We have been telling our teams to be more relevant. We never told them how.

The other week I had a meeting with a senior executive at one of the large pharmaceutical companies. My job was to brief him on a workshop I will run for his team in a few weeks.

After the usual pleasantries I started describing the setup. What we are going to do, what we want to achieve, the preparation, the practical things.

I did not get far. I had just begun explaining what I consider one of the big problems today, access to decision makers in healthcare, and that showing medical teams how to work practically on changing that is exactly what the workshop is for.

Exactly, he interrupted. I am sorry, but I could not hold back any longer. I have to tell you how much I agree with what you are saying. I always tell my teams that we must, and he leaned hard on the last part, become more relevant to our customers. Only then will we earn a seat at the table and become the thing we have always talked about becoming. A valuable partner to healthcare.

As you can imagine, there was not much left for me to add. He had just made my job considerably easier. I do not always get that kind of excited response from senior executives so I finished the call in a very good mood.

A while later, out walking the dogs at lunch, Staffordshire bull terriers for anyone wondering, a thought hit me.

What he said about becoming more relevant. What does that actually mean?

A word everyone agrees with

He is not alone in saying it. This has been going on for years, and many leaders identified the underlying problem a long time ago. When you are not relevant, access to decision makers suffers.

But again. What does being relevant actually mean? What does it look like? How do you become it? What exactly can I do, as a KAM or an MSL?

By the time I got that far the walk was over. Two grateful dogs parked themselves under my desk and I went looking for the truth. Or more accurately, for what other people have written about it. Because I realised I might have taken a lot for granted. You think you know what something means, and then you start digging and find out how thin your knowledge is.

I found a fair amount.

What the numbers say

The first thing that shows up is a gap between how senior leaders rate their own customer engagement and how healthcare professionals rate it.

Deloitte surveyed more than 190 HCPs and 50 executives from the top 25 pharmaceutical companies, and published the result in March 2025. Eighty-two percent of life sciences executives are satisfied with their current customer engagement strategies. Twenty-eight percent of HCPs feel those strategies meet their needs effectively.

Put that beside Indegene’s survey of around 1,000 physicians across eight countries, where 70% said pharmaceutical representatives do not completely understand their requirements. In the UK it was 83%. In Germany 80%.

For anyone working in pharma, none of this is news.

And the positive reading is that it points at an opportunity nobody has taken.

Imagine a new survey where 70% of HCPs say that representatives from company X really do understand their situation and what they need. Think what that would mean for that company’s access to stakeholders, and in the end for patients’ access to their medicines.

Why should that not be possible?

But how would it happen? What is missing today?

The clue outside pharma

I had to leave our own industry to find one.

The best thing I found is a meta-analysis by Palmatier, Dant, Grewal and Evans, published in the Journal of Marketing in 2006. It pools 111 independent samples and 38,077 respondents to answer a single question. What actually makes a business customer value a relationship with a supplier?

What they found: “The seller expertise (r = .62) and communication (r = .54) antecedents have the greatest positive influence on relational mediators.”

So business to business buyers value expertise. Hardly a surprise. Expertise is defined in the study as knowledge, experience, and overall competency of the seller.

The part that should stop us is further down the same list.

Interaction frequency, defined as the number of interactions per unit of time, scores .16. Relationship duration, meaning how long you have known each other, scores .13. Of the eight factors measured, those two come seventh and eighth.

Frequency and coverage. The two things we regard as sacred in pharma.

The right kind of expertise

If we assume the study also applies to pharma, and I see no reason why it would not, the question becomes whether our people are meeting those three criteria. Knowledge, experience, competency.

My view, after teaching and coaching thousands of KAMs, MSLs, medical advisors and market access people, is that they hold a very high level of expertise.

But is it the right kind of expertise?

I am fairly certain this is where the way forward sits. There is nothing wrong with the knowledge we give our people today. We just need more tools in the toolbox.

Being an expert on your product is no longer enough. The competence has to reach past the product and into the account itself. Its patient flows. The barriers in the patient journey. Its strategic priorities. Its challenges. The ecosystem it belongs to.

None of that gets fixed overnight.

Your move

The good news is that anyone can take the first step, and nobody has to approve it.

1. Write a list of the things you do not know about the account that would really change how you run your meetings if you knew the answer.
2. Pick the three that matter most, and decide for each one how you would find the answer. Who to ask. What to read. Which meeting to request.
3. Take one of them into your next meeting as a question rather than a message. Then stop talking and listen and learn.

That is not a project. It is an afternoon.

And it is the difference between being an expert on what we sell and being an expert on the account.

You’ve read this far, so I’m betting you’re ready to start.

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

/Mats

Background research and sources

Deloitte Switzerland, Unlocking the future of customer engagement in pharma, published 20 March 2025. Survey of more than 190 HCPs and 50 pharmaceutical executives from the top 25 pharmaceutical firms. Verbatim: “82% of life sciences executives are satisfied with their current customer engagement strategies, yet only 28% of HCPs feel that these strategies meet their needs effectively.” Fielding dates are not disclosed. The two figures come from two different questions, so this is a perception gap rather than a like for like comparison.

Indegene, The Digitally Savvy HCP, and the June 2022 restatement of the same dataset. Around 1,000 HCPs across eight countries including the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy, 20+ specialties, all with ten or more years of experience. Verbatim: “70% of HCPs feel that pharma representatives do not completely understand their requirements”, rising to 83% in the UK and 80% in Germany. The fieldwork dates from 2021.

Palmatier, R.W., Dant, R.P., Grewal, D., and Evans, K.R. (2006), Factors Influencing the Effectiveness of Relationship Marketing: A Meta-Analysis, Journal of Marketing 70(4), 136–153. Meta-analysis of 111 independent samples from 94 manuscripts, N = 38,077, 637 correlations. Effects on the relational mediators, which are commitment, trust, relationship satisfaction and relationship quality: seller expertise .62, communication .54, relationship investment .46, similarity .44, dependence on seller .26, interaction frequency .16, relationship duration .13, conflict −.67. The study covers business to business relationships generally and not pharmaceutical field teams specifically. Full text is openly available through the University of Washington.