A new view for no-sees	February 2008

Med Ad News spoke with Mark Gleason, senior VP, corporate development, Aptilon (aptilon.com), about how combining the telephone with Web-based applications can create an effective alternative to face-to-face detailing.

Med Ad News: As the number of no-see physicians increases, does telesales offer a useful alternative?

Mark Gleason: The key factors that are allowing no-see physicians to actually engage with pharma companies is the fact that you can allow them to do it at their convenience instead of when you have a rep drop in to their offices. That means nights and weekends. For the busiest primary-care physicians, for example, they have huge patient loads. They really do not have the time to engage with reps in a meaningful dialogue. So, by allowing or encouraging these physicians to be able to engage with the reps when they are doing their medically relevant information search — they’re going online nine hours a week as it is, according to Manhattan Research — so while they’re online, to be able to give them the opportunity to go to the source of all things about that drug and be able to have a meaningful dialogue with a knowledgeable rep who is well-equipped with every bit of clinical information about that drug, you’re providing a real service to these physicians.

That’s how we’re seeing the kind of numbers that we’re seeing. Most of the interactions are nights and weekends with the physician at home.

Med Ad News: Are you seeing the numbers trending upward in physicians who prefer this kind of contact?

Mark Gleason: It’s partially a function of more pharma companies participating, and that’s ramping up very significantly this year. We’re currently contracted with six of the top ten pharma and a number of other companies. What’s happening is more drugs are being made available, providing more options to physicians, so they’re going to get more value, they’re going to be offered more opportunities. They’re going to get into a more habitual behavior over time because of the sheer convenience and the high quality of these interactions, because they’re very complete in the kind of content that’s available, and there’s a full range of services that’s wrapped around it, so the service level is higher than anything that pharma has offered before.

Med Ad News: How do Aptilon’s offerings differ from the typical call center?

Mark Gleason: It’s not really our call centers. These are going to be pharma company staffed or their designees as the reps. What we do is we enable the interaction and put an interface between the physician and the rep that allows for very dynamic, e-detailing like presentation. That’s where the uniqueness is.

The other thing is, the rep does not have to be in a call center. The rep could be the one who is calling on that physician who can make an appointment with that physician when it’s more convenient for that physician, where they do it by going through this hub, going online through the distributed call center. In addition, reps in the field could have several days a week that could be their days just interacting with physicians online. Wherever the service person is could be pretty much anywhere.

Med Ad News: Do your offerings lend themselves to integration of telesales with field sales?

Mark Gleason: Very much so because of the fact that you can use the call center as a support function for a rep in the field. So, for example, if a rep is not going to be able to access the physician during office hours — just low probability of occurrence, they’ve been calling on them repeatedly and just have not gotten access — it allows the rep in the field to give that physician a Web-pointer card that shows them where to go online, and they’re able to say look, my partner in the call center is working nights and weekends, so if you go online, you can get all of the high quality information that I would provide, but you can do it at your convenience. So, the rep is better able to support that physician and drive more interactions by promoting the call center if, in fact, they’re not going to be able to do it face-to-face.

Obviously, this isn’t going to be a channel for every doctor. We’re not going to get every physician participating. But we know that over 90% of physicians are online in an average week, we know they’re on an average of nine hours, so what we do is put these medically relevant education opportunities in front of physicians at sites where they would be going to look for education and services. So, medical publishers, where you have a physician who is a subscriber, we will partner with them, provide a revenue stream for them, and when that physician signs in, and they’re on a target list for one of the companies that’s sponsoring the program, we then offer that physician opportunities that are specifically tailored to that physician.

Med Ad News: What kind of training is involved for the rep?

Mark Gleason: We’ve taken technology out of the interaction. We’ve made it so that the physician doesn’t have to do any downloads, and we’ve made it so easy for the reps that would be receiving these calls, that it takes an hour and a half of instruction on how to move around, just a click of the mouse to move around between slides and topics and services. It’s very simple technology.

Then it’s an afternoon of playing in the sandbox, and then after two days of working this, since they have so many interactions with physicians, and these are long interactions from a rep interaction standpoint — 10 minutes for primary care, 15 minutes for specialists, and in a seven hour shift — you’re going to have a rep in this environment who is likely going to do double the number of interactions, and with these long interactions, of what a rep in the field is going to be doing. They’re really going to be able to focus. The listening skills get very good with these reps because they have to home in on what the physician is interested in, they can ask qualifying questions, they can steer the conversations in areas they think will be more useful to the physician.

