Who decides what is relevant?

In my last Notes from the trenches I wrote about why so many pharma executives worry about not being relevant to healthcare stakeholders, and what being relevant actually means.

The question did not leave me after I published. I kept thinking about it, especially on the dog walks. The dogs don’t mind me being preoccupied, it gives them freedom to operate and far longer sniffs along the ground than I would normally have the patience for.

I think most of us agree that it matters to be relevant in front of a stakeholder. Because we know what happens if we’re not. They decide we are wasting their time, and they won’t accept another meeting.

It turns out they are keeping score. DT Consulting asks healthcare professionals every year to rate their recent interactions with pharma companies on three things. Trust, relevance and simplicity. The latest round covered 6,020 HCPs in 13 countries and was published in December 2025. All three metrics fell.

In the last article I wrote: “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.”

I still agree with myself, which is comforting. But here’s what keeps nagging me. Who decides what kind of expertise and competence is needed? Who decides what will make YOU relevant to ONE particular stakeholder in ONE specific meeting?

The scalable gate

Let’s say we try to solve this the traditional pharma way. Here’s what’s going to happen: someone at headquarters will be put in charge of developing more relevant content, whatever that means. But content is easy. Figuring out what new expertise and capabilities the field force needs is not.

A case in point: Many years ago I attended a meeting at the global headquarters of the company I was working for at the time. The newly appointed CEO had asked for a new commercial model built on key account management. Some of us from the local affiliates with experience of that kind of programme had been invited to give our view on how it should be done.

The man leading the work was what I call a typical careerist. He had learned what worked in the early nineties, made a career out of it and that is what he brought to the room. We need to identify initiatives that are SCALABLE, he said. And he kept saying it. Whatever clever input we had, it had to pass the scalable gate.

Now, if you know anything about key account management, you know it is close to the opposite of a scalable initiative for a mass market. That is what “key” stands for. Unique. One of a kind.

That is not to say accounts have nothing in common. Many share similar challenges and similar priorities. But to assume you will find the one thing that scales and fits everyone is, frankly, preposterous. And no, the initiative never got off the ground. The new CEO eventually lost interest and moved on to other important things.

What happens when the goal is “be more relevant”

Here’s an idea: What if we make it the top priority for one year for the whole field force to become more relevant in front of healthcare stakeholders? What do you think will happen?

Luckily we don’t need to guess or run the experiment.

When a high level executive tells an organisation “be more relevant” it sounds like a clear instruction. But research into how we set goals says otherwise. Locke and Latham summarised 35 years of research and more than 40,000 participants in 2002. They found that goals of the “do your best” type “have no external referent and thus are defined idiosyncratically.”

This means: If the goal does not say what good looks like, everyone will fill it with their own meaning.

“Be more relevant” is that kind of goal. For a manager it means one thing. For those in the field it means another. And for the stakeholder that sits across the table from you, relevance means something different entirely.

So who decides?

My view is this. What YOU need to become relevant will not come from the central functions. Not because they are not willing to help you, but because they don’t know your stakeholders the way you do.

The only one who can create the thing that makes you relevant, in a particular situation with a particular stakeholder, is you. There’s just no way around it. This also means there’s a REALLY big opportunity waiting out there for those who want to take it.

Your move

Psychology has a practical tool for turning a vague goal into something you can act on. Gollwitzer and Sheeran pooled 94 studies in 2006 on what they call implementation intentions. So instead of having a goal that says “I will become more relevant” you say “if this situation occurs, then I will do that”. People who write their goal this way reach it more often than people who keep it general.

So here’s an example of how you can write your own becoming more relevant goal.

Pick one stakeholder you will meet in the next month. Write down the one challenge you know they are working on right now.
Write down what you do not know about that challenge.
Finish this sentence: “If this stakeholder is thinking about how to tackle this challenge …then relevant for me means …”
Do your homework, fill in the blanks and open up the conversation with: “I understand you are working on… as I studied this topic I found out that… what’s your perspective?”

That sentence is the one thing no one else can write for you.

In the next Notes from the trenches: a question a former colleague once asked me, and it has stayed with me ever since. If we used to give detail aids to product specialists, what are we giving KAMs? I have been looking at what the numbers say.

/Mats

Background research and sources

DT Consulting, The State of Customer Experience in the Global Pharmaceutical Industry 2025: HCP Interactions, published 8 December 2025. 6,020 HCPs, 13 countries, 8 specialties, 12,040 rated interactions, fielded April to June 2025. Verbatim: “All three core drivers, trust, relevance, and simplicity, declining for the first time since COVID-19.” The overall score fell from 58 to 54. The score is a proprietary index whose scale is not published, so the change should not be read as a percentage. No separate score for relevance is published, so we know it fell but not by how much. DT Consulting is owned by Indegene, which sells content services to pharma, and reported the decline all the same.

Locke, E.A. and Latham, G.P. (2002), Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: a 35-year odyssey, American Psychologist 57(9), 705–717. Roughly 35 years of research, over 40,000 participants, at least eight countries. Verbatim: “do-your-best goals have no external referent and thus are defined idiosyncratically.”