How to survive strategic planning: An actionable framework

Having led, participated in, consulted on, or acted as a co-conspirator in numerous strategic plans across a broad range of businesses, I have concluded that most corporate entities—large or small, new or established— arrive at one painful common realization when creating their strategic plans: The entire process sucks. It’s frustrating, time-consuming, and often produces a lackluster result…or worse, provides an unwise strategy at a crucial tipping point for the company.

The people charged with developing these plans are expected to do so on top of performing their already-demanding jobs. Their planning “process” then often spirals down into creating generic strategies and objectives (how many more times can “increase prescribing” and “activate the patient” be used in the healthcare sector?). Even experienced teams struggle to create an insightful plan that delivers clear results based on agreed-upon terminology.

Inevitably, frustration with existing templates, lack of time, and looming deadlines lead to, “Let’s just update what we did last year.”

After witnessing and participating in a few too many of these unfulfilling exercises, I became determined to conceive a better way.

I wanted to map out a process that helps the big picture become clearer…then break down that big picture into feasible steps…and finally take the learnings from those steps to create thoughtful solutions, industry-leading thinking, and brilliant strategy.

OK, if not all that…then at least to make the process manageable and the final plan meaningful—with clear objectives, strategies, and metrics to track your progress (and defend your glory!)

The Brave Health Strategic Planning Framework evolved from collaboration with a number of biopharmaceutical companies, and draws from my years of experience participating in, workshopping, or leading the process of creating a successful strategic plan.

As I refined it over the past several years, I’ve applied versions of this Framework at biopharma and service sector companies. In doing so, I’ve learned it can be applied to specific products, to divisions or departments, or to entire organizations—successfully.

This framework provides a way to demonstrate a clear rationale for prioritizing investment choices. It’s driven by insights. It’s even been used successfully by non-marketers.

Below is a snapshot of the framework’s structure and components. Behind each component are instructions for how to complete them, including sources to use, how to identify and manage the cross-functional team, and how to develop metrics that prove your success (or at least to learn in a timely way if something isn’t tracking).

The Brave Health Strategic Planning Framework provides clear direction to develop each stage of planning, including market landscape, development of objectives, strategies to achieve those objectives, and tactics to deliver the strategy.

If you’d like to learn more, I’d welcome a chance to discuss it further with you: kelly.hughes@brave-health.com.

StrategicFramewrok.jpg

Managing Bias

We all carry with us our own collection of experiences that inform the thousands of daily decisions—both large and small—that we make. There is nothing we can do to change our past experiences, but we can try to be more aware of how much we allow them influence us. I am a big believer in listening to you gut instincts. In business—as in many aspects of our lives—it’s important to weigh that instinctual message against a more objective set of questions and available information.

This article (Outsmart your own biases, HBR) describes a number of approaches to help manage our natural bias.

Some key insights:

  • Listen your instincts as well as well outside information
  • Acknowledge your mood or emotional strength—being mentally or physically tired can derail decision-making processes
  • Be aware of the natural human desire for certainty and don’t ignore or dismiss unconventional solutions too quickly

Try "brainswarming" instead of brainstorming

Let's face it: most of us do brainstorming without much of a framework. We gather the group, put ideas on a board, and then use only a few of the ideas if any. The challenge with the traditional brainstorming approach is that sometimes very few good ideas come out of the time spent.

This is a great approach that I have used successfully—even with groups that have done a lot of brainstorming. It's easy to adapt the core concept that is explained in this short video.

So the next time you need to do brainstorming, try brainswarming instead.

4 Factors for Successful EU Market Access

There are a lot of horror stories about dealing with the various “big 5” EU country (France, Germany, UK, Spain & Italy) drug approval and reimbursement authorities: NICE is a force to be reckoned with; the German authority seems impenetrable; Spain has been changing their policies to offset economic conditions; Italy may require “pay for performance”; France (and others) set budget limits for certain drugs.

A recent assignment highlighted some key considerations when launching a biopharma product in the EU, and some insights on developing a successful strategy emerged.

1. There may not be one EU strategy

Brand managers often express a need for one, all encompassing EU strategy for their brand. Each country has enough unique requirements that each will need its due course for approval, pricing and access negotiations. A clear overarching EU strategy must allow for each country’s nuances.

2. Strategic choices in patient population

The approved patient population will, of course, be based on the clinical trial design, but consideration of key sub-populations, especially at launch, may be worthwhile. A strategy to launch in a smaller population—where the product benefit is clear—and keep expanding into a larger population over time, as more clinical trial data become available and/or real world experience provides a rationale for expanding patient types, has been very effective. Brands that have a clear long-term strategy may be able to successfully implement this approach. They may start “small” in terms of patient population and price, but over time they continue to advance pricing and access as they add new indications and result in a win-win-win (payer/patient/company) scenario.

3. Be as transparent as possible. Then more so

Many companies approach the negotiations with the approval and pricing authorities (The two functions can be closely aligned or distinct depending on the country) as inevitably contentious. However, there are several examples of companies with very difficult challenges, e.g., a high-priced biologic entering a less expensive tablet market, having very successful outcomes both in terms of price and access. The one thread that seems to connect these success stories is that the companies went into the negotiations with complete transparency on not only their data—going above and beyond requirements—but also their long term clinical development plans. Sharing their vision for the benefits of their product in the target populations and how their clinical program supported that vision, often resulted in favorable pricing and access.

4. Shifting healthcare provider roles and site of patient acquisition

Some of the newer biologics being developed for diseases previously treated with a pill are causing a shift both in site of care and possibly where the patient acquires the drug. Certain countries may require injectables to be administered by a specialist whereas the patient had previously been prescribed a pill by a general practitioner. Similarly, higher cost drugs or drugs requiring special handling may be limited to hospital distribution versus a community pharmacy. These changes require companies to carefully consider how to provide the right support services, education and communication to physicians and patients to ensure that patients have access to their product.

The Sovaldi launch shone a bright light on the ever contentious topics of costs and access for patients. As the industry continues to produce more costly—and highly beneficial— biologics for large potential patient populations (e.g., lipid lowering, certain cancers, HepC), there will be more and more experience to draw from.