In Part 1, I went through my interview with Ted Lai, Chief Digital Officer at Sanofi Greater China. This was a lot about his background and his approach to digital transformation, which he is really crazy experienced in.
However, digital transformation always comes down to use cases. That’s where the rubber hits the road. How does this impact customers?

In this second part, I want to go through the 3 big use cases Sanofi is working on.

Big Use Case 1: Creating a Coordinated, Omnichannel Experience for Physicians

Going to market as a pharmaceutical company is a lot about having an army of pharmaceutical representatives. These are the well-groomed and charming staff that meet with physicians and talk about the products. It has a lot to do with education (“here is a research study on how this drug works on this condition”). And it has a lot to do with getting the very limited time and attention of hyper busy physicians, who are located in hospitals and clinics scattered across the country.

And the numbers are huge.

In the US, there are +900,000 practicing physicians and +80,000 pharma reps trying to interact with them. Pretty much every week. Knocking on their office door doesn’t really work that well. So, they do things like host lunches for them in the hospital break room. They drop off free samples. They offer invitations to conferences.

People think this is some sales process, but as mentioned, it is mostly about education. Although it also tends to be a lot about food (in the US). If you want to get 20 surgeons to come to your event in the hospital conference room, you better have some good food.

In China, these numbers are, unsurprisingly, even larger, with an estimated +2M health care professionals in the country.

The go to market strategy in pharma has a lot to do with the daily work of pharmaceutical representatives – and this is desperate for digital transformation. It’s highly inefficient. It is expensive. And it is often inconvenient and of limited utility to physicians.

Enter Ted Lai and his team at Sanofi Greater China.

Their approach is to:

• Move the communication with physicians and other healthcare professionals online (i.e., on to smartphones).
• And to dramatically improve the experience (and therefore value) to these professionals.

That is a good digital transformation use case.

It impacts the user experience (which is the most powerful thing). And it also increases productivity and saves costs. There is nothing better than improvements in the customer experience that also save you money.

The main KPIs are likely going to be user growth, engagement, satisfaction, and revenue (indirectly). But KPIs will also include cost savings, given the expensive army of sales representatives going for in-person meetings and experiences.

The big digital initiatives usually cost a lot in terms of time, effort and focus. So, you want them to have a big potential payoff. Even if it takes a long time to get there. For me, that is always:

• Growth in revenue and/or users
• Building your moat. How do you build something others can’t replicate and/or compete with?

In fact, I spent 7 years studying one question “How Do You Build and Measure Competitive Advantage in Digital Businesses?”

And I wrote 7 books with the answer (Moats and Marathons). Here’s the answer in three slides.

Slide 1: Know which strategy question you are focusing on.

Slide 2: Know how your digital initiatives are going to impact competition.

Slide 3: Building competitive advantages is the most important over the long-term.

Ok. So, what is a coordinated, omnichannel experience for physicians? Which is what Sanofi China has been focusing on.

It seems to be 3 things:

1.Creating a series of digital touch points.

They are increasing the types of touchpoints with physicians. That is key. Without engagement, none of this works. But you also need to coordinate them into one integrated and seamless experiences. The sum has to be better than the parts. Ultimately, this will be a combination on online and offline interactions.

2. Creating a WeChat portal for physicians.

If you’re building online interactions in China, you are talking about WeChat. That is where everyone lives. For Sanofi this means, connecting with physicians there and then doing:

• Content generation and sharing. This can be education, invitations to events, etc. An increasingly amount of this can be automated.
• Personalization. Matching the right content to the right physician at the right moment is the key. That’s how you improve the experience. It’s also the key to not annoying them. This can be invitations, solutions to their problems, etc. This requires machine learning.
• Compliance. Very important in healthcare of course.

3. Creating a mobile dashboard for medical reps, managers and others.

This is your co-pilot for the team. This is who you make the medical reps and managers both better and more productive.

• For medical representatives, this is a productivity tool. You are giving them lots of resources. Especially real time information as needed. Which doctor to contact today? How to move forward with them? What to say?
• It also gives them feedback, nudges and prompts. This is how you improve performance and share best practices.
• For managers, this is more of a tool for better information (structured data benchmarks and unstructured data insights). Which enables faster and better decision-making. Also, for optimizing resource allocation across the team. This tool can also get better at providing recommendations over time.

Sanofi is rolling this out right now. It’s their first major use case now that they have built the tech architecture, data platforms and teams. And given the size of the organization, this is a big deal. Getting adoption is going to be a long haul.

Big Use Case 2: Streamlining and Upgrading the Patient Experience

This appears to be the next big use case in the queue.

You would think patients taking their medication after seeing a doctor or being discharged from a hospital would be pretty straight-forward.

It’s really not.

Drug adherence is a huge problem in pharma. Patients leave the hospital or clinic and then don’t take the meds as directed. And they don’t do the follow-up. It’s a lot about having the correct information and clear instructions. It’s also just about compliance. This can result in the patient not getting treated properly and sometimes getting worse.

Overall, the experience of the patient after they leave the hospital or clinic is inefficient, murky and not terribly user-friendly.

