Pharmaceutical marketing meetings are unique events. They’re designed to develop advocates, yet sometimes fall short of even developing rapport. The best meetings establish rapport with the participants from the start. After years of leading and facilitating various types of medical and pharmaceutical meetings I’ve found a number of techniques that help build that rapport quickly so that we can get on with the ultimate goal of developing advocates. Following is my short list of techniques that will help build rapport quickly and develop your advocates more effectively.

The surest way to have the same old meeting is to start it the same old way. Don’t start so formally. Everyone expects a certain tone and format to the opening of a meeting, so why do that if you want to build a strong rapport with your group. Starting with a short story before you introduce the speakers or run through the agenda will get everyone in a listening and comfortable state. The last thing you want are everyone’s eyes glossing over as soon as you’ve introduced your first speaker.

Listen more and talk less. I see it all too often­—too many facilitators talk too much, giving the impression that the meeting is really about them and their knowledge on the subject. I love taking the pressure off myself by announcing that, while I’ve done my homework, I’m not the subject-matter-expert. The participants are always the main focus. The facilitator is there to help them achieve the meeting’s objective.

Look to connect with the participants on a personal as well as professional level. This helps to reduce their anxiety and gives you touch-points you may use to get them involved in the discussion. Finding out that a participant has a family member struggling with the disease state under discussion lets you know that they have more than just a professional interest in the subject.

Don’t be afraid to shake up the agenda. We’re always so worried about getting off track, but some of the best meetings I’ve attended have been when the facilitator allowed a certain amount of wiggle room in the agenda. As long as we keep the ultimate goal in focus and arrive there by the end of the meeting, we’re safe exploring a few rabbit trails. Remember the illustration of the rocket being off course 90 per cent of the time? Constant minor course corrections bring it to it’s target.

Don’t do stand-up. I’m not talking about jokes here but rather presentation posture. If it’s a small group, can all the presentations be conducted from a seated position? Do we really need the PowerPoint? Can you lead the meeting from your seat as well? As soon as someone stands up, we all go into a passive mode. If I want to engage my audience, passivity is not a helpful state.

Be honest about everything happening in the meeting. Changes in the environment, timing, and content need to be addressed. Everyone knows what’s happening anyway. The surest way to squash rapport and your credibility is to try to hide something. Being professional requires being honest.

Be flexible with each audience. If you’re conducting a series of ad boards across the country, don’t treat them all the same. Each group is different. Your agenda and goals may be the same, but your approach to getting there may need adjustment based on who’s in the room. Each group has its own dynamic; exploiting that feature will produce better results.

Ask questions and don’t monopolize the meeting. This one should be a no-brainer, but I’m surprised by how many facilitators eat up too much of the participants valuable time. The surest way to keep from doing this is to ask questions. Starting the meeting with simple close-ended (binary: yes or no) questions and then employing more complex open-ended (reflective) questions will give the meeting a more conversational feel. The result will be a greater willingness on the participants’ part to—well, participate.

Employing these simple techniques will move the ball farther down the field, establishing better rapport and building a better advocate relationship. Treating people the way you want to be treated is always a great way to approach a meeting. We all want to be heard and be treated professionally. Open and honest dialogue will not only improve our communications but will, in the long run, build better relationships with our advocates.

With this short list I certainly haven’t exhausted the techniques we might employ to build better rapport with our advocates. What are yours?

These are difficult times, difficult markets, difficult circumstances. Everyone feels it. Many acknowledge it. Some overcome it. The financial guys call it a shakeout: smaller fish are gobbled up by larger, insolvent companies go bankrupt, and shops evaporate for lack of customers.

In times like these one emotion seems to predominate: fear. You can feel it in almost every industry. And while there are signs that the economy is changing, fear seems to be the operative force at work today.

There are three specific fears I see at work in advocacy development. The first is fear of the client. This fear was well in place before this economy sent everybody running for cover, but has been exacerbated by the prolonged downward spiral. We work in an environment where the singular goal seems to be to please the client at any cost. Now don’t get me wrong. My goal is always to please the client. But the nature of my consulting relationship precludes me from doing whatever is expedient just to keep the client happy. The client has engaged me to give them my best advice on achieving their communication goals. They’ve come to me because they don’t have that expertise. I respect my clients tremendously, but I’m not in fear of them.

What we’re really talking about here is the fear that you won’t get the second call. In fact that’s short-term thinking. Will you get the second call if you withhold your expertise from your client, and the project goes belly up?

