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Salil Kallianpur

Salil Kallianpur is Executive Editor at MedicinMan and Founder - ARKS Knowledge Consulting. He has worked in senior roles at Dr. Reddy's, Novartis, Pfizer and GSK.

Indian Pharma CEO Roundtable 2023

Leaderspeak Salil Kallianpur - February 8, 2023

Theme: India Pharma’s Digital Journey – The Progesss from Awareness to Adoption When: Wednesday, March 1, 2023, 7 PM to...

Define and Measure Digital – KPIs and ROI

Leaderspeak Salil Kallianpur - December 2, 2022

Measurement and optimization for digital marketing is one of the critical success factors in the pharmaceutical industry. At the...

The Pill is Now a Commodity – Can ‘Beyond the Pill’ Models Work in India?

Leaderspeak Salil Kallianpur - November 14, 2022

The pill is now a commodity that many of these companies provide at heavy discounts, making money off everything ‘beyond the pill’. Investors are betting heavily on the potential of technological innovation to transform the way healthcare is delivered. The Economic Times reported that in 2021, India recorded investments of $77 billion across 1,266 deals including 164 large deals worth $58 billion. While the money reduced in 2022, the reason wasn’t a lack of faith in this business model. Meanwhile, the pharmaceuticals industry that is most affected by this quiet but rapid change, is grappling with its entrenched culture. Its current business is so profitable that everything else pales in comparison. ‘Build, measure, learn, build again’ – a mantra of the health tech industry is alien to pharma that doesn’t learn, build or measure after launching a product. Pharma also thinks of its customers as doctors alone and does precious little to connect with patients, or caregivers. People who are not sick do not feature on their radar at all. These are cultural values that keep pharma focused on the pill and discourage thinking beyond it. A social media poll conducted by MedicinMan showed almost predictable responses. 100+ respondents who work in the pharma industry in India were quite clearly divided. 48% of them wanted to know what beyond the pill actually meant, while 23% wanted to know how to execute it. The rest felt that the ultra-competitive environment in the Indian generics market required very high share-of-voice tactics (19%), or that their customers demanded product information (9%).

Why and How Can Pharma Make the Shift from Product Centricity to Customer Centricity?

Leaderspeak Salil Kallianpur - November 6, 2022

The customer is the one who buys a product from us. In pharmaceutical selling, the customer is not always...

Medical Reps will Remain – What will be their Future Role?

Leaderspeak Salil Kallianpur - October 28, 2022

There was a phase when the industry feared that digital would eventually replace the medical sales representative but it appears that digital engagements work best when facilitated by an affable and knowledgeable person, who can personalize the information, and the conversation, to the doctor. In pharma, there’s no substituting face-to-face dialogue it seems. And why should it? “Rather than digital replacing a person in pharma, the need of the hour is digitalizing the approach of person. The person and the technology are HERE TO STAY”, says Archis Joshi, Commercial Head at Dr. Reddy’s. The sales role is getting tougher. Medical information, at one point pharma’s greatest value, is today much more freely available than it used to be. In the Indian market which is dominated by generic medicines lacking differentiation, simply informing doctors about the product, isn’t a viable prospect any more when it comes to piquing their interest. “Why are brands that have been around for some time still unable to cross the marketing funnel and are still stuck at either the ‘awareness’ or the ‘interest’ stages, and unable to move towards the ‘purchase’ or ‘recommendation’ stages?” wonders Mehul Shukla, Director, Marketing Excellence at Cipla.

Don’t Do Digital for the Sake of Doing Digital

Leaderspeak Salil Kallianpur - August 27, 2022

Catalyzed by the pandemic, the pharma industry quickly progressed from being digitally agnostic to a state of preparedness. The shift required the industry to experiment with technology in its customer-facing plans, which resulted in many cases the creation of random acts of digital, often without a cohesive overarching strategy. Can pharma do better? The answer lies in understanding the utility of their digital assets while building a mindset to transform, and ensuring that teams within the organization do not work at cross-purposes.

Digital Transformation and the World of Pharma

Digital in Pharma Salil Kallianpur - July 7, 2022

A big myth about digital transformation is that it is all about technology. It is not. First, it is about...

Digital Darwinism or Digital Expert – The Choice for Indian Pharma is Clear

Featured Salil Kallianpur - October 21, 2020

It is heartening to see that Pharma marketers have finally decided to include digital into their marketing mix. Even...

Have Tech Advances Made UCPMP Obsolete? Need for Contemporary Pharma Marketing Code

Featured Salil Kallianpur - October 11, 2020

Salil Kallianpur The code of conduct for ethical pharmaceutical marketing was not designed for a world of data, software, and...

Patient Centered Pharma – Pipe Dream or Possible?

Featured Article Salil Kallianpur - September 13, 2020

To me, patient centricity is as fascinating a concept as it is contradictory. It is fascinating because it puts power into the hands of the patient. And it is contradictory because pharma does not like giving away power over its messages or processes. Pharma has traditionally never enjoyed interaction and has depended on ‘pushing’ messages across rather than having ‘conversations’. It probably also explains why we make do with medical reps who are not the sharpest knives in the drawer and scarcely invest in sharpening them.

Customer Engagement and Experience are the New Differentiators

IMS Monthly Market Reflection Report Salil Kallianpur - May 21, 2019

At the IDMA Marketing and Sales Conference in Mumbai last week, I spoke on “Using digital to create customer...

What pharma marketers get wrong about digital

Thought Leadership Salil Kallianpur - November 6, 2018

Marketers often think that everything is new in the digital world. They have simply forgotten the first principle, which is to serve the customers – to have a customer-centric view and not a product-centric one.

MedicinMan was launched in 2011 as India’s 1st Magazine dedicated to the cause of Field Force Excellence in Pharma and Devices.
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Lifetime Value of a Patient: Why Indian Pharma must Transition from Product-centric Selling to Patient-centric Healthcare

Introduction For decades, the Indian pharmaceutical industry has measured success...

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