A cardiologist gets an email about a new data set on Monday, sits through a sponsored webinar on the same topic on Wednesday, and on Friday a rep walks in and describes the data slightly differently from both. Three channels, one message, three versions. The physician doesn't think "what a rich multichannel experience". She thinks the company doesn't quite know its own story.
That is the problem most multichannel plans in pharma still underestimate. Since the pandemic, the industry has added channels at speed: remote detailing, approved email, webinars, portals, messaging. Adding them was the easy part. The hard part is making every channel carry the same approved claims, delivered in a way that fits each healthcare professional (HCP) and each conversation, and a channel where consistency needs to be checked is the one we train least systematically: the field. Here are five keys we think matter most in mid-2025, with a practical view on what each one asks of Marketing, Medical and the sales team.
More channels did not mean more relevance
The emergency phase of 2020 and 2021 forced companies to move fast, and many of those moves were improvised. Face-to-face access dropped, so everything went digital at once. Some physicians welcomed it. Many were simply flooded: more emails, more webinar invitations, more remote call requests, often with the same content repackaged for each channel.
A few years on, most organisations have settled into a hybrid model. Reps are back in clinics and hospitals, but access is more selective and more appointment-based than before. Digital channels have stayed, and in many cases they now carry the first contact. The question is no longer whether to be multichannel. It is whether the channels work together or just coexist.
Our view, from the programs we have run with field teams, is simple. Multichannel is not about being everywhere. It is about being relevant everywhere you are, and consistent across all of it. That starts with the HCP and ends with a very practical question: does every person who speaks for the brand, human or digital, actually know the story?
Key 1: Start from the HCP's question, not from the channel plan
Most multichannel plans are drawn as a grid: channels across the top, segments down the side, activities in the boxes. It looks tidy and it tends to produce activity for its own sake.
A better starting point is the set of questions each type of HCP is likely to have at each stage of the brand's life. Before a launch, a key opinion leader (KOL) wants the trial design and the primary endpoint. In the first months, a community specialist wants to know which of her patients fit the indication and what the practical barriers are. Later, a hospital pharmacist cares about formulary position, access and cost. Each of those questions has a best channel. Some are answered well by a short email with a reprint. Others need a conversation, because the physician will push back and follow up.
When you map questions to channels, two things become obvious. First, the field is the channel for the hard questions, the objections, the "but what about my patients who...". Second, the digital channels will generate follow-up questions that end up with the rep. If the rep isn't ready for them, the digital investment turns into a disappointing call.
Key 2: Segment by need and access, not just by specialty and decile
Specialty and prescribing potential are still the backbone of targeting. They are no longer enough on their own. Two oncologists with the same potential can behave completely differently: one takes every remote meeting, the other sees nobody without a referral from a colleague and only reads what arrives through a trusted society.
Useful segmentation now combines three layers:
- What the HCP needs from you at this point (evidence, practical guidance, access support, patient material).
- How they prefer to receive it (in person, remote, written, at a congress, through peers).
- What access you actually have (open door, appointment only, no-see, institutional rules).
Analytics and AI models can help sort this at scale, and CRM call notes are an underused source for it. But segmentation only pays off if the people executing it can adapt. A rep assigned a no-see practice with a strong digital preference needs a very different call plan, and a very different set of materials, from a rep with open access to a hospital department. That brings us back to preparation.
Key 3: Content is the product, and it has to be short, approved and identical in meaning
Pharmaceutical companies are no longer the main source of medical information for most HCPs. Guidelines, journals, societies, peer networks and online resources all compete for attention. To earn a physician's time, content has to be scientifically solid, useful in practice and short.
Three rules we would apply to any multichannel content plan:
- Build every channel's material from the same approved core, then adapt the format, not the substance. Adapting is not an exemption from review: a new channel, format or length is new material, and it goes back through medical-legal review under your own SOPs, even when the claims are unchanged. A shared core just makes that review faster.
- Keep the unit small. A physician will read a three-minute summary of a secondary endpoint. She will not read a twelve-page brochure in her inbox.
- Make sure the field knows the core better than any channel expresses it. The email can afford to be brief. The rep will be asked what the brief version left out.