There’s a second fear that I see very often these days in pharma communications: the fear of failure. This fear paralyzes innovation (something we need more of, not less). Because budgets are tight and the future is a bit unknown, the safe bet is to not take any risks, challenge any norms, or change any practices. If there was any fear guaranteed to keep us pinned to this downward spiral, this is it. What we need now, to pull us out, is a dose of creativity and courage. At a recent ad board I took a bold stab and stopped a meeting ten minutes from the start to redirect it to where I knew the client wanted to go, but wasn’t heading. That change in direction and tone resulted in the outcome we were looking for. Could the client have gotten pissed off and sent me packing? Sure. But I was betting that in all our preparation, we had built a rapport of trust in my judgment.  The bottom line is, if you’re not willing to make a mistake you’re never going to advance your position.

The third fear I see is fear of the community in which we work. We have the privilege of working with some of the most educated and brilliant people on the planet. That’s one aspect of our work that I love. I have met some of the most amazing, passionate people in pharma. But the tendency for those of us who don’t have all that medical education and training is to cower under its significance. If you find yourself taking on a position of mental inferiority you don’t have a clear understanding of what you bring to the table. I wasn’t invited to the party for my expertise in pharmacokinetics. I was invited for my expertise in communications. It’s with this understanding that I approach each member of the project team. I bring my expertise and they bring theirs, each of us learning from the other. What’s more, the project is completed with excellence—because each has played his or her part to the fullest.

Pharmaceutical communications is at a turning point in its development. Kicking this fear thing in the head will help us move forward. Honest communication between client and agency will produce the desired result.

How do you reach a large number of cardiologists today with vital content regarding cardiovascular risk reduction?

Ten years ago the only way to do that was to have a series of meetings across the globe until you reached your target number, or the budget ran out, whichever came first. Today we can do it from the comfort of our own office or local production studio. No flights need be booked. No hotels contracted. And best of all, no schedules interrupted for days. The content is more focused, the experience is more engaging, and ROI goes through the roof.

Webcasts are nothing new. They’ve been around for quite a while. But when we combine the various technologies available today, we can create a product that’s greater than the sum of its parts. With broadband technology in just about every office and most homes, the ability to render multiple streams of information on a single webpage, to poll and interact with the audience, generates endless possibilities. The move from live to virtual meetings has increased in our business year over year.

One of my clients had a dream to reach hundreds of cardiologists with a live interactive debate. Their goal was to raise awareness of the involvement of class effect in the selection of antihypertensives for cardiovascular risk reduction. The debate would bring together thought leaders with two distinct points of view (class effect and evidence-based medicine) to argue the pros and cons with me before studio cameras. The stream would be webcast to groups of HCPs around the country simultaneously. But rather than have the audience sitting there passively listening, they would be able to direct the conversation through interactive polling. At predetermined points in the debate I asked questions of the audience to see what information they required to decide how they stood on our central question: Is it acceptable to generalize to a class effect, or should we adhere strictly to evidence-based therapy with individual compounds? The results of the various questions I asked told me where to direct the discussion and what topics needed further clarification for the audience. We concluded the “show” with an open forum Q&A.

The results of this process were nothing short of stellar. Within a short span of time (30 minutes) we effectively moved the audience’s opinion on the matter in question. Specifically 82.5% had changed their stance on our central question after viewing the discussion along with the data presented. In addition the thought leaders involved enjoyed being a part of such a cutting edge program and felt that they had done their colleagues a service by participating.

Does this mean that face-to-face meetings are a dying breed? Hardly. Nothing will ever match the depth of personal interaction that takes place at a live meeting. Many ideas are communicated, not just from the podium, but through the nuances inherent in human interaction. A webcast can never match that depth of communication. But as travel costs increase, budgets decrease, and time becomes a commodity in short supply, the technological options become increasingly attractive.

So attractive, in this case, that the client is considering doing another round of the same show. Although I’ve been involved in dozens of webcasts, there was something different about this one. It might have been the spirit of the team, the excellence of the content, or the brilliance of its execution. Most likely it was all of those qualities working synergistically. But there was an added factor that sent this project into home run territory–communications design. Subtle yet significant tweaks through the planning process brought us to a natural communication pattern that was a determining factor in the project’s effectiveness. The discussion ebbed and flowed according to the moment, according to those participating in the conversation. What it wasn’t was sterile and linear like some PowerPoint-driven data dump. It was, in fact, a conversation–not a presentation. This factor gave the program its winning quality. And while the content was compelling, the method of delivery made it unforgettable.

