Paul Johnson, SVP, Managing Director, Account Services, Palio

“The day you sign a new client is the day you start losing them.”

Fictional ad men Don Draper and Roger Sterling (from the AMC drama Mad Men) cautiously celebrate a new client win by agreeing that the beginning of a client engagement is often the start of the end. Still, relationships matter – even those that are destined for separation at some undefined moment in the future.

At Palio, we appreciate the longevity of our client relationships. But even good relationships can meet an untimely demise because things change. Reorganizations, mergers, takeovers, downsizing and economic circumstances can impact even the best relationships. In other cases, the relationship was destined to be short term – for a project, a season or to achieve a specific business goal.

Breaking up is hard to do, especially when it’s not the result of dissatisfaction with work product or team members. But, since goodbyes are destined to occur, it’s important to have a strategy that supports a graceful exit and keeps your reputation intact. Properly managing a departing client can be as important as attracting new ones and how you handle that transition can determine future success.

Good manners prevail. While it seems simple, remember to say “thank you for your business.” The relationship has contributed to the betterment of your company – perhaps you made connections with new resources, learned a different facet of an industry, developed a capability you didn’t have before or simply kept the lights on. People may not remember what you’ve said or done, but they’ll remember how you made them feel.

Maintain status of professionalism. If you’re parting under less than stellar circumstances, keep your emotions at bay. Stay the course and be as professional as you were the day the relationship commenced. How you handle challenges and difficulties can say a lot about your strengths and character. Today you’re saying goodbye, but who’s to know when your paths will cross again?

Facilitate a smooth hand-off. A commitment to excellence in a partnership means you leave each other in a better position than when you started. In our knowledge-based economy that requires a plan for knowledge transfer so the client can maintain business momentum after you depart. Provide clients with pertinent files, ask what format they’d like them in, and do what you can to ensure they’ll be put to good use.

Keep the lines of communication open. A substantial amount of communication about performance and deliverables took place at the start of the engagement. Ending a relationship requires that same level of communication. Find out what you can do to make the transition easier as well as ways to improve your own performance.

Many times, clients return to former partners for the same reason they leave – circumstances change. If you’ve let go gracefully and leave them with the impression you’re a class act, you might be able to take advantage of future opportunities and continue the relationship at another point in time.

What are your tips for successfully moving on?

Palio is an advertising agency revolutionizing pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing to create experiences that will Never Be Forgotten.

Twenty years ago: 1991.

You go to the doctor. Your chart is a folder stuffed full of papers, one of hundreds in the office. You leave with a prescription, which your physician wrote on a small piece of paper, and you carry it to the pharmacist. The pharmacy – unaffiliated with any larger chain – takes your paper, files it, and fills your prescription. If it’s for a “scheduled” drug, like a narcotic, you sign your name in a large ledger.

Today: 2011.

That chart is likely to be a digital file, and your prescription is equally likely to be transmitted electronically to your pharmacy, where it is filed digitally and cross-checked against your prescription history, for contraindications, and your personal history, for allergies. Your input is either verbal or digital – an answer to a question that you’re asked, which is typed in, or a digital signature. Some people do have a “care team” structure where their different health providers interact directly, but they’re likely to be extremely well-off, or dealing with a serious and specialized issue such as cancer.

Twenty years in the future: 2031. What will your healthcare experience look like?

Despite too many years of legislative hang-ups and politicking, we’ve finally attained a unifiedsystem of electronic health-care records. From your patient profile to your visit report to your prescriptions to your reviews of your experiences, it’s all digital, searchable and shareable.

Your physician and pharmacist both access the same data. Also included are your massage therapist, who helps you with your bad back, and, of course, your insurance. Your dentist or your allergist, however, have different permission levels. The only one who can see everything is you.

You aren’t a lone ship sailing from port to port to manage your healthcare anymore. Your care team can be linked as closely as you would like them to be.

This helps them to address red flags and head off health problems. They’re compensated more highly for preventative work than for curative or palliative care, so they are able to focus accordingly.