The same principle applies to training the field. Long modules and dense slide decks can be difficult to fit between visits; short practice sessions offer another way to reinforce approved content. Short, focused content, followed by questions that force people to retrieve what they read, does far more for retention. We like to turn a dense clinical paper into a short audio episode for the car, then follow it with a handful of questions the next day. The format changes, the approved substance doesn't, and the audio script and the questions are reviewed like any other material.
The email can afford to be brief. The rep will be asked what the brief version left out.
Key 4: Treat every event as before, during and after
Webinars, advisory boards, symposia and congress activity remain some of the most valuable touchpoints in any multichannel plan. They are also where a lot of value leaks away, because the event is treated as the whole activity rather than the middle of it.
We find it useful to plan every event in three phases, for both the HCP audience and the field team supporting it.
Before
For HCPs, a short, relevant piece of content that makes the session easier to follow. For the field, a quick preparation cycle on the data that will be presented, so reps and KAMs can invite the right people with the right reason and aren't surprised by what the speaker says.
During
For HCPs, interaction that respects their time: questions, polls, a real Q&A. For the field, awareness of which topics are generating debate, so the follow-up conversation starts where the physician's curiosity is.
After
This is where most plans are weakest. Murre and Dros's 2015 replication of Ebbinghaus, a single-participant experiment with nonsense syllables, shows that unrehearsed material fades fast and that spacing helps. If the follow-up call happens three weeks after a congress symposium, and nothing has refreshed the rep's grasp of the new data in the meantime, much of the event's value is at risk. A few days of short reinforcement for the field, focused on what was actually presented, keeps the story sharp for the follow-up.
Key 5: Measure reach, and measure what the messengers know
Multichannel dashboards have become very good at counting: emails opened, webinar attendance, remote call duration, content downloads, calls per day. Those numbers matter. They also share a blind spot. They tell you the message was sent. They say nothing about whether the person sending it, in the case of the field, could explain it accurately.
A fair objection is that knowledge is a training metric, not a commercial one, and belongs in the L&D report. We disagree. In a hybrid model, the rep is one of the channels, usually the most expensive one and, for many HCPs and many kinds of conversation, an influential one. If a quarter of the field misstates the patient population in the new data, every downstream metric is affected, and no channel dashboard will show why.
So we would add a small number of knowledge measures to the multichannel scorecard:
- Readiness on the core messages by team, country and topic, measured at the start of each cycle and again several weeks later.
- The specific facts the field most often gets wrong, and whether those gaps are closing.
- The misconceptions that do not respond to repetition and need a manager or an MSL.
Put next to channel activity and CRM data, those measures change the conversation in the brand review. A drop in follow-up conversion after a webinar can be traced to a gap in how the field understood the webinar content. That is actionable. "Engagement is down" isn't.
The rep is still the channel that holds it together
For all the investment in digital, the field remains, for many HCPs, the channel they turn to for the difficult conversation, though not for all of them: some prefer a peer, an MSL or a journal. It is also the channel with the most variability. Consistency does not mean identical delivery. A good rep adapts the order, the emphasis and the examples to the physician in front of her, and should. What must not vary is the claims: the same approved data, the same population, the same caveats. Two reps presenting the same visual aid can deliver it differently and still be consistent, or sound alike and still misstate the claim.
That is why we think the best multichannel investment many companies can make this year is not another channel. It is making sure the people in the field know the approved claims as precisely as the best digital asset expresses them, and can answer follow-up questions within the label when the physician asks. In practice, that means short, frequent preparation rather than occasional long training, individual fixes for individual mistakes, and a clear view of who is ready and who isn't before the cycle starts.
It also means treating first-line managers as part of the multichannel plan. When a manager knows that a particular rep keeps confusing two endpoints, the next ride-along has a purpose. When the manager only knows that the team attended the training, it doesn't.
This is the part of the problem we work on at Atrivity: one-minute challenges that reps play between visits, fixes sent to each person for their own mistakes, and a readiness view by team, country and topic that Commercial Excellence and Marketing can read alongside their channel data. It sits next to the omnichannel stack, not inside it.
Before your next cycle meeting, try one exercise. Take the single most important message of the cycle, the one every channel will carry, and ask ten reps to explain it in their own words. If you get ten consistent answers, your multichannel plan has a solid foundation. If you get six versions, you know where to start.