Many factors can derail your company’s market access strategy, from bad customer data to sales team turnover. But your training shouldn’t be one of them. Expert-vetted market access training can give your team the knowledge and confidence needed to overcome key selling challenges, including provider access and engagement.
Even though each brand’s market access strategy is unique, your team must understand key market access concepts before they can truly engage customers and reach peak performance.
CMR Institute offers nationally recognized market access e-learning courses that can help your sales representatives and account managers re-engage providers and improve market access for your brand. We offer more than 50 market access training courses for pharmaceutical and medical device companies that can improve your sales team’s business acumen and account management skills. Our market access courses can also help your medical science liaisons (MSLs) reach key opinion leaders (KOLs).
Why Your Sales Team May Struggle with Provider Access and Engagement
Here are some reasons why your sales representatives and account managers may not be seeing their most important customers.
1. Organizational complexity
Today’s vertically and horizontally integrated delivery networks (IDNs) and other provider organizations are increasingly complex, making them especially difficult to navigate for representatives and account managers (see figure). Ownership changes through continued mergers and acquisitions create many layers of decision-makers as well as uncertainty for sales teams and providers alike.
Market access training can help your team navigate these complex organizations and understand how they influence providers’ prescribing decisions. It can also help them identify opportunities for partnership and offer meaningful solutions that extend across the enterprise.
2. Financial pressures and burnout
Providers’ operating margins in 2023 have improved since 2022, but many continue to have high operating costs. Physician practices are also facing ongoing pressures to see high volumes of patients, with less time to engage in conversations with representatives and account managers.
At the same time, two-thirds of U.S. doctors and nurses are still experiencing burnout even though the COVID-19 public health emergency has ended — making them even less likely to engage with your team. In this environment, many healthcare organizations are re-upping their efforts to improve the welfare of their workforce by adopting a quadruple or quintuple aim (see figure).
Your team should be able to assess the needs of these customers and offer targeted solutions that can support all aspects of their mission, from improving population health and the patient care experience, to reducing the cost of care. Courses on account management, population health management, and other market access topics can give your team the edge they need.
3. Changing regulations
Legislative and regulatory changes continue to disrupt providers’ daily lives and, thus, your sales team’s value-based selling efforts. Consider some of the laws and government programs that have shaped provider payment and reimbursement in the past 15 years (see figure).
In 2023 and though 2024, many providers may see higher numbers of uninsured patients because of the unwinding of the Medicaid continuous enrollment provision. This could add to the existing financial pressures on many struggling hospitals and IDNs — creating an opportunity for your team to offer meaningful support and help secure market access for your brands.
Training Guided by Real Subject Matter Experts
- We know you have a lot of options when it comes to your market access training. One factor that sets CMR apart is our subject matter experts, who are top experts in the field, including MDs, academia, clinical specialists, and healthcare system executives from some of the country’s leading provider organizations. They bring their unique industry insights and perspectives, ensuring our content is relevant, accurate, timely, and actionable.
Another factor that makes our learning different is that we are constantly adding new courses and updating our courses to reflect the dynamic nature of the healthcare environment. This year, subject matter experts will work, together with our team, to assess this changing market and the needs of the healthcare industry to review and update more than 45 market access courses for accuracy and relevance to the field as well as add new content to provide ahead-of-the-change expertise to our learners. We’ll also complete dozens of additional industry updates this year to add new regulations or marketplace developments to our market access content.
Training to Improve Provider Access and Engagement
Your company has invested in the best customer data, but it can only go so far to improve provider access and engagement. What happens if your representative or account manager stumbles over a simple business question and loses their chance to engage a customer?
We can help by bringing your market access training plan to life with ready-to-use and customizable learning content. Our learning experts have designed an interactive tool to help you assess your market access training priorities.
We can also customize learning pathways for each customer-facing role in your sales team. We’ll help you give your team the knowledge they need to engage providers without infringing on valuable selling time. Reach out to us at solutions@cmrinstitute.org to learn more.
In future blogs, we’ll discuss how training on patient access, reimbursement changes, and payer utilization management can help your team meet your ambitious goals.