Paperwork is minimized, allowing back-office work to be replaced by true patient care. Visit lengths have grown from under 20 minutes to half an hour, and waiting time has shrunk from nearly an hour to 10 minutes.

Because information no longer requires physical housing, many physicians are reverting to house calls, a practice that appeals especially to the elderly, parents of small children, and professionals working long hours.

Because each patient owns the repository of their health data, a variety of tools have sprung up to help them parse and utilize it. Digital scales, thermometers, sleep monitors, blood-sugar monitors and other small wireless tools feed that repository effortlessly, making it ever more useful in predicting and monitoring your health.

What are you working on that can help this future arrive sooner?

Palio is an advertising agency revolutionizing pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing to create experiences that will Never Be Forgotten.

Rob Kempton, VP, Brand Planning Director, Palio

Anyone who has spent a day in pharmaceutical – or any other type – of sales, will tell you the answer is an unequivocal “no.”

There are cold calls to warm leads and warm calls on glacial leads. There are follow-up calls on established accounts and first-time calls to what may be your next strategic account. There are calls where you get the hand-off, the brush-off or even the flip off, as well as those where you close the deal, make the sale and bring home the cheddar.

Against that backdrop, why would you use the same digital tools for every sales call? The answer is: You wouldn’t.

Now, there are some exceptions: Chances are your organization has an established CRM platform like Salesforce CRM or industry-specific solution like StayinFront EdgeRx. That central repository of prospecting data, notes and follow-up activity should be part of every call – in fact, chances are your sales management demands it.

But what about the tools you use to pitch at a first-time informational meeting versus a drug-specific presentation for an existing customer? That’s where there’s room to change it up:

Start with a completely modular deck. Whether you’re using PowerPoint, Flash or one of the online presentation tools like SlideRocket.com, your sales organization should be able to piece together a presentation appropriate for the coldest of cold calls as well as a new-drug introduction to a longstanding customer – all on their own, guided by best-practices content suggestions from the marketing organization.

Use different tools for different lead scores. If your organization uses lead scoring to prioritize sales opportunities, consider WebEx or other online meeting tools for the lower-scoring leads. Time and travel are expensive, even if you have a local sales rep in place – why not save money with the leads that have historically poorer performance?

Be prepared for different types of learning: Sometimes, using the right tool means knowing when to put it away. For example, although the majority of people absorb information best through visuals, a significant number of individuals process and retain messages better through audio. Good salespeople are trained to recognize these traits and adapt to them – put the iPad or PowerPoint away if you’ve clearly got an audio-first prospect, and spend your time engaging in conversation.

Let some broad rules guide you: Generally speaking, dial the tech and the presentation glitz back on initial sales calls, increase it for informational meetings once a relationship is established. And, if you’re in a multi-call environment, dial it back again for the close meeting. The key: At the outset and at the close of a deal, you want the prospect focused on communicating and reinforcing their needs and how your product fits those needs – many sales are lost by over-communicating right past the prospect’s pain.

The rules for what digital tools to use on a sales call are no different than those for use in their non-digital counterparts. Choose the tools that will let you focus on the customer and their needs – not on your desire to lay out every feature and benefit or use the latest tech toy – and you’ll close more deals.

Palio is an advertising agency revolutionizing pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing to create experiences that will Never Be Forgotten.

Todd LaRoche, EVP, Managing Director of Creative, Palio

There is no slow season in health care. Whether seeing patients in between personal and professional appointments or a spike in patient visits during cold and flu season, doctors are always busy. For sales reps, this results in a greater challenge getting face time with doctors.

Sales reps may not be used to communicating in a two-minute window, but doctors, nurses and office staff are conditioned to interact that way. Last year on Pixels and Pills, I wrote about being brief and getting to the point when communicating with doctors. That still holds true, but with more doctors tethered to their smartphones and iPads, we need to use technology to change how we communicate with doctors.

