Yesterday I had a very frustrating conversation about the sales enablement pilot what I have the opportunity to lead. On the way back to home I was just thinking about why I felt myself so upset and frustrated. Since I’ve started this project in the majority of my time I just try to demolish the myths in pharma digital marketing; the myths what hinder the development of a common view of the goals and objectives.

Here comes to list of my favorite myths and misconceptions:

#1 In pharma scientific data sells the product, so the pharma digital marketing is about building an insanely complex multi-language webportal (with tons of clinical trials).

#2 Multichannel marketing means that all doctors must be spammed with 3 emails a week.

#3 Content creation is about savings – spend all money on technology investment. Every marketer has 10 minutes to write something, or prepare a presentation, that’s good enough.

#4 Marketing mix = multichannel marketing. Have you ever sent an email to a customer? Do you have banner advertising? Congratulations, you did multichannel marketing, checked.

#5 The success metric in multichannel marketing is website traffic.

#6 Closed loop marketing = edetailing

#7 Edetailing = anything shown on iPad

#8 Sales enablement!? It’s better if marketing isn’t involved in any sales force issue.

#9 The aim of CRM is to control sales representatives (Have they recorded the expected number of calls, or haven’t)

#10 It’s useless to track the calls and/or the insights in CLM (= edetailing = anything on iPad), because:

• sales reps are liars, there are only fake calls in CLM
• doctors’ insights are not important, because we won’t change anything in contents and communication

#11 We are smarter, than physicians, we can find out (without any data or insight) what they are interested in (it’s an easy choice: wine or photography).

#12 Interactivity = animated graphs, a lot of them

#13 Edetailing materials: the longer is better. More precisely the longer and more detailed (25 bullet points on one screen) is better. Anyway, don’t trust sales reps, a good (longer and irrelevantly detailed) edetailing presentation sells the product without reps.

#15 Who needs product training!? Can the sales reps read, can’t they? Then no need of training, they can read the presentation – everything is written down in it.

Sales enablement is about change management. Without the common view and understanding on the SE initiative there’s a high chance of failure. So keep on fighting against myths and misconceptions.