Given that it operates out of three Northeast offices and never had issues with remote work even prior to March 2020, Entrée Health didn’t see its mission or growth impacted materially by the pandemic. In fact, it allowed the Omnicom-owned market access specialist to reassess the structure of its leadership teams based on books of business, rather than on location.
“We’re able to move people around based on their capabilities and the capabilities that are needed by a client,” explains Cora Meese, EVP, director of growth and account services. “That has enabled us to allocate senior people to clients more easily and make sure that they are accessible on a daily basis.”
The downstream effect of such an approach means that junior members of the agency get to practice their soft skills in the still Zoom-dominated workplace and figure out the types of accounts and assignments that suit them best. Meese notes that some marketers work better with large pharma companies, while others fare better in the world of biotech startups.
Entrée bulked up its C-suite in 2022 with the addition of agency-world veteran Roseann Roccaro as CFO. It also created a handful of new leadership roles, including EVP, executive creative director (filled by Megan Hall); SVP, business strategist (Jillian Cunningham); and EVP, creative director (Paul Smith). Overall, head count grew from 252 people at the start of 2022 to 265 at its conclusion.
The agency saw revenue nudge upward by 5% in 2022, to an MM+M-estimated $52.5 million from $50 million in 2021. Client roster mainstays include Takeda, Apellis Pharmaceuticals, Pear Therapeutics, Janssen and Boehringer Ingelheim.
To better serve these organizations, Entrée rolled out a pair of in-house service offerings. Access Next is a customizable platform designed to better educate sales reps about coverage for specific drugs, while Cognuity taps all available data to enable more productive manufacturer/payer conversations. Meese describes the latter as an “Amazon or Netflix for all of the materials that different sales teams have access to.”
Dina Steinfurth, managing director of Entrée’s Valuate Health Consultancy, notes that her data team has invested significant resources in the collection of first-party data on payer preferences. The goal: to better understand how decisionmakers prefer to receive content and to streamline clients’ content strategies.
“We’re working with one manufacturer that did an audit of hundreds of their materials and realized that their reuse rate, year-over-year, was under 15%,” she notes. “Everything was basically a one-shot deal, which is a huge expense and inefficiency to them.”
Steinfurth points out that the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency will inevitably lead to more significant pressure on patients vis-à-vis out-of-pocket costs. Combined with pricing measures introduced by the Inflation Reduction Act and the regular ebb-and-flow dynamic with pharmacy benefit managers, this has clients looking for answers.
Entrée seems ready and willing to meet the challenge head-on.
“These are the types of problems we love to solve for them,” Steinfurth says.
. . .
Our marketing role model…
I love organizations that look sideways at themselves to see what else could be, such as Dole — yes, the pineapple people — which is teaming up with a leather expert to make textiles from surplus pineapple leaves. It’s a great example of taking things that seem loosely connected and making something huge out of the collaboration. — Hall
Click here to see Entrée Health’s Agency 100 2022 Profile.
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From the June 01, 2023 Issue of MM+M - Medical Marketing and Media
