CRITICAL COMPETENCIES – By Wendy Heckelman, Ph.D., and Sheryl Unger, MILR
Why does a perceived gap remain?
Business acumen is a widely discussed critical competency for customer-facing roles in the life sciences industry. At its core, business acumen means understanding how your customers and your company make money. With this increased focus, commercial organizations, learning and development (L&D) departments and industry partners have all rallied to strengthen business acumen, especially among customer-facing roles.
Even with this increased focus and effort, why does strengthening business acumen remain a perceived gap requiring additional development?
A Look Back
It is important to acknowledge the recent progress and increased investments made to develop and strengthen business acumen skills. Initially, the definition of business acumen was variable and sometimes vague.
Because of this, aligning senior leaders on a consistent definition was the first big win. Many life sciences and pharmaceutical companies’ definition includes demonstrating an understanding of the broader healthcare and local marketplace dynamics, being able to integrate data analytics into decision-making processes, working collaboratively with field counterparts to understand specific customer needs, and creating and executing targeted strategic plans.
Market access organizations were the first groups to invest heavily in business acumen skill development within the evolving account management practices needed due to waves of consolidation among larger organized customers (payers, integrated delivery networks and medical groups) and the shift to value-based care. In more recent years, commercial leadership began focusing on coaching all customer-facing roles to “connect the dots” as they planned and executed against priorities.
Over the years, L&D functions varied in commitment and investment in business acumen programs, account management skills development and strategic thinking and planning while also increasing their focus on improving constituents’ knowledge of marketplace dynamics.
Going Forward
The healthcare marketplace continues to evolve in complexity, and the need for stronger business acumen and account management skills will likely not slow anytime soon.
When designing and delivering learning curricula to strengthen individual skills it is important to:
- Focus on Marketplace Knowledge First
Start by ensuring customer-facing employees have baseline knowledge of the various healthcare stakeholders and business models impacting prescribing decisions. This includes expanding knowledge in topics such as: accountable care organizations, integrated delivery networks, pharmacy benefit managers, oncology care and other evolving segments.
Learning professionals must ensure this information remains current and relevant. - Delve Deeper With Account Profiling and Stakeholder Mapping
A basic principle of account management is that each customer is different, with unique clinical, business, operational and reimbursement concerns and needs. It is important to systematically profile each account to uncover the customer’s drivers and generate actionable insights for the team.
Often, an account lead takes primary responsibility; however, others on the team need to share information to develop a complete picture of the account, uncover priorities and collectively agree on the best path for advancing goals and achieving trusted partnership status. - Enhance Data Analytic Capabilities
Customer-facing roles are often provided various sales and market analytics reports, yet team members’ ability to review, evaluate and draw actionable insights from these reports may vary. To address this need, learning professionals should include data analysis skill development to enhance customer-facing team members’ ability to understand what is happening and why.
Actionable insights are needed to ensure account teams can identify the best opportunities and execute against priorities.
At the team level:
Create a Culture of Collaboration
Since account management for large, organized customers involves many different customer facing roles and working in a compliant and coordinated manner, it is important to create a culture of collaboration. When larger, multi-role teams are not collaborating and coordinating well, opportunities are missed.
Account leads need the skills to influence without authority. Individuals and team members need to take ownership for sharing information. Managers need to define clear behaviors, expectations and reinforce and reward collaboration as a key value. - Develop Account Management Leadership and Coaching Skills
Field managers require specific skills to coach individuals who call upon more complex accounts with multiple stakeholders. Leadership development and coaching programs should be retooled with a primary focus on building sophisticated account management and business acumen skills.
Field sales leaders need regular briefings and coaching to understand changes in the evolving marketplace and how best to coach their direct changes in the evolving marketplace, and how best to coach their direct reports to uncover customer needs and work across matrix teams in a more collaborative and coordinated manner.
Once individuals have mastered the critical capabilities of business acumen and account management, there are still steps an organization must take to ensure accountability, consistency and ongoing improvement of business acumen and account management skills. These steps are:
- Clearly Define the Account Planning Process
An organization that provides specific guidance to their employees on how to develop and execute coordinated account plans, in a compliant manner, will increase accountability for achieving results. Once processes are defined, organizations play an important role in developing learning programs and tools to further enhance strategic planning capabilities and support plan execution. - Build Tools for Sustainability and Effective Coaching
The best way to build business acumen is to apply key concepts through real-world application activities and the use of coaching guides. For example, account profiling guides that are customized for the role and for the therapeutic area allow customer-facing roles to extract specific insights for incorporation into an account plan.
Individual team members can share information with their field counterparts to drive collaboration and align overall account understanding. Customized and structured coaching guides provide people managers with the ability to follow up with direct reports to ensure learning is applied in actual customer situations. - Customize Learning Journeys and Curriculum by Roles and Experience Levels
Create a learning culture that deploys and utilizes assets through self-paced, virtual and leader-led delivery methods. This blended approach will allow forreal-time application on existing customer challenges, while limiting time away from the field, keeping costs down and strengthening practical account management skills.
Measuring training and event success should move beyond program-level evaluations. Competency-based assessments are useful in determining the extent to which individuals can demonstrate specific account management behaviors. In addition, individualized development plans should be updated on an annual basis. - Consider Creating an Account Leadership Development Program(ALDP)
An ALDP identifies, develops, prepares and eventually moves talent into critical account management roles. The program design should also include foundational knowledge and advanced negotiation, customer engagement and field collaboration skill development. An effective ALDP has its own curriculum roadmap, process for identifying high-potential employees, assessment instructions and action learning projects to develop account management skills.
Summary
The lessons learned at the individual, team and organizational levels provide positive steps for enhancing business acumen and account management skills. Creating an account management mindset through an effective curriculum and focused coaching supports the ability to achieve results.
Learning professionals play a critical role as business partners to provide resources and develop customer-facing roles’ business acumen and account management mindset, will set and skill set.
Wendy Heckelman, Ph.D., is president and founder of WLH Consulting and Learning Solutions. Email her at wendy@wlhconsulting.com or connect through linkedin.com/in/wendy-l-heckelman-phd.
Sheryl Unger, MILR, is an organizational development consultant for WLH Consulting and Learning Solutions. Email her at sheryl@wlhconsulting.com
or connect through linkedin.com/in/sheryl-unger-b7a5385.
