Much has been said about the challenges and values of building global centers of excellence for key account management (KAM) and strategic account management (SAM) as a strategic operational group within organizations. Each year, the Strategic Account Management Association (“SAMA”) issues awards for SAM programs and mature programs. One thing every winning company has in common is they all had an established centralized programming office, or center of excellence (“COE”). An irrelevant coincidence? We think not. Establishing a COE is the key success factor for implementing an effective strategic selling and strategic account management approach. Despite this fact, only 10 percent of SAMA member companies have a COE, let alone an effective one. With such a clear business opportunity, it is time to take a closer look at COEs, i.e., their challenges, benefits and key characteristics for SAM impact and success. 

About the Author

Dominique Côté brings  30 years of experience leading commercial teams in global pharmaceutical and biotech organizations.  Her consultancy work is focused on Commercial Excellence, Executive coaching &  leadership, KAM/SAM roadmaps & journeys, as well as Account based Marketing.

She is an accomplished international business leader, recognized as a chief architect of global account program journeys, leading corporate changes and cultural shifts for customer-centric innovation and patient value.

Dominique is  a panelist and keynote speaker in Europe and the U.S. in the areas of commercial  Excellence and Customer centricity. She writes and is published in journals like Journal of Sales Transformation, Velocity, and others on these topics.

For the past 20 years, I have been involved in pharma discussions regarding the need to radically change our sales and engagement model. The pharma industry has shifted from defi ning its customers as the physicians prescribing to patients to a much more complex environment – one where the customer is defined by a diverse group of players which participate in the decision-making around treatment and access to treatment. From my perspective, the ultimate customer, although indirectly, has always been the patient. This is now becoming increasingly important. However, in an industry that is being highly disrupted by the current technology explosion and remains under signifi cant regulatory pressure, both the demand and the uncertainty are making it easier said than done to engage in a cohesive fashion with the different customers.

These are a few of the mega trends that are forcing us to change our traditional engagement models:
• Value-based healthcare is putting pressure on contracting and pricing as we move away from price-per-unit and volume-based pricing to value outcome and risk sharing; this is resulting in increased sophistication and partnering.

• Technology – from 3D printing of tissues and organs to machine learning and AI. The days of being diagnosed using a mix of a scanning app connected to personal health
data via a virtual platform—where a doctor can diagnose and prescribe— to delivery of your prescription to your doorstep by drone may not be that far away. The  echnology will also transform our landscape from drug discovery to commercialization, as well as how patients access our products and solutions. By 2020, chronic conditions like diabetes will be diagnosed in minutes using
cognitive systems.

• Patient empowerment. Today’s patient is becoming increasingly important as a decision-maker. Meanwhile, the defi nition of health is shifting from being illness free
to simply being well. It is also broadening – today the solution to a disease is not simply medication  ut increasingly about a holistic approach that goes beyond the product to include devices, apps, environment, diet, and so on. Moreover, the overall solution is different for each patient, and getting more individualized.

• Competition landscape. Given this backdrop, pharma urgently needs to evolve how it partners around the basic issues and broad healthcare challenges. It is critical to create a more collaborative model aimed at curing illness and to provide holistic solutions to patients. All of  his means that our competition is no longer solely the pharma industry, but technology companies and
startups as well. To be successful, we need to change our mindset to create partnership with organisations, which we formerly used to view as our competitors, in order to  provide more value to the healthcare systems and their patients in a coordinated effort.

In order to be able to face these changes and adapt to them, our go-to-market sales and engagement model will need to evolve as well. We will need to really start looking “outside in” and understand the broad view of our  customers’ clinical, business, environmental and financial needs. We will need to look at our patients’ journeys and what is important to them, and then to explore how we can partner both within the organisation and externally to provide that holistic solution in a synergistic way. We will need to listen differently to bring simplicity and insight in a complex environment, understanding the whole customer, while also being proactive in identifying their challenges.

About the Author

Dominique Côté brings  30 years of experience leading commercial teams in global pharmaceutical and biotech organizations.  Her consultancy work is focused on Commercial Excellence, Executive coaching &  leadership, KAM/SAM roadmaps & journeys, as well as Account based Marketing.

She is an accomplished international business leader, recognized as a chief architect of global account program journeys, leading corporate changes and cultural shifts for customer-centric innovation and patient value.

Dominique is  a panelist and keynote speaker in Europe and the U.S. in the areas of commercial  Excellence and Customer centricity. She writes and is published in journals like Journal of Sales Transformation, Velocity, and others on these topics.