be based on good business relationships,
- customer-orientation should not be made possible by advertising at a product level, but by good communication and interaction between you and your customers,
- the available additional training and consulting services that are offered are interesting, but you and your employees feel that you are left to your own devices in their day-to-day implementation,
then I am the right partner for you! With my experience as a doctor, as a person responsible for many years for strategy development, marketing and sales, as a Key Account Management project manager and Key Account Manager, I bring a unique combination of abilities into a business partnership.
I offer active Key Account Management (KAM) in the medical and pharmaceutical sector:
- Consultation regarding limitations and opportunities of KAM
- Creation of a KAM strategy
- KAM organisation and project planning
- KAM project implementation
- Work as KA project lead and active KA manager
- Introducing your employees to the KAM
- Project review – regular reports on the progress of the project
- Project handover – handing over the project management to your employees
- KAM Coaching
My active KAM services do involve not just an advanced training offer for KA managers, but also the active implementation of your KAM in the marketplace under my supervision. I operate as a project manager and KA manager by order of my clients. In addition, I identify suitable employees and introduce them to the KAM while providing support. This is usually a temporary task, with the goal of having my clients be able to continue with the KAM by themselves afterwards. If required, an intermittent long-term coaching process in the context of pre-defined review cycles can be implemented.
Why Key Account Management in the pharmaceutical branch and medicine?
Key account management means to step away from the standard promotion of one’s own products and services and instead to boost the success of the customer, according to the motto:
„The more successful my client, the more successful I am as a supplier!“
In a marketplace in which several suppliers offer very similar products or services simultaneously, it is very difficult to set one’s own product apart. In the medical and pharmaceutical sector, additional marketing conditions complicate the task. Medication can only be matched to the needs of the customer with great effort and long lead times. Doctors and the pharmaceutical industry are subject to special regulations and restrictions in their advertising.
These general circumstances can be a reason to make use of other marketing methods. KAM represents a possibility to move away from classical product marketing and to initiate a partner-like collaboration. A prime objective is the development of a stable long-term customer relationship. If this is successful, then the direct comparison of your products with competing products will be less important to your customers than their good collaboration with you. If you are also able to offer a high-quality product at an attractive price, then there is nothing to stand in the way of an excellent business relationship.
KAM means to understand the professional life of the customer from their perspective and situation, and to be able to identify areas in which you, as a business partner, can supply valuable services. Often, these will be services that are not part of the core business of your customers, but that you may master them very well.
You can guess, or you already know, that KAM can only be practiced successfully by persons with extensive experience and a special kind of personality. It is especially important that the KA manager is able to put himself in his customer’s shoes and thus get a grasp of the challenges and problems they face. He needs to systematically document his findings, create proposals for solutions to problems and then implement these in practice. This includes a high degree of leadership competence as well as communication and networking skills. Because in most cases, the various functions of a company (Research & Development, Medicine, Commerce …) need to be merged in order to be able to offer a useful package to the customer.
KAM was developed in the 1970s in the consumer and investment goods industry. In the medical and pharmaceutical sector, the understanding of KAM as described above was only rarely practiced and taught. Often, the KA manager is only responsible for creating a quotation for a major client – even though it is important especially in medicine to recognise the needs of doctors, medical offices and hospitals and to make them systematically transparent. If you want to be the preferred partner of your customers, there is hardly a way around a professional KAM.
With my experience as a physician, as a person responsible for many years for strategy development, marketing and sales, as well as a long-standing KAM project manager and Key Account Manager, I can contribute a unique combination of abilities into a business partnership.