This is a long-standing operational problem in healthcare. Nobody has great insight or coordinating control over the patient experience once they leave the clinic or hospital. It gets lost between the patient (the patient’s family), the doctor, the pharmacist and usually a nurse.

In the West, this disappearing patient problem is often addressed by nurses. They are the ones administering the drugs in the hospital and clinics. And they can spend a tremendous amount of time calling and following up on the patients at home.

So, a digital solution here is digital tools to support the nurses to improve their effectiveness and/or efficiency.

Another is tools that allow patients to self-serve. This is a big potential use case.

Big Use Case 3: Content Generation

I would call this more of a medium-sized use case.

Content generation is still the favorite “go to” use case for generative AI. It is literally named after “generating” content.

This is about deploying GenAI tools to staff and teams. And having them start using them in the various workflows. This can be everything from simple tasks like employee onboarding to advanced tasks like clinical trial reviews.

GenAI really does have a tremendous impact on the productivity of professional workers. Especially knowledge workers (like in healthcare) And especially those that create lots of documents or other content. Especially those that have to create lots of documents for regulatory filings and such.

The reason this could be more powerful at Sanofi is because they are dealing with complicated, advanced subjects (R&D, biopharma, clinical trials, regulatory filings). And you really can’t hire junior people to do most of this work. Think writing up reviews for clinical trial reports. You really need highly trained professionals for this. And they are usually expensive and overwhelmed with daily tasks. GenAI tools can really increase the productivity of advanced knowledge professionals who have to do a lot of document creation.

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Ok. Those were my main takeaways from my discussion with Ted.

One last point.

None of this Works Until the Data, Tech and Skills Are in Place

You can’t target the big, high impact use cases until you are ready. And that takes time. For a large multinational, you need to spend years building out the enabling capabilities – which include:

1. The Tech Infrastructure and Team

This is going to take years. And unfortunately, GenAI requires a different tech stack than a traditional CPU based architecture. So, the tech infrastructure has to be built.

And you need a good tech team- preferably one that is proficient in using GenAI copilot tools for coding and other work. They are going to be building and upgrading pretty much forever (although maybe AI agents will take over much of the work over time). Both on premise and cloud.

2. Data Management

All digital activities require data. It needs to be gathered on an ongoing basis, cleaned, and deposited in one central place. And then protected. You need to build data products so teams can access it. It’s a lot of work.

And unfortunately, to realize the full power of AI, you need a lot more data. A lot more.

And this data is significantly different than typical structured data in warehouses. You need a lot more unstructured data. Think emails, images, videos, conversations, etc. So, cleaning and standardizing the data is more complicated. So is proper management.

And unfortunately, data is also much more complicated in healthcare given the sensitivity (privacy) and regulatory controls over it. And much of the key data is in hospitals and clinics, who have strict rules about sharing it.

3. Change Management

Most business (not technical) teams have limited experience in agile methodology. They need training in digital tools. They need to work more in agile teams. And there needs to be a lot of discussion about experimentation and accepting failure, which many organizations culturally do not accept. But which is inherent to digital projects.

So, there is a lot of training that has to happen for apps and tools that are launched. And as they are tested and improved over time. There will be endless bugs along the way. And cancellation of the tools and use cases is common.

The best way to learn this is by doing. So as the foundational building phase is going on, agile business teams can work on simple “quick hit” use cases. In the process, they will get used to agile methodology. And you really want to show progressive “wins” and concrete progress all along the way. It builds momentum.

Finally, launching all these digital tools and portals doesn’t do much good if there isn’t buy in from the business units, employees and customers. It is really frustrating to build something that nobody ends up using. So, you need to get them involved early on in the planning and design phase.

4. Highly Supportive Leadership

All this digital transformation takes time and money. Definitely in the building infrastructure phase. And definitely when building the big, high impact use cases.

And it involves accepting a lot of failure. That’s part of the process.

So, you really need patience and support from the leadership. They have to be committed for the long-term.
Building the data and technology foundation for large, complicated business (like Sanofi) can take 3-5 years. And you’re likely not going to see big benefits until high impact use cases get adoption. You really need patient and supportive leadership that understands what is being built and why. It also essential that you can show quick wins and measurable progress along the way.

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That’s it.

It was a fascinating talk with a real expert. Keep in mind, this is my impression of what’s going on at Sanofi Greater China and my thinking on the subject. None of this article should be considered the words of Ted or Sanofi.

Cheers, Jeff

• Lessons in Digital Transformation from Ted Lai, Chief Digital Officer of Sanofi Greater China (1 of 2) (Tech Strategy)

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Related articles:

• Scale Advantages Are Key. But Competitive Advantages Are More Specific and Measurable. (Tech Strategy)
• The Characteristics of Unattractive Industries with Cutthroat Competition (1 of 3) (Tech Strategy)
• 5 Misconceptions About Barriers to Entry (Tech Strategy)

From the Concept Library, concepts for this article are:

• Pharma

From the Company Library, companies for this article are:

• Sanofi China

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