How ZS helped harmonize Pfizer’s key account management process

This article features a conversation between ZS’s Mike Powers; Jerry Alderman, CEO of Valkre; and Jason Kraft, director of commercial effectiveness and key account management at Pfizer.

Thanks to industry consolidation and other long-term healthcare trends, there’s a growing recognition among pharma companies of the importance of engaging strategically with large, organized customers. In 2023 ZS and Valkre, a cloud software provider of solutions for strategic account planning and management, partnered with Pfizer to build and deploy the Valkre platform across its U.S. organization. The following article includes a conversation between ZS’s Mike Powers, Valkre CEO Jerry Alderman and Pfizer’s Jason Kraft, director of commercial effectiveness and key account management. This conversation, which took place at the Strategic Account Management Association’s (SAMA) 2024 conference in Miami, has been edited for length and clarity.

ZS: Why do you have key account managers (KAMs) at Pfizer, and what are you trying to accomplish with your KAM program?
 

Jason Kraft: We have KAM teams at Pfizer to foster cross-functional collaboration across medical, commercial sales and account management. The goal is to collaboratively partner with large, integrated health systems on areas of mutual interest, such as improving patient care, streamlining processes and enhancing capabilities. We have several KAM teams at Pfizer, each aligned to a different therapeutic area. Our KAMs sit at the center of a cross-functional team of colleagues with the aim of improving collaboration across the extended account team.
 

ZS: Can you describe the state of technology supporting your KAM teams before teaming with ZS and Valkre?
 

JK: It was inconsistent and generally left to each individual KAM team. Some were using our traditional CRM platform, some were doing everything in Excel. Even the teams that were using a traditional CRM, the platform was built for reps and was lacking functionality specific to KAM—so they were doing a lot of work in SharePoint, in an Excel tracker or someplace else. We saw a big opportunity to get a more consistent user experience for our KAMs.
 

Jerry Alderman: When I look at Pfizer, I see a complex organization with many separate business units, each with their own leadership and their own level of KAM maturity. On the other side, I see highly complex and increasingly consolidating customers, such that the key account engagement model is becoming critically important. But what I also saw was that the infrastructure to support the model had not kept up, so you ended up with one business unit doing one thing and another business unit doing something else.
 

JK: Our KAM teams tend to operate in silos, so it took time to build awareness at headquarters that our KAM teams all had different systems and different ways of working—and that having one tool for all KAMs would be beneficial. Because we have different therapy areas within shared accounts, the more we can speak the same language, the stronger we are collectively and can show-up as "One Pfizer" to our most important customers.
 

ZS: Can you speak about other critical components you thought about when building out your new key account management tool?
 

JK: Number one, we wanted to increase efficiency by negating the need for KAMs to go to SharePoint for account planning, Teams for collaboration and Excel for something else. Number two, we wanted to increase effectiveness. And number three, we wanted the technology we use to directly support and enable our existing strategic account engagement model.
 

JA: To me, it starts with effectiveness. Because it doesn’t do any good to make something efficient that’s not effective. And when we think about effectiveness, we’re thinking both in terms of the KAM program and individual KAMs. You need to raise the level of both and, when done well, technology can play a critical role in doing so.
 

ZS: You spent years tweaking your traditional CRM to make it work for KAMs, but at some point, you decided it wasn’t going to deliver the outcomes you needed. Can you talk about that journey?
 

JK: Nothing was built for KAM, and it was enablement leads, not people with a software background, requesting new features to our solution. As a result, we were rehauling the system every two or three years; it was slow, plodding and unsustainable. As a company, we didn’t want to be in the software building business.
 

JA: In our experience working in this space across major life sciences companies, we often see them trying to build their own software, and it becomes increasingly complex and costly to manage and evolve as their key account management model evolves. Over time, maintaining the product roadmap becomes more difficult and costly, and in many cases, it becomes unsustainable.
 

ZS: I believe you had five business units involved in this implementation. That’s a lot of people and a lot of opinions. How did you create buy-in across your organization?
 

