Let's talk about key performance indicators

Let’s talk about Key Performance Indicators.

Yes, I have been writing about this before, and with the current rate of adoption of more appropriate KPIs I will continue to do so.

In fact, you might argue that the current incentive and reward system in pharma is the reason for the declining return of field teams. From my position, this is what I see.

If data tells us that healthcare professionals (HCPs) do not think meeting with pharma reps provides value, then surely something is wrong. Terribly wrong. And it’s not because the field teams are not doing what they should. No, they are only responding to the current incentive structures bolted to an outdated commercial model.

In short: The system is broken.

And worse: There’s little evidence that something new is coming.

The good news: This means there’s opportunity out there to capture for anyone not being content with the current situation.

I get it, there’s hardly anything more boring than talking about KPIs.

The best KPIs are the ones you don’t talk about, the ones that just works.

So when I get questions about appropriate team based KPIs, I know somethings is not working. And I get these questions a lot.

What do I do?

Well, I give my point of view, pointing to the need to change the underlying incentive structure which always gives the manager a dead stare as they realize, oops – this is above my pay grade.

I get that. The change needs to start with the higher management team. But what do you do, as I heard the other day, when the first thing the new head of Europe asks for is: What are your call frequency and coverage?

It’s enough to drive you crazy if you let it… (Rest in piece Dolly Parton).

This tells me that the awareness of what is happening on the floor is not only bad, it is catastrophic.

Why have we ended up at this place?

Why are so many great pharma companies willingly steering themselves into the abyss?

Why are they making themselves redundant?

For one thing, I refuse to believe it’s because lack of IQ. I’ve met and talked to a lot of these people and they are smart, smarter than me.

So why then?

My take is: they are as much a victim of the system as everyone else. They’ve been brought up in it, being part of it, and had a great career based on it. And when you’re surrounded with the same type of people, where’s the impulse to change going to come from?

Since a number of weeks I’ve been building a new type of account planning tool that uses AI to do the heavy lifting for us. This will save A LOT of time and improve performance and efficiency to the benefit of HCPs, patients and the company.

At this stage of the project I’m now considering what KPIs to integrate. In my view, there’s only one purpose these KPIs should support: How effective is the team in advancing identified win-win-win opportunities together with the account.

This simple sentence gave birth to 20 potential KPIs.

Twenty.

Here’s a couple of them I’m particularly found of:

KPI	Input	How it is derived	What it shows
1 Account plan quality	The existing account plan, run in document mode. No wiki required.	Compression ratio; share of text carrying nothing the reader could not have predicted; assumption load, meaning load-bearing claims with no stated evidence.	How much of what was written down was already known to the reader. Whether the plan is a transmission device or a ritual.
2 Depth of account knowledge	All standing claims, each tagged Scientific, Operational or Strategic, and graded.	Claim count, corroborated share, and the shape across the three dimensions.	Whether the account is known as an organisation or only clinically. Thick scientific against an empty strategic layer is a specific and fixable diagnosis rather than a general complaint.
3 Corroborated share	Standing claims, their grade, author and source items.	Claims with two or more independent sources, divided by all standing claims. Echo-adjusted, so two people repeating one original source count once.	Whether the account picture is shared or is one person’s account of it. Forty structural claims with eleven corroborated is itself the finding, not a gap in the data.
6 Days since last delta	Claims, item dates, duplicate detection.	Elapsed days since the newest claim that was not already known.	How long the account has gone without producing new information, read against activity over the same period. Volume measures effort. This measures whether any of it was news.
11 Question closure rate	Questions issued by each Account Foundation run, their dates, and whether they came back answered.	Answered divided by issued, per run, plus elapsed time on those still open.	Whether the questions the tool raised were actionable, and whether the team engaged them. This is number of actionable insights, with the actionability tested rather than asserted.
14 Win-win-win completeness	Standing claims and their grades, tested against the three wins.	Whether the patient win, the system win and the company win are each supported by a sourced claim, and at what grade.	Whether the opportunity is genuinely tri-lateral. The company win is always assertable, so in practice this measures whether the account’s own stated ambition is on file and sourced.

To conclude.

There’s more than enough data that tells us somethings needs to change.

As I have written before, if the value of the traditional information exchange meetings will continue it’s trajectory towards zero due to AI adoption in healthcare, the window closing, and it’s closing quickly.

But I have faith in all those great people working in pharma.

The best part is, you don’t need permission to start.

Just start.

Every great thing has started with a small step. An idea. A small initiative. Anything.

Now stop reading and get out there and change the world.