[PRACTICE NOTE] The Next Chapter of Commercial Excellence in Pharma: The Rise of Customer Excellence

Pharmaceutical science has never been stronger. Pipelines are more diverse, clinical development more precise, and manufacturing more advanced than at any point in history. Yet amid this extraordinary progress, the industry faces a defining paradox. Scientific excellence has soared, but experiential excellence has not kept pace.

The next chapter of commercial excellence will not be won by companies that simply communicate their science more efficiently but by those that deliver it more meaningfully. Success will belong to organizations that treat customer experience with the same rigor as clinical efficacy, transforming every engagement into living proof of their science, purpose, and trust. Pharma has long set the evidentiary standard for science and the trust standard for its brands. What comes next is the experiential standard that must now match both. Only when the experience of engaging with a company meets the same level of precision, credibility, and consistency that governs its science will the full value of innovation reach the people it is meant to serve.

This evolution begins with Customer Excellence, the discipline that unites marketing, sales, and launch excellence into a coherent commercial operating system capable of earning both permission and preference.

From Science as Foundation to Experience as Fulfillment

Science remains the foundation and heartbeat of the pharmaceutical enterprise. It drives the Path-to-Prescribe, where evidence, education, and efficacy shape confidence and decision-making. Yet even the most extraordinary science cannot fulfill its promise unless it reaches patients through systems that are intuitive, accessible, and human.

Experience now headlines the Path-to-Fulfillment, the continuum of interactions that determine whether prescribed therapies translate into outcomes. It is along this journey that friction, burden, and disconnection often erode impact. Clinical innovation can demonstrate efficacy, but experience determines whether that efficacy becomes reality. The journey from lab to life depends on what happens before, at, and after the point of prescription: before, when healthcare professionals form impressions of credibility and clarity; at, when the science meets the moment of decision and trust determines uptake; and after, when continued education, access, and support sustain adherence and belief.

In some therapeutic areas, as much as half of prescriptions go unfulfilled. This is not a failure of science but of system design, a symptom of burden-heavy and friction-heavy journeys that make it difficult for healthcare professionals to start and keep patients on therapy.

Pharma has long set the global benchmark for the evidentiary standard of science and the trust standard of its brands. What is now required is an experiential standard equal to those same heights. This standard ensures that the experience of engaging with the company is as credible, consistent, and confidence-inspiring as the science it produces and the ethics it upholds.

Science drives the Path-to-Prescribe, and experience headlines the Path-to-Fulfillment. Together they define the new frontier of Customer Excellence.

Why Transformation Is No Longer Enough

Transformation has become the default response to every commercial challenge. Digital transformation, omnichannel transformation, and now AI transformation have each promised to close the gap between companies and their customers. Yet despite billions invested, many of the experiences delivered to healthcare professionals remain inconsistent, impersonal, and disconnected.

The problem is not intent but orientation. Transformation modernizes tools but rarely challenges the mental models that define success. It makes organizations more efficient at what they already do instead of reimagining what they could become.

Pharma no longer needs another transformation. It needs a rebellion that questions the orthodoxy of activity metrics, channel volume, and functional isolation, and that restores coherence and humanity to how the industry delivers its science to the world.

Customer Excellence as a Rebellion

Customer Excellence is that rebellion. It is a disciplined and systemic redefinition of how value is created, delivered, and sustained. It challenges the assumption that progress is measured by scale and speed and argues that the true measure of commercial excellence lies in coherence, trust, and ease.

This rebellion is not against compliance but against complacency. It asks leaders to replace optimization with orchestration and to build organizations where the quality of engagement matches the quality of the science itself.

The Seven Shifts Defining the Rebellion

The seven shifts form the architecture of the Customer Excellence discipline, uniting marketing, sales, and launch excellence into a single, human-centered model for sustainable growth. They are not incremental improvements but structural changes in how the enterprise creates and sustains value.

Shift #1. From Tangible to Intangible Value Exchange

As the modern customer increasingly prioritizes intangible elements of value, Experiential Commerce is reshaping not only customer expectations but also how CFOs and capital markets assess value creation and destruction. This evolution is neither anecdotal nor temporary; it is structural and customer-led.

According to the World Bank, intangible assets now account for more than 65 percent of global GDP and over 75 percent of GDP in high-income economies. For CMOs and marketers, this shift represents a profound opportunity to expand the dimensions of their brand propositions and to position their organizations as indispensable partners in customers’ lives.

