This is Part 2 of the ‘Succeeding in Value Communication’ series, a set of articles that examine the key success factors in creating customer engagement tools that successfully communicate the clinical and economic benefits of pharmaceuticals, devices and diagnostics. These recommendations have been drawn from the experiences of the BaseCase Consulting Team.
Make your value story memorable with tailored value communication
Don’t just tell your Value Story – communicate it. A great Key Value Message is important, but it will only get you so far. A compelling and credible story has to lie behind and support it. Here, a value story is defined as a sequence of evidence-based claims and facts that support your key message.
For example, let’s assume you would like to communicate the following key message: “Adequate glycemic control will reduce the overall costs of diabetes treatment.” If you want someone to accept such a statement, you need to justify it. What evidence do you have? What data supports your claim? This is where your value story comes in. A series of short arguments backed by scientific literature.
To back up your key message above, you could present the following story, by outlining the problem and the solution.
The problem:
- The prevalence of type 2 diabetes is going to dramatically increase in the future.
- Treatment of diabetes is expensive and mostly caused by preventable complications.
- If nothing more is done, diabetes treatment costs will increase dramatically in the future.
The solution:
- One third of patients have HbA1c levels that are too high.
- Complications can be prevented by keeping patients at optimal HbA1c levels.
- Fewer complications means more sustainable diabetes treatment costs in the future.
A good value story will clearly outline the problem and present a viable solution, with individual arguments being presented in a simple and logical order. The entire story should not be crammed into a single slide as this can increase the chances of losing the flow and, with that, audience attention. It’s always better to present one or two well supported, short arguments at a time.
It’s no secret that the more specific your story is, the more effective it becomes. This is where technology such as BaseCase comes in to make the value story both interactive and quantitative. You’re now able to quantify each argument in your story and easily link it to your customer’s context. This practice is called ‘tailored value communication’ and it helps you to not only communicate your value story – but make it memorable!
With tailored value communication, instead of stating “The costs of Diabetes treatments are expected to rise”, you can use dynamic text to directly link it to your audience’s population. This helps you develop a more specific statement, such as: “In your population of 45,000 patients, you can expect a cost increase for Diabetes treatments of $1,800,000 over the next 5 years.”
Your customer will likely challenge this statement, possibly by pointing out the variations in the cost and prevalence of each treatment. To which, you can counter by adjusting the inputs in your model to the rates and prevalence the customer experiences locally. This data will then update the statement to reflect the individual situation and can be used throughout the presentation.
It is certainly an easier said than done task to keep a value story clean and simple as the reality is that the underlying data and models are often very complex. This is where our next topic of Layering Information comes in, allowing KAMs and field teams to present high-level arguments without distractions while bringing up additional details on-demand.
DISCLAIMER
The information in this article is strictly hypothetical – we make no claims about medical products nor do we endorse any. Example statements in this article is not intended for actual decision making.