A thought experiment for the beach

It is July. If you are reading this the way most of my audience is right now, you are horizontal, warm, and somewhere between the second and third umbrella drink of the afternoon.

Good, you have deserved it!

But sooner or later the sun gets boring. The next drink does not look as tempting as the first two did. Your brain, finally rested, starts quietly looking for something to chew on. May I suggest a thought experiment, now that it is relaxed and open to new ideas.

A quick recap before we start

Earlier this year I wrote two pieces about the pod, the small commercial unit pharma is rebuilding itself around. Five specialists, one account, one shared outcome metric. A field lead, a digital engagement specialist, a data analyst, a market-access lead, a patient-support expert. Account-bound, persistent, collectively accountable, with the decision rights to reallocate effort between themselves without asking anyone upstairs.

That is the setup. Here is the exercise.

Imagine you are one of the five

It is January 2027 and you are the field lead of a pod. Close your eyes, well, after you have finished reading, and walk through a single day.

Your morning does not start with getting into you car for a 2 hour drive to a meeting with a physician you don’t know anything about. No, it starts with something the teams data analyst flagged last night: recently published data about the account you’re about to visit in the afternoon, reveals that referrals from primary care have dropped for the third month running, and there’s no mentioning about this fact in the team’s diary.

You walk into that afternoon meeting with this knowledge top of mind. You’re not delivering a prepared message. You don’t have an approved slide deck with you. The only thing you have is this piece of knowledge and some questions you thought of that hopefully will give you deeper knowledge and insights into why this is happening and what the potential consequences are, for patients, the account and your company.

Now compare that to the meeting you would have had in the old model. You, alone, with whatever preparation one person can manage between six other calls, opening with a product update the physician could have read online.

Which of those two meetings gets you invited back?

Will you actually engage HCPs better?

The evidence we already have says yes.

HCPs have been telling us for years what they want. Two in three European physicians who still see pharma have limited themselves to three companies or fewer. The ones who open the door say they would be twice as likely to meet with someone whose interaction mirrored their best professional relationship. And their best professional relationships are not with people who deliver messages. They are with people they learn from.

One person, however talented, struggles to be that. One person cannot simultaneously know the account’s referral data, its reimbursement position, its patient-support gaps and its digital engagement history.

Five people who share one outcome can. The pod is not a smaller field force. It is a machine for showing up with something worth saying.

And utilization? That follows. Not because anyone pitched harder, but because the barriers between a guideline and a patient, the failed referrals, the late diagnostics, the closed reimbursement gates, are exactly what a pod is built and measured to remove. Treatments get used when pathways work.

Now the honest part of the exercise

Are there downsides? Of course there are. A thought experiment that only produces upsides is called a daydream.

Three worth thinking about.

Coverage shrinks. Five people on one account means some accounts get no pod at all. That is a real strategic choice, and it will feel brutal the first time a territory you spent years building goes uncovered. The management answer is that it is at least an explicit choice, made on data, instead of the silent thinning of reach that a 15% budget cut spreads across everyone.

The metric arrives late. Being measured on something a patient experiences six months from now is uncomfortable for anyone raised on call reports. It needs leading indicators along the way, or good people will feel lost between outcomes.

And the line between medical and commercial gets blurry inside a unit this integrated. That one is not solved by pretending it away. It is solved by designing the guardrails into the pod from day one, rather than bolting them on after the first uncomfortable question from compliance.

A note to you, on your sun chair

If this exercise left you curious rather than tired, I have something for you.

I have recorded a podcast as the opening of a training programme I run for people who want to work this way. The programme has four parts, and the first one is on the house. Some might say it is the most important of the four, because it covers the thing the exercise above started with: how you research an account and its stakeholders, and how you build a foundation of knowledge about your customers deep enough to start generating insights from.

No login, no cost for part one. Link in the first comment.

So begin becoming a pod the laziest way possible: lying perfectly still, eyes closed, headphones in. Anyone walking past will assume you are asleep.