Cannonball Proof Your Decisions
Cannonball Proof Your Pharma Commercial Decisions to Stand The Pressure Test
Cannonball proof your decisions by building a core through the MoM (Market Opportunity Map)
You can’t master a new language without first learning the letters and how to use them to construct a meaningful sentence.
In the context of Big Pharma, the MOM is essentially the patient’s journey – what occurs from the onset of symptoms to seeking diagnoses and treatments to improve health outcomes and quality of life. To create an effective marketing strategy, at each step along the path you need to know what happens to the patient and all associated stakeholders (e.g., healthcare providers, insurance companies, and caregivers). Each player has their own set of interests, barriers, and has the power to influence others along the journey from sickness to health.
Acquiring this in-depth knowledge is not as easy as you may think, however. Sure, you can draw the journey in a few minutes using a generic structure. However, if you are honest with yourself, you will realize that if you substitute the journey name from (person living with schizophrenia) with another name (person living with hypertension), it applies just as well to either.
Similarly, you may think that you will get the most insightful MOM by working with the best consultancy firm. I can relate, considering I chose one of the leading consultancy firms to do an extensive research project for me to gain insight from healthcare providers (HCP). In more detail, we ran qualitative focus groups with different specialists and conducted quantitative research throughout one of the most populated country in the Middle East Africa . It took months of traveling to generate the results. Although I was very happy with the final product, the senior leadership team I was working for were not.
Mid-presentation, they stopped me to say we’ve heard this before; it’s a generic journey with shallow insights.
Offended that they didn’t appreciate the time and effort that went into this work, and the value it could add for them, I tried to elaborate. All the while, they insisted it was short-sighted and generic. Years later, when I reflected on this incident, I understood that I had overestimated the value of my results.
Through this experience, I learned that the methods are more important than the time and effort that goes into an MOM. This includes the sources you pull from, the quality of the questions you ask, the techniques you use to analyze data, the parameters you set, the variables you exclude, the process you employ to identify the gaps, and the leadership you need to steer the research team.
A market opportunity map (MOM) captures any interaction that a customer has with a business, its products or services.
Based on my own experience refining MOMs over the past 19 years in Big Pharma, I learned that getting the best outcome is not merely a matter of putting in the effort. The most important components are challenging underlying assumptions, selecting the right methods and sources of data, asking the right questions, using the most appropriate techniques to analyze data, carefully choosing the parameters and factors to exclude to qualify insights, identifying gaps and opportunities, and picking the leadership required to steer the research team.
BE PART OF THE COMMUNITY OF KEY PEOPLE IN BIG PHARMA
What if you actually lived the patient journey – knowing each player and their character?
What if you knew this even better than the script of your favorite movie?
My short answer to this series of questions is:
You could easily refer to the MOM whenever your decisions are challenged and contextualize them within the 8 scenes.
You would be prepared to quickly judge any proposal for action that you receive from leadership or commercial teams.
Ultimately, you would be viewed as a leader who is an expert in his or her domain.