03 / Planning
Account Planning and Execution excellence. How a cross-functional team turns what it knows about an account into one prioritised opportunity, and a plan that actually gets implemented.
Key Account Manager
15
meetings held last quarter
Medical Science Liaison
12
scientific exchanges completed
Market Access
✓
reimbursement approval secured
Yet …
The key account didn’t move forward on the opportunity that matters most.
Individual success ≠ team success ≠ account progress
Healthcare organisations don’t make decisions because one pharma representative has a good idea. They decide when stakeholders across the organisation each see value from their own perspective.
Clinical leaders care about evidence and outcomes. Operational managers worry about workflow and capacity. Financial controllers must justify the resources. Executive leadership balances strategic priorities.
Opportunities rarely fail because the clinical evidence is weak. They fail because the pharma team couldn’t show it understood the account from all of these angles. No single person can build that understanding alone. The KAM knows the strategic priorities, the MSL the clinical landscape, market access the reimbursement complexity.
The power comes from bringing those perspectives together around one specific, prioritised opportunity.
The question APEX answers
How do we work together as a team to advance one validated win-win-win opportunity, and get access to the decision-makers who can act on it?
Every significant decision in a healthcare organisation balances three things. Strategically sound but operationally impossible never happens. Scientifically excellent but strategically unanchored meets resistance. The strongest opportunities sit where all three intersect.
What is this organisation trying to achieve, and within what economic framework?
Goals, budgets, cost-saving requirements, growth plans and strategic initiatives. Softer aspects too: staff retention, patient satisfaction targets and benchmarking against peers.
Example: migraine careThe region aims to cut emergency department visits for chronic conditions by 15%, while finding SEK 8 million in savings.
How does the organisation work in practice, and where is the friction?
Workflows, processes, capacity, staff efficiency, patient flows, quality metrics, resource use and facilities.
Example: migraine careChronic migraine patients wait 4 to 6 months for a neurologist, and many cycle through the emergency department while they wait.
What evidence guides care, and where are the knowledge gaps?
Clinical evidence, treatment protocols, guidelines, educational needs, research priorities and care delivery models.
Example: migraine carePrimary care has limited awareness of preventive treatment options, and protocols still emphasise acute management over prevention.
A list of facts about an account creates no value. Value starts when you ask what the knowledge means for patients, for the account, and for your company.
Raw facts. “The account performed 450 orthopaedic surgeries last year.”
Structured, contextualised data. “Volume has fallen 15% in three years while regional demand grew 8%. They are losing patients to other facilities.”
Knowledge plus consequences. A pattern that reveals something not obvious from the individual facts.
An actionable, validated insight. A problem you can help solve that creates value for all three parties.
Worked example
“Neurology has a 4 to 6 month wait for new chronic migraine patients, and many visit the emergency department several times before they see a specialist.”
Ask: what are the consequences?
Months of avoidable suffering while waiting for specialist care, with repeated emergency visits and delayed access to preventive treatment that could cut monthly migraine days sharply.
An unsustainable neurology backlog, and emergency departments absorbing non-emergency cases at a high cost per visit. A direct conflict with the strategic goal to cut emergency utilisation.
Preventive protocols can’t be implemented reliably until capacity is freed up. But a treatment that reduces migraine days and needs less frequent administration could be part of the answer.
The insightThe capacity crisis in neurology blocks preventive migraine care, and it opens the door to solutions that combine strong efficacy with operational efficiency.
An insight your team generates around the table is still a hypothesis. It becomes something you can build on only after someone has tested it in an Engage conversation with the stakeholders who live that reality.
The temptation is to work on every opportunity at once and make a little progress on each. Don’t.
Spread a team across five opportunities and none gets the attention it needs to be validated and implemented. Take ONE through the full cycle, from hypothesis to validated insight to implemented solution, and you get real results plus learning you can use on the next.
The question isn’t “which opportunities should we work on?” It is “which ONE should we prioritise right now?” Stay with it until you are either implementing it, or have validated that it isn’t viable.
High-performing teams advance opportunities to completion. Busy teams discuss many things without completing anything.
People are busy, and account meetings easily turn into time sinks. The trick is not to cover the whole plan. Use the meeting to advance the one opportunity you have agreed matters most.
Section two is where it comes together. The MSL hears neurologists’ frustration with preventive options. Market access knows the region is tracking emergency costs for non-emergency cases. Clinical operations knows neurology is looking for more efficient care models. Separately, they are facts. Together, they reveal an opportunity.
Don’t worry if you can’t get through the whole agenda at first. Quality beats quantity while you build the foundation.
Section three is where you find the gaps. Maybe you understand the clinical barrier but not the operational implications. Maybe you know the priority but not the decision-maker. Those gaps become a simple action list: who finds out what, by when.
When the gap is a stakeholder you need to understand better, someone holds an Engage conversation, and the answer feeds the next review. Review, find the gap, have the conversation, synthesise, repeat.
Five sections. Built to be implemented, not filed.
The cross-functional team with clearly defined roles: KAM, MSL, market access, clinical operations.
Strategic, operational and scientific insight captured systematically across every interaction, so knowledge compounds instead of staying in silos.
One opportunity, with the win-win-win for patient, account and company spelled out.
A structured, recurring account review that creates discipline over the long haul.
Clear owners, deadlines and status for every commitment. Follow-through you can see.
If you only measure individual activity, you get individual activity. Team KPIs have to reward the behaviour that moves an account.
Measuring what is easy to count (calls, meetings, emails) rather than what drives outcomes.
Track the team’s collective progress on prioritised win-win-win opportunities.
Each function optimises its own metrics, creating uncoordinated effort.
Measure how well the team combines its expertise around shared goals.
Individual targets reward parallel work instead of collaboration.
Reward the team for advancing the opportunities that matter most.
Measuring results like sales and share of wallet, but not the team behaviours that create them.
Measure both what the team does and what it achieves.
Keep them relevant, simple and few: four to six KPIs that the team can actually influence, understand in 60 seconds, and see tracked openly. And check the foundations first. Without organisational alignment, incentives that reward collaboration and realistic workloads, even perfect KPIs won’t drive team performance.
Research-driven, team-enabled, validation-focused and relentlessly prioritised.
Research identifies a potential opportunity and builds the knowledge asset that gets you access.
The team turns it into hypothesised insights with S.O.S., agrees it is THE priority, and names the stakeholders to validate it with.
Validation conversations test whether the problem is real, urgent and actionable, and whether you are seen as the right partner.
The team synthesises what was learned, refines the opportunity, and decides whether to keep going or pivot.
And the cycle continues until the opportunity is either implemented or set aside on the strength of what you learned. Connect without APEX means individuals working in silos. APEX without Engage means solutions built on assumptions. Engage without Connect means conversations without direction.