They get very good very quickly. We find very high satisfaction rates because we do a considerable amount of customer satisfaction surveying after the fact. We find 95% of the physicians are satisfied with the interaction and are interested in coming back again.

Med Ad News: Is that kind of experience a good training ground for becoming a field rep?

Mark Gleason: That’s a great question, because you’re going to learn product knowledge faster in this environment than any other environment you have, in that you’re working with a very complete slide deck of all of the information about that brand. You’re using it more than you would in the field, you’re going to hear more question and answer scenarios, so you’re going to know how to deal with questions that you wouldn’t have the opportunity to get to in the field because of the lack of interaction time. They’re going to get very knowledgeable on how to provide satisfactory answers, how to get them the right information.

The other thing is you have a sales trainer who will normally be in that call center who can listen in on every conversation and help that rep improve their skills with a very hands-on kind of training. By the time they’ve done a couple of weeks in the call center, they’re going to be extremely knowledgeable on that drug. So, to your question, it’s an excellent question, this would be a great training ground to bring reps into a classroom environment and throw them onto the call center for a number of days so that they’re thinking on their feet about this information.

Med Ad News: Does this kind of detail lend itself to closed-loop marketing?

Mark Gleason: That’s an excellent parallel, because we’re actually partnering with a number of the closed-loop marketing folks because everything you’re capturing in a closed-loop presentation, what slides were shown, how long were you on each slide, did you order samples, that type of thing, that’s all the same kind of information that we capture on our end. In fact, we’re working the technology in a way that a rep with a tablet PC with closed-loop marketing technology could actually use that same slide presentation to deliver an online presentation through our system.

We’re partnering with a number of these folks where it’s really going to provide the rep of the future model, where that table PC becomes both an online tool as well as a face-to-face tool.

Med Ad News: What are the staffing and time management concerns of a telesales force?

Mark Gleason: It’s an interesting combination, because you want a lot of the dynamic people you have in the field sales organization, good, personable, liked people, those kinds of personality characteristics. But at the same time your night and weekend shift is going to allow you to rethink some of the staffing. So, give me a nurse who has a couple of kids home during the day, has to be home during the day, but at night needs to bring in some extra income for the family, seven hours in a call center just talking to physicians about better treating patients, that’s a pretty good job.

You can think about folks who are disabled, folks who just don’t want to drive for a living because the windshield time can be very taxing for some people. There are just some people who really like that interaction. In addition, they don’t have to be in the call center. They can be at home. It opens up a breadth of, in a lot of cases, very capable people, who just are not the kind of people who want to drive around all day and count samples and do all the administrative headaches that the rep in the field has to do. These people spend virtually all their time talking to physicians, and the only administrative work they do is a small report after each interaction.

Med Ad News: And how is time spent between incoming calls?

Mark Gleason: Well, during the day, you can do outbound tele-detailing. You can call a practice. If they can get to a physician and get the physician to go online, they can do a live video detail or a tele-detail.

At night shift, we find a pretty material ramp up in our traffic, just because physicians have time, so the night shift tends to be a very busy time in the call center. For specialty reps who may not do as many as primary care reps, for example, they may not do as many interactions, but they’re doing more than a rep in the field is doing, even if they’re not as active every minute of their time in the call center.

Med Ad News: Is there a significant cost savings?

Mark Gleason: There is a reasonable cost reduction for this, because if you think about it, there’s no company car required, the gas prices are not an issue, they don’t spend 20% of their time doing samples, so these are folks, particularly if they’re home, you don’t even have the overhead of the office. The productivity of more minutes of interaction with a doc in addition to the kinds of cost reductions you can do with the personnel that are staffing the call center, you don’t need the same incentive comp system that you do with a rep in the field, for example. In the analyses we’ve done, we’ve seen a reasonable reduction in the cost per interaction, and if we did it on a cost per minute of interaction, we’d see a big reduction in the cost per minute of interaction because of the fact that these reps get so much more time with the physician than they do when they’re trying to do face-to-face calls.