Stop the data dumps! Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest maybe I can deal with the issue of medical meeting design in a more genial fashion. Maybe if we stopped and added a few extra questions to our planning mix we could pump up the ROI in our meetings. Maybe if we considered not just what we want to communicate but how we’re going to communicate it, we’ll end up with a meeting that people actually look forward to and, dare I say it, seek to attend. How do we do this? Let’s start by adding a new dimension to the planning process—communications design—that focuses on the how not just the what. Because meetings are communications events, right?

Communications design asks the questions that can insure our desired outcome. For example: What is the overarching message that needs to be communicated through this meeting? I often find it helpful to ask my clients not only what their desired outcome is, but also what the key message is that they want to communicate through this meeting. Everything else builds on this.

Once that question is answered then we can ask a more specific design question like: What types of sessions will support us in getting this message across? Here we begin to break free from the standard data-dump scenario. Will a facilitated discussion of the issues surrounding the message give the participants more ownership of it? How about an interactive exercise, like ranking features and benefits? Of course we will need to present some data in the traditional PowerPoint format. But can we break up the tendency to lecture, and get interactive with the participants by organizing the presentation into modules–making it easier to segment the story into its chapters? This allows us to take questions throughout the presentation, giving it the feel of a conversation, thus engaging the audience on a deeper level.

At this point the look and feel of the meeting begin to come together in the planner’s mind. We can then look at the agenda and order these sessions in a fashion that will allow our key message an uninhibited pathway into the audience’s mind. Heavy data (with Q&A integrated) is best dealt with early in the morning, with interactive exercises to follow lunch, and discussions concluding the day. But these decisions need to be made in the context of the myriad other issues surrounding the meeting, like its length, time of day, room availability, flight schedules, and budget, to name a few.

Whether planning an advisory board, speaker training, investigator meeting, roundtable discussion, or dinner meeting, looking at it from a communications design point of view, before you take any action, will greatly facilitate getting your message across, and will help you achieve greater ROI.

It has been estimated that the average person is subjected to over 3000 different messages per day. If yours is going to stand out and be remembered, communications design has got to be a part of your strategy.

It started, as it usually does, with a phone call. A client asked if I could come up with some creative ideas for a drug launch meeting. They wanted to equip their audience with the latest data; they wanted them prepped to handle the questions that they might get out in the field; and they wanted it to be innovative and fun. I was told that a number of previous ideas had already been vetoed.

I sketched out some ideas, slept on them and got up earlier than usual the next morning when all was quiet.  Revamping and honing the ideas, I reduced them to a short list, put on the coffee, and reviewed my pitch for the conference call that was coming. The initial response was positive, enthusiastic. A few days later the client had approved the ideas, with some tweaks. Over the next several weeks, after the usual number of conference calls, storyboards, design sessions, and moderator prep, we were all ready to go.

Launch meetings are fun and stressful. There’s excitement in the air about the launch of a new product, but there’s tension also because first impressions are being made—and you don’t get a second chance with that one.

The programs were three game-like sessions designed to get the doctors deeper into the data and to strengthen their understanding of the product’s key messages. We also wanted to foster honest debate on the hot issues, so no “training” was designed into these sessions. Plenty of time was given for discussion. My team members took a moderator’s role, supporting the medical science liaison each was coupled with to form a tag team that would drive the discussion to its conclusion.

The doctors enjoyed the format tremendously, and all the design goals were met. They particularly liked the way we capped off the session with a lightning round of challenge questions (one of the client’s tweaks), which got their competitive hackles up as the top five teams were awarded honorable mention at the close of the conference.

For me it was the culmination of a lot of hard work. But that’s work that I love: the opportunity to take an idea from concept to execution. Fewer and fewer of our programs are off the shelf these days. More and more clients want to break the mold and do something that wins serious ROI, is innovative, and is memorable.  Creativity wins the day in this economy, and the results of this meeting were proof of that. This was a meeting to remember. And flights home after meetings like that are always a pleasure.

A good deal as has been written, discussed, and postulated over the last five years about the trust deficit that exists in the pharmaceutical space (see Jane Parker’s article). Although many of the ideas suggested have been implemented, we still have a long way to go. Much of that has to do with the intrinsic nature of trust. All of us know that trust is earned. This means it’s a process in which we must participate in order to build it.