Give them what they want. Sales reps need to get better at tracking information related to each sales call, including the doctor’s contact information and preferred mode of communication, patient population needs and prescription-writing activity. With a compressed amount of time to detail new medicines and deliver marketing messages, it’s important to address those most relevant to each practice. Having better information, sales reps can then implement more doctor-centric strategies and design more relevant campaigns.

Get your high tech game on. It’s important to identify creative ways to convey information. For doctors who are digitally savvy and prefer electronic communication, an interactive iPad app or digital brochure can deliver value and foster stronger relationships – all while providing an efficient and more cost-effective means of communicating beyond the traditional face-to-face call. And, physicians can review information at a time that is convenient to them – not when they have an office full of patients.

Speak in sound bites. If you can convey information in a 140-character tweet, you can do it in the real world. But if you have mere minutes of a physician’s time – whether in the office or at a virtual event – a succinct presentation style can be a real differentiator.

Recognize that it’s all in the details. While overall sales and market penetration matter immensely to the organization’s bottom line, at the individual sales rep’s level there are other metrics worth tracking in this limited-face-time environment. Average amount of time spent discussing products with a physician, requests for additional information, volume of sample product distributed or prescription-writing activity are just three of many ways to track messaging effectiveness by proxy measures. Understanding how physicians want to receive and interact information can help you determine the best technology solutions to facilitate information exchange and meet their needs.

Technology is creating new and exciting opportunities for communication that enable us to take evolving communication preferences into account when providing new product information, clinical alerts or product updates. By incorporating communication technology, electronic promotional activity, and virtual events into our communication arsenal and demonstrating depth and breadth of product knowledge, sales reps can provide valuable interactions with doctors and achieve their objectives.

Palio is an advertising agency revolutionizing pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing to create experiences that will Never Be Forgotten.

Gregory Alderisio, Senior Copywriter, Palio

Let’s say you see an ad in a magazine or on the Web and you absolutely hate the headline. Who do you blame? Naturally, the wretched, abominable writer. Or what if the art direction is so banal or so hideous you recoil in horror. Whose fault is that? Of course, the hapless, no-talent art director.

Pretty much everything wrong with an ad can be laid at the feet of two people: the AD and CW. It’s the same with the glory. A good headline: well, obviously that came from the unique mind of a gifted writer. An inspired visual? Kudos to the innovative genius of the art director. Why would it be any other way? A pair of people did the ad so let’s praise/stone them depending upon how it turned out. And of course at their year-end review, the creative team with too many boring, dull, moronically-simplistic ads gets labeled as lazy, timid or unimaginative. On the other hand, the team with award-winning work gets a raise, a bonus and a big fat ego.

Because that’s the way many agencies are run, it’s got to be a good system, right? Well, maybe not.

What if instead of praising or blaming two people for the work, we praised/blamed everyone? Not just in words, but in more tangible ways. Planners, account people, medical directors, creative directors, producers – what if all their raises, bonuses, perks and promotions depended upon the creativity of the work their accounts produced? Overnight agency output would improve. Because it can’t be just the creative team who’s motivated to do good work, that’s not enough. Two people alone can’t push good work through a sea of indifference and nitpickers. Every department has to want the good stuff and have a vested interest in getting it sold and seeing it produced.

This may sound self-serving but ultimately it serves the client because clients get better work that attracts more attention. And brands that get noticed are brands that have a better chance to succeed and make clients happy.

If we’re comfortable calling out creative work that’s dull and lifeless, we should be just as comfortable doing the same with a dull key thought, a me-too insight, or a toothless medical claim. We can’t just sleepwalk our way through customer research, message development and strategy generation then sell ho-hum ideas to our clients and expect the work produced to be brilliant.

When work is great, chances are it came from an inspired insight or a focused strategy and that contribution needs to be acknowledged. Great work is also impeccably produced so we have to recognize producers and art buyers when a finished idea looks just as cool as everyone imagined it would when it was merely a line drawing.

In other words, we all sink or swim together. The sooner every department is held accountable for the creative output in a concrete way, the quicker the entire agency will be devoted to bringing truly memorable ideas to the market.

