As the landscape of healthcare stakeholders and influencers becomes more complex and multifaceted, so the need for managing key accounts grows. Pharma companies are trying to reach different stakeholders with different priorities, often in different locations. Key Account Management (KAM) is a way of consolidating this fragmentation, focusing on key institutions – whether these are hospital groups, pharmacy chains or even large public and private payers – and for those pharma companies doing it well, it is producing measurable business benefits.
What about those institutions that cross national borders? Recent years have seen the formation of ever-larger providers – super accounts – that do exactly this. We have seen the rise of multi-country hospital chains, such as Australian company Ramsay Healthcare, which also provides private healthcare in the UK, France, Indonesia and Malaysia. The Fresenius Helios hospital group, based in Germany, recently acquired the Spanish hospital group Grupo Hospitalario Quirónsalud to become the largest hospital group in Europe. Similarly, there are major pharmacy chains expanding their businesses across markets, such as Walgreens Boots Alliance, which operates the largest global pharmaceutical wholesale and distribution network delivering to more than 230,000 pharmacies, hospitals and other customers in more than 20 countries. We are also seeing a rise in payer influence and control, often across multiple markets.
So, how does a Key Account Manager (KAM) in one market approach this kind of super account? In an ideal world, pharma companies want their KAMs to act in a strategic role – to explore new opportunities, to uncover unmet needs and provide solutions, to build relationships and establish partnerships. But KAMs tend to operate on a local or at best regional or national level, and a KAM in one market can operate in a completely different way from a KAM in another market. There is a lack of aligned ‘vision’ within organisations around exactly what they want to be for these super accounts and insufficient coordination, so opportunities are being missed.
“We struggled to coordinate global and national interactions with a global pharmacy chain, not allowing us to maximise potential and minimise the risk,” said one pharmaceutical executive from a major pharmaceutical company. “Our global account team had interactions but did not generate insights on global strategies that would have helped our national account team to be well prepared and highly competitive.”
Going forward, pharmaceutical companies have to create new processes for dealing with globalising accounts and position themselves as long-term partners by delivering value, thereby helping their customers to achieve their goals while driving sustainable growth and profitability.
