Business Acumen & Account Management 
June Newsletter (Collaboration – Account Management – Specialty Pharma)
Successful Account Management in Specialty Pharma starts with “Collaboration”
Collaboration is more than a buzz word; it is a way of working and vitally needed to drive business results, especially for pharmaceutical and biotech organizations focused on specialty and rare disease state products. Cross-functional, compliant collaboration is essential to drive integrated, patient-centered approaches necessary to manage complex therapies and evolving market demands.
In larger organized customers, the challenge of getting the right medicines to the right patients at the right time involves different customer-facing roles working in a compliant and coordinated manner. However, field collaboration is often cited as a significant account management concern. Therefore, collaboration if left to chance, will result in opportunities being missed, customer engagement diminished, and risks to sales performance.
Below are important actions leaders and account team members can take to create and sustain a culture of collaboration and accountability.
Incorporating Collaboration in the Organization’s Culture
Driving a culture of collaboration starts with defining a clear patient-centered mission and rallies everyone on the “why” behind their efforts. Team members need to understand and buy-in to their interdependency as a means of better execution and an improved customer-experience. Leaders must reinforce key messages regarding the benefits of cross-functional collaboration such as:
- Leveraging team expertise to develop unified strategies with organized customers (payers, large IDNs, medical groups, specialty pharmacies)
- Responding to stakeholder needs by pooling insights and fostering real-time problem solving
- Driving solution-based opportunities and partnership with value-based models that improve patient outcomes and address cost concerns
- Building trust and long-term relationships with key stakeholders by demonstrating coordination and informed team members?
Clarifying Roles and Responsibilities – The Secret Sauce of Execution
Role clarification is fundamental to effective field collaboration because it defines clear responsibilities, compliance guardrails, and boundaries; ensuring that each team member knows where their contributions begin and end. This clarity reduces overlap and minimizes conflict, enabling team members to work synergistically towards common objectives. When every role is well-articulated, professionals can leverage their specialty without ambiguity, leading to more efficient decision-making and improved accountability. Clear role definition fosters a culture of trust and mutual support, empowering field teams to collaborate seamlessly and drive better patient outcomes.
Strengthening Collaboration Skills as a foundation for Effective Account Management
The rise of specialty pharmaceuticals is changing the customer landscape and the impact of this creates the necessity to employ a Strategic Account Management model to succeed in this space. Underlying effective account management planning and execution is collaboration.
Specialty pharmaceutical organizations (with the goal of strengthening collaboration as a core capability) should focus on the following actions:
- Culture: Partner with senior leaders to define a culture of collaboration to drive behaviors needed to support cross-functional collaboration and cascade to team members.
- Role-Specific Collaboration Training: Work with each role to define collaboration behaviors and clarify compliance requirements.
- Creating the space to support individuals with the skills to effectively communicate and resolve conflict with their field counterparts.
- Promoting Cross-Functional Collaboration: Design interactive sessions where collaboration messages and practices are reinforced. Allow teams to work through real planning and execution issues with specially designed programs and approaches that align goals, strategies, and share responsibilities in a compliant and coordinated manner.
- Leveraging a Collaboration Continuum Tool: Provide Account Teams with a structured process to address specific behaviors and collaboration efforts between individuals. This provides an opportunity to address specific agreements and actions needed to strengthen collaboration, coordination and communication.
- Continuing Account Management Skill Development: Build business acumen capabilities and collaboration skills by helping field roles understand how to profile an account, identify and map stakeholders, and compliantly develop integrated account plans. None of these activities take place in a vacuum!
By treating collaboration as a strategic lever, and integrating it into every level of account management, organizations can strengthen execution, enhance customer relationships, and drive sustainable growth in the Specialty Pharmaceutical and Rare Disease market.
For those attending the 2025 LTEN Conference at the Denver Gaylord, please join WLH and a great panel of speakers for our workshop, “It’s Complicated! Making Account Management Work in Specialty Pharma “ on July 29th at 10:30 am – 11:30 am MT.