Palio is an advertising agency revolutionizing pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing to create experiences that will Never Be Forgotten.

Jessica Goldsmith, Account Supervisor, Palio

In our “Client/Agency” series, we’ve talked about the different ways that clients and agencies view several different facets of their partnership – from time, to the bottom line, to expectations, to creativity to collaboration.

Now we’re going to talk about the fundamentals of the partnership: the different ways that the two parties view their clients.

In both cases, the most important relationship for the person involved is the one with their clients. If this were a tech situation, we’d call them end users. For the client in the “client/agency” pairing, their end users – the client’s clients – are often their marketing colleagues. They need to deliver ideas, plans, materials, collateral, strategies, campaigns: ones that meet the goals and objectives of the brand and of the company as a whole. If their deliverables don’t match those expectations, they have dissatisfied clients.

This much, so far, is obvious.

The problem arrives when agencies forget about this larger client base and think only of their client as being their end user.

Agency folks, here’s a reminder: our client is not just our client.

Our client is that person, yes. But our client is also their client.

We can’t just think only of our client’s personal preferences. We have to always take into consideration what we know about the larger brand team, the brand itself, the company itself, the competition, and the industry. Our recommendations have to be informed by all of those factors, not just by what might make our direct client initially happy.

It follows, then, that our responsibility is to know enough about all of those factors – not only about our immediate client – to use them in our thinking. If you can’t do that already, you need to seriously rethink your work and your research.

And we need to consider that every day. Are we alerting our client to information that’s relevant to them – or are we also adding information that they could be providing to their colleagues throughout the organization? Are we considering just how our work can help them – or how it can fit in with all of the other activities across the brand, and with all other marketing activities on other brands in their portfolio?

We are the ones outside of the organization. It’s our external perspective and creativity that make us vital to our client’s success. We can’t develop tunnel vision.

Don’t forget who your client is: and who else your client is, too.

Palio is an advertising agency revolutionizing pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing to create experiences that will Never Be Forgotten.

Tess Okura, VP, Account Director, Palio

Like many children of the 70’s, I could rattle off the phone number of every person I knew and other random facts. Learning and memorizing things came easily, but it was a necessity – it was a time when there was no smart phone or Internet to look things up.

Today, however, technology has provided with so much information at our fingertips that our critical thinking skills are often less exercised or, perhaps, are over-stimulated, and that can be dangerous if you want to lead with thoughtful strategic thinking in the pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing space.

Though we’re now incredibly aided by technology, we’re also bombarded with more information than ever before. Everything we do from work to play to interacting with families and friends stimulates our brains, helping us learn and acquire new information each day. Add in the amount of digital information being created through emails, instant messages, blog posts, Web sites, Facebook updates, digital phone calls, podcasts and more, our brains are constantly in overdrive.

Technology has certainly made information more available and accessible, and it offers unprecedented convenience. Many technologies are sold on the promise that it will free up time to help us be more thoughtful and creative thinkers. While Google and ubiquitous access to a variety of media has put a world of knowledge at our fingertips, it may not necessarily be making us any smarter.

The decline of critical thinking skills is one area of concern. Education reporter Trip Gabriel recently discussed the quality of learning in online curriculum, where advocates cite its convenience and critics say that it’s all about saving money.

Jack London was the subject in Daterrius Hamilton’s online English 3 course. In a high school classroom packed with computers, he read a brief biography of London with single-paragraph excerpts from the author’s works. But the curriculum did not require him, as it had generations of English students, to wade through a tattered copy of “Call of the Wild” or “To Build a Fire.”

Hamilton, who had failed English 3 in a conventional classroom and was hoping to earn credit online to graduate, was asked a question about the meaning of social Darwinism. He pasted the question into Google and read a summary of a Wikipedia entry. He copied the language, spell-checked it and emailed it to his teacher.

Google may help speed the time to answer, but changing the depth and breadth of instruction can be detrimental to developing problem solving skills and memory recall. These proficiencies are important for intellectual development and fostering innovation.