Customer Excellence Enterprises like Airbnb, Starbucks, and Tesla have already proven that value is no longer about what or how a company sells, but how it integrates into customers’ daily lives—creating relevance, emotional loyalty, and sustainable differentiation. As capital markets increasingly reward companies that deliver on these intangible drivers, CMOs who embrace Customer Excellence will redefine marketing’s role and influence how their organizations are valued and trusted in the long term.

How to get started on Shift 1: Collaborate with CFOs to quantify the impact of experiential factors on financial outcomes such as premium pricing, customer stickiness, and reduced churn. Demonstrate that experience is not a soft metric but a commercial one.

Shift #2. From Campaign-Centric to Customer-Centric Journeys

Experiential Commerce is forcing marketers to reevaluate the fundamentals of how they create and sustain engagement. For decades, marketing has revolved around promotional campaigns, operating in cycles of awareness, promotion, and demand generation that prioritize acquisition and short-term spikes over sustained engagement.

This “launch and leave” approach leaves immense value untapped. A customer-centric mindset does not reject campaigns but repositions them within a broader strategy—one where marketing is not just about selling but about building meaningful and continuous relationships. Customer-centric marketing tempers the instinctive overreliance on promotions with a deeper focus on experience as an enduring component of the value proposition.

This evolution requires that marketing become the steward of the entire customer lifecycle, ensuring that every touchpoint reinforces trust, loyalty, and differentiation rather than fragmenting the customer experience.

How to get started on Shift 2: Facilitate a Lifecycle Mapping Workshop that enables teams to step out of the campaign mindset and view the brand through the customer’s eyes. This helps break free from the “launch and leave” cycle and design experiences that drive continuous engagement, retention, and expansion.

Shift #3. Experiential Factors as Equal Partners to Product and Brand Factors in Value Propositions

The formula 3 > 2 represents a fundamental shift in competitive strategy: companies that compete on product, brand, and experience together unlock far greater customer value and differentiation than those relying solely on the traditional product–brand model.

In this new paradigm, experience is not a peripheral enhancement but an equal pillar in shaping perception, driving preference, and fostering long-term loyalty. Product features and brand reputation may attract initial interest, but experience—how seamlessly, intuitively, and emotionally a company engages with customers—is what cements relationships and sustains advantage.

Industry leaders such as Apple, Tesla, and Ritz-Carlton have demonstrated that when experience is woven into the value proposition alongside product and brand, it becomes a strategic differentiator that commands premium pricing, increases retention, and fuels organic advocacy.

For CMOs and marketers, this shift requires integrating experience as a core element of strategy rather than as a secondary support function, future-proofing both their brand and their own relevance as leaders of growth.

How to get started on Shift 3: Move beyond traditional marketing KPIs such as impressions and conversions to include experiential metrics like Customer Value at Risk (CVAR), emotional engagement scores, and experience-driven retention rates.

Shift #4. From Transactions to Relationships

Another defining element of the Customer Excellence mindset is the shift from transactional interactions to relationship-driven growth. This transition is as much about organizational mindset as it is about measurement.

Marketers must go beyond transaction-based campaign metrics such as click-through rates and conversions, which measure short-term performance but fail to capture the broader financial and relational impact of marketing relative to customer acquisition cost. To do this, organizations must integrate Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) as a strategic compass for growth while also measuring Customer Value (CV) and Customer Value at Risk (CVAR) as its leading indicators.

CLV provides a forward-looking view of a customer’s long-term contribution, allowing leaders to assess whether acquisition costs align with projected returns. Yet CLV is a lagging metric—it reflects what has already been earned or lost. CV and CVAR, in contrast, provide an early warning system. CV quantifies the realized and potential value of existing relationships, while CVAR measures the degree of vulnerability that exists across those relationships when experience quality erodes, trust declines, or effort increases.

Together, these metrics reveal how relationship health predicts revenue sustainability and future growth. By pairing CLV’s long-term view with CVAR’s real-time visibility, CMOs and commercial leaders can intervene before loyalty is lost and design experiences that actively protect and grow customer value over time.

In pharma, where relationships are complex, longitudinal, and deeply trust-based, this mindset reframes marketing’s purpose from conversion to continuity. It ensures that the enterprise invests not only in reach but in resonance, turning every engagement into an opportunity to reinforce belief, credibility, and partnership.

