Pharma teams spend months crafting “value stories.” They’re sleek, glossy, and full of optimism. They highlight innovation, unmet need, and potential impact. And yet, when these stories reach payers, they often fall flat. The question is: why?
The problem is simple. Most value stories are written like marketing brochures for the internal team, not real-world payers. They talk in broad, aspirational terms such as improved outcomes, cutting-edge technology and patient benefit, but they often skip the one thing that matters most to payers: evidence of tangible impact on budgets, patient pathways, and system efficiency.
Payers aren’t looking for poetry; they want clarity. They want to know:
- How will this therapy change outcomes compared to existing options?
- At what cost?
- Which downstream savings are realistic, and which are wishful thinking?
A sticky value story meets three criteria:
- Evidence-based: Ground it in robust data payers’ trust. Use real-world outcomes, budget impact models, and credible health economics. Hypothetical benefits or cherry-picked clinical endpoints rarely convince.
- System-focused: Show impact on patient pathways, not just molecules. Payers care about the journey, not just the destination. How does this therapy integrate into existing workflows? Does it reduce hospitalisations? Free up clinician time? Avoid unnecessary procedures?
- Repeatable: Simplicity matters. Payers need to retell your story internally. If your slides are full of jargon, dense tables, or unverified assumptions, the message won’t survive internal discussions.
Consider a cardiovascular therapy launch that failed despite strong clinical outcomes. The team’s story highlighted innovation and patient potential, but it ignored budget impact and pathway integration. Payers struggled to present the information internally, adoption stalled, and uptake lagged. Rewriting the story with a focus on budget impact and workflow integration transformed adoption in months.
The lesson: Most pharma value stories fail not because the therapy lacks value, but because the narrative doesn’t respect the payer’s world. A story that resonates with clinicians may not land with payers. Evidence, clarity, and system relevance are non-negotiable.
If your value story isn’t simple enough for a busy payer to explain over a cup of tea, it’s probably too complicated. Keep it clear, concise, and relatable.
In short, for a therapy to succeed, your value story must stick. Ground it in reality, focus on what matters to the payer, and make it easy to communicate. Otherwise, the most brilliant therapy in the world risks being ignored — not because it doesn’t work, but because your story doesn’t.