Trust is built between two parties when the mutually approved values and behaviors of each are evidenced over time.  In the pharmaceutical communications industry, we have to decide what we really value first before we can begin to build trust. The foundations of trust are our values, communicated to those with whom we interact.

But real trust goes way beyond the communication of values. Trust is based also on the experiential evidence of our actions toward one another over time, our behaviors. Once values have been clarified, behaviors need to change—and the sooner the better. Nothing is worse than someone communicating a new value and not backing it up with the appropriate behavior. This in fact breaks the trust bond even further and does more damage than if we never acted in the first place.

In regard to building advocates for our products, this means that physicians need to feel comfortable with the messages they are asked to communicate to their colleagues and patients. It means that they need to feel secure in the fact that they will not be put in compromising positions with their patients; equally, they will not jeopardize the respect they’ve earned from their peers. If we want physicians to carry our messages to both the medical and patient communities, building trust between pharma and physician needs to be Job One.

The bottom line is that trust is built through open and honest dialogue between the two parties. As I facilitate various types of medical meetings (ad boards, training sessions, investigator meetings, etc.) I find that, to the extent that I am able to open up dialogue, trust develops.  When physicians and pharmas come together with the common value of providing the best healthcare solution to the patient, successful outcomes result in this atmosphere of mutual trust.

At a recent series of ad boards that I led, one comment was common in the feedback we received: “You listened to us.” That sentiment was evident throughout the meeting as trust was building. The attendees felt validated and not used; the pharma felt that they had gotten some valuable input and dramatically changed their marketing efforts going forward. The interesting thing was that when I asked for pilot study volunteers to gather data regarding those changes, almost all responded affirmatively. Why? Because they were part of a dialogue, not a pitch. They were part of a process and, having played a part, they wanted to take the next step and participate further in partnership with the company.

Building trust is the process of sharing values and exhibiting behavior consistent with those values over time. Honest communication is the primary tool used to get that process going in the right direction.

Recently I was asked to design some programs for a drug-launch meeting. The client wanted the doctors participating to have a clear understanding of the new product’s key messages without resorting to the standard slide review type of training session that they have been subjected to so many times. Oh, and could I make it fun and creative.

The request was actually nothing new; several clients had asked the same thing in the past. But oftentimes, after presenting my ideas, the designs were perceived as too far out of the box to garner support from conservative marketing teams, and so we’d usually retreat back to the team’s comfort zone—standard slide review or speaker training sessions.

The difference this time was that the client was thrilled with the ideas I had presented and wanted to move forward with them for launch.

What I had suggested was to draw out the key messages by making the doctors hunt for them—forcing them to dig deeper into the data. This would be done by taking them through a series of games—yes, games—­in which we would challenge their knowledge of the data while at the same time reinforcing their understanding of the key messages covered in the scientific sessions.

What’s of interest to me here is not the games themselves, but the leap of faith that the client took to break out of the box and go with something new. Taking that leap is tough for many clients. We live in the very conservative world of the pharmaceutical universe; most people just want to stay in a safe orbit. The problem is that our times demand innovation—innovation in all phases of the business, from new compound and device development to communication strategies that support the marketing of those new compounds and devices.

I knew when I brought my communications career into the pharma space over 10 years ago that the standard speaker training session had a limited lifespan. Doctors, at some point, would be unwilling to sit in session after session of best practices in presentation skills. I mean how many times do you want to hear that you need to make some solid eye contact and project your voice to get your message across with impact. Don’t get me wrong­—these things are still necessary­­—as long as we’re using our bodies to communicate our message, we’ll need disciplined skills. But these times demand a different approach to communications training, one that’s not so “head on,” so pedantic.

Without motivation being reinforced no amount of behavioral skills training will be carried out to the field. We will forever be stuck in a loop, attempting to train behavior without affecting the root causes for that behavior, which are motivation and belief. But coming at the problem with a new approach, a back door approach if you will, has the potential to increase that motivation and thereby change the outcome in the field.

What I like about the games we are playing in these sessions is that they surreptitiously strengthen the motivation for speaking by drawing the speaker deeper into the key messages.  We all know that we communicate much more clearly and, more importantly, are more persuasive when we are motivated and inspired to communicate a particular message. Good training speaks to the root causes of our behavior and modifies it by offering a different motivation or inspiration. By coming through the back door of motivation and inspiration we arrive at our original objective: speakers who are well prepared to communicate our healthcare message. The exciting thing is that this is accomplished without ever once reminding them to make solid eye contact or project their voice.