From Targeting HCPs to Guiding Engagement

Pharmaceutical companies have traditionally focused commercial planning on who to engage: which healthcare professionals (HCPs), accounts or territories should receive sales attention. Increasingly, that is only the starting point. The harder question is how to engage each HCP - through which channel, which communication style with what content, and with what follow-up.

This matters because HCP engagement is now distributed across face-to-face meetings, remote calls, email, websites, congresses and medical interactions. Deloitte describes the direction of travel as integrated, personalised and increasingly automated customer engagement, combining human relationships with coordinated digital experiences.

A ready-to-use engagement plan translates strategy into field action. It should identify the priority HCP, but also recommend the engagement objective, preferred channel, how to engage, relevant message or approved content and next best action. That distinction is important: a targeting list tells a representative where to spend time; an engagement plan helps determine what to do with that time.

Recent Deloitte research identified a substantial gap between internal confidence and HCP experience. While 82% of surveyed life-sciences executives said they were satisfied with their customer-engagement strategy, only 28% of HCPs believed those strategies met their needs. This suggests that more activity is not necessarily the answer. Relevance, coordination and timing may matter more than contact volume. (Deloitte)

BCG similarly describes data and analytics as tools for coordinating and personalising channels, including dynamic field decision support and next-best-action recommendations. Used well, such guidance can reduce the burden on representatives of interpreting fragmented customer data, improve call preparation and make follow-up more consistent.

The impact is not automatic. Recommendations need reliable data, local-market fit and appropriate medical, promotional and privacy controls. Sales representatives must also trust the guidance and retain judgement when important context is not captured digitally.

The most effective model is a closed loop: plan the interaction, execute it, record the response and refine the next recommendation. This can help sales teams move from simply prioritising contacts to orchestrating more relevant and measurable HCP engagement.

Sources

• Deloitte, Unlocking the Future of Customer Engagement in Pharma, 19 March 2025
• Deloitte, Navigating the Future of Commercial in Biopharma, 1 June 2025
• BCG, The Forces Transforming Biopharma Marketing, 22 January 2025
• BCG, Rethinking Pharma's Commercial Model