JK: Our leadership uniformly agreed that our current customer engagement platform wasn’t working for our KAM teams. Our KAMs were also onboard, as they saw the limitations of our current system day in and day out. For senior leaders outside of KAM, we benefited from a headquarters-sponsored initiative to implement a “One Pfizer” approach to account management. This work surfaced the need for a single account management tool to enable work across shared accounts. And finally, our IT teams were flexible and supportive because they’d seen the various overhauls we’d had to do on our systems over the years.
 

ZS: You said Pfizer’s IT was highly supportive of the initiative. Can either of you talk more about that partnership and how it ultimately enabled the successful development and deployment of the account management solution?
 

JA: Often, when we see a business unhappy with its technology, it’s because they’ve done a poor job of defining their requirements. With Pfizer, because of the history of “do overs,” there seemed to be a strong recognition of the business requirements and therefore alignment between commercial and IT.
 

JK: We knew we wanted something that was built specifically for the work of key account management—and in Valkre and ZS, we found partners that really understood what KAM is all about. You don’t know what you don’t know, so it helps to have that outside-in perspective.
 

JA: It’s crucial to clearly understand and communicate the objectives of the KAM program along with the business requirements, and to involve IT early in the process. We’ve seen the most success when IT and business teams are aligned early on in recognizing that the program’s objectives are difficult to achieve with traditional tools and short-term solutions like Excel and PowerPoint.
 

ZS: As part of the implementation, we decided it would be important to have an early experience team made up of KAMs from across BUs to help co-create the solution and then provide feedback. Can you talk about that?
 

JK: It was important for two reasons. First, getting information from KAMs helps to build a better launch experience. If there’s a bug, or something that’s creating a subpar user experience, it’s critical for the project team to hear that directly from users. But also, it helps create buy-in from the individual KAM teams. We had five KAM teams, with five different remits, reporting to five different leaders. We brought them onboard at the start of the journey so we could hear their feedback, number one, but also so we could explain to them certain design or functionality decisions. You know, “We can’t make this or that change because it’ll have this effect somewhere else downstream.” So, as we were building up to launch, not only did we have this core group of committed users, but they were acting as internal champions and experts for the rest of their teams.
 

JA: It’s critical that you don’t just throw a piece of technology at people without helping them understand the “why” behind it. Because the reality is, when leadership introduces a new piece of technology, alarm bells go off for the rank and file. So, communication is very important: Here’s what we’re trying to achieve, and this is how this technology is going to help us get there.

ZS: Here’s a question for Jerry. From your perspective, what are the do’s and don’ts for organizations considering a tech platform to enable KAM?
 

JA: First, start by agreeing on what good looks like. Too often, it’s left vague. So, align on what’s a key account? What’s an account plan? What are the processes and methodologies that are non-negotiable? Second, minimize change to the extent possible. Don’t start off with a massive change management effort around methodologies. As much as possible, come from a place of enabling the work your KAMs are already doing but just make it easier and more effective.
 

ZS: One of the challenges we hear from our pharma clients is that communicating the value that KAM programs deliver to the organization is difficult because it’s a long process to develop deep and strategic relationships with, say, a large integrated delivery network. Can you elaborate on how the data your key account management platform generates helps to communicate that value back to leadership?
 

JK: The data we’re developing through our KAM platform is integral to how we demonstrate to senior leaders the impact we’re having by engaging differently with our key accounts. At Pfizer, we collect data on everything. But it’s critical that we’re looking at the metrics that are appropriate to key account management—not just sales. Obviously, we look at sales data. But we’re also looking at execution data, engaging key stakeholders—things we just didn’t have a way of collecting or communicating before.
 

One of the key things the system allows us to do is look at leading indicators of success. The actual outcomes may take longer to show up, but we’re able to show leadership leading indicators as a bellwether of the success we’re having at moving in the right direction as an organization to manage our key accounts more strategically.
 

ZS: So what has been the result early on?
 

JK: In this first phase, we now have a harmonized key account management process across our business units and greatly improved KAM team satisfaction. As a result, we’ve seen much higher adoption and have enabled ourselves to collect much more, and more granular, data about what we’re doing with our key customers.
 

ZS: You’ve said this is just the first step in your journey. What’s next?
 

JK: As we think about the next phase, it’ll be about how do we leverage the system to enable more strategic customer interactions, and how do we use it to foster better cross-team and cross-business-unit collaboration.