How to get started on Shift 4: Integrate CV and CVAR as leading indicators of CLV within performance scorecards. Use them to identify where value is being created, diluted, or put at risk. Then align interventions across marketing, sales, and service to strengthen relationship health and long-term profitability.

Shift #5. From Funnel to Bow Tie to Flywheel

For decades, pharma’s commercial model has been built around the funnel—a system optimized for acquisition rather than continuity. It excels at generating awareness and driving conversion, but it ends at the point of prescription. In a world where relationships define differentiation, this model is no longer sufficient.

The industry began evolving toward the bow tie, recognizing that value extends beyond acquisition into retention, adherence, and ongoing support. The bow tie reflects the duality of the customer journey before and after the prescription, yet it still treats these as sequential stages rather than parts of one continuous system.

Customer Excellence introduces the flywheel, where acquisition, retention, and expansion operate as a single, self-reinforcing cycle of value creation. Every interaction builds energy that fuels the next. The flywheel is powered by trust, coherence, and ease across all functions, compounding the impact of marketing, sales, and service over time.

This is the structure of sustainable growth. The funnel drives attention. The bow tie sustains connection. The flywheel compounds trust. Together, they represent pharma’s essential evolution from company-centric marketing to customer-aligned value creation, where every experience strengthens the next and the enterprise grows by helping healthcare professionals help patients.

How to get started on Shift 5: Map the customer lifecycle across pre-prescription and post-prescription phases, identifying where energy is lost or duplicated. Then design mechanisms that transfer learning, feedback, and value across the entire system, transforming disconnected touchpoints into a compounding growth engine.

Shift #6. From Neutral Interactions to Brand-Defining Moments

Every interaction communicates brand character. There are no neutral touchpoints. Customer Excellence ensures that purpose lives in every operational detail, transforming moments of service into moments of meaning. Simplified forms, thoughtful follow-ups, and clear communication become lasting evidence of reliability. Consistency builds credibility, and humanity builds preference.

Organizations that embed this mindset understand that each conversation with a healthcare professional or patient either reinforces or erodes trust. The most admired companies do not leave these moments to chance; they design them with intent. They operationalize empathy, making it measurable, repeatable, and accountable.

How to get started on Shift 6: Build experience principles that translate brand purpose into clear behavioral standards for every touchpoint—digital, human, or hybrid—and hold teams accountable for delivering them with the same rigor as compliance or safety protocols.

Shift #7. From Vertical to Horizontal Orientation

Pharma’s structures were built for precision and control, and over time that precision hardened into silos. Each function performs well in isolation but rarely in harmony. Healthcare professionals, however, experience companies horizontally as they move from sales interactions to digital portals to access programs and medical inquiries.

Customer Excellence realigns the enterprise to this horizontal journey. It connects what marketing promises, what sales delivers, what access enables, and what medical supports into a seamless experience. Planning becomes orchestration, measurement shifts from functional output to journey health, and collaboration replaces competition.

When organizations think and act horizontally, they begin to meet customers where they are and show up as one unified brand.

How to get started on Shift 7: Create a cross-functional Experience Delivery System that links strategy, operations, and analytics. Align teams around shared outcomes such as journey satisfaction, time-to-resolution, and experience quality, ensuring that every function contributes to a single, integrated customer rhythm.

From Rebellion to System: The Next Era of Commercial Excellence

The seven shifts are not a checklist to implement but a discipline to master. They describe how pharma can close the gap between its scientific mastery and the lived experiences that bring that science to life.

Customer Excellence is not the operating system in and of itself. It is the discipline that, when combined with Marketing Excellence, Sales Excellence, and Launch Excellence, creates a unified Customer-Aligned Commercial Operating System. Together these four disciplines form the integrated engine that drives differentiation, preference, and growth.

Within this system, Marketing defines the story, Sales delivers the experience, Launch orchestrates the moment, and Customer Excellence ensures that what is promised is consistently delivered. It turns parallel functions into a coherent enterprise that moves in rhythm with the customer rather than around them.

Customer Excellence provides the connective tissue between belief and behavior, between intent and impact. It ensures that every insight, interaction, and innovation serves the customer journey rather than internal agendas. It gives technology and data their true purpose, elevating human connection rather than replacing it.

This is the next chapter of commercial excellence in pharma. It is no longer defined by transformation but by orchestration. It is no longer about scale but about