Search efficiency is also changing how we interact. Whereas people might have deliberated at length over a given topic, being able to readily access information lessens the need for debate and argumentation. What’s the point when you can just Google for an answer? This can be potentially limiting because new ideas are born from looking at old concepts in a new light.

Gary Small, professor of Psychiatry and Aging at UCLA School of Medicine has looked at how search is affecting our brains and notes that it’s not making us smart or stupid, but it is changing how we think.  What search does, he says, is change how we use our memory.

Unlike children of the 70’s who had to memorize phone numbers, people today can simply look them up in their handheld device or press a button for speed dial. There is no need for active thinking. However, we still have to pick and choose what we need to remember. Individuals attending an industry trade show need to be able to remember people’s names, what company they work for and if and when they’ve interacted. It would be awkward to need to look up that information on a handheld device.

Our prior experiences, education and ability to activate short-term memory help us search online, but for interacting in the real world, technology can be used to encourage brain fitness. Small suggests activities such as Sudoku puzzles, games and other memory techniques in addition to physical training and healthy living to improve brain efficiency and brain health as we age.

Search and other technologies are indeed changing how we think. The way we use memory is being altered as we move to a society of searchers and gathers. Technology has created a world where information changes quickly, and ideas can be distributed almost instantaneously. Individuals need to develop and nurture critical thinking skills so they can continue to innovate, evaluate information and arrive at thoughtful conclusions.

Palio is an advertising agency revolutionizing pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing to create experiences that will Never Be Forgotten.

Philip Reynolds, VP, Associate Creative Director, Palio

In our “Client vs. Agency” series, we’ve looked at the differing views that can be taken regarding time, money, expectations and collaboration. Now, we’ll look at creativity.

Palio is an advertising agency revolutionizing pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing to create experiences that will Never Be Forgotten.

Michele Boxley, Account Director, Palio

Most businesses – certainly, most businesses that have been through a crisis – understand the value of a good disaster plan. Whether you’re an advertising agency like Palio that specializes in pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing, or any other kind of business, when trouble strikes, that’s exactly the wrong time to be sorting out how to talk to customers and the media, or how best to communicate with employees.

So, if we stipulate the value of having a plan in place, then what goes in it? Or, more specifically, how can you leverage the new social, digital and mobile communication tools when disaster strikes? And what should you watch out for? Consider the following:

Have a formal cascade of options. If disaster strikes and you need to communicate with a far-flung workforce, employees should have no question about which channel or tool is the right one for official company updates – that’s a core component of most disaster plans. But, what if your primary tool is damaged or unavailable? Depending on the scenario, it’s possible for email, phones and the company intranet to all be down simultaneously – and that’s when employees need to know what other official options exist.

Keep risk management front and center. The organizational imperative in a crisis is not to communicate with everyone and anyone who wants information – that’s a time sink, a risk and a distraction. Rather, the imperative is to manage risk at every turn. That means looking at social, digital and mobile communication tools through two lenses, at once both weighing their potential to quickly reach a dispersed and mobile workforce, and understanding their potential to generate distracting and counterproductive public chatter in a crisis if not properly managed.

Your vendor’s disaster could be your disaster as well. Many organizations have embraced enterprise-level social collaboration platforms like Socialtext, gaining great benefits from the software-as-a-service model. But, that begs the question: What happens when disaster strikes a core communications vendor? If your organization can’t afford the lost productivity of downtime, go beyond simple service level agreements with strategic communications vendors, and ask to see their actual disaster and business-continuity plans. Not only will you have more insight into their resiliency during a disaster, but you may walk away with ideas for how to better prepare your own organization.

Social and mobile media are an incredible asset in a time of crisis, particularly as today’s workforce gets out of the office and into the field in ever greater numbers. However, “social for the sake of social” is never a good idea – especially in crisis and disaster communications. So, explore your options, but don’t assume anything is a must-do just because social currently gets so much attention.

Palio is an advertising agency revolutionizing pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing to create experiences that will Never Be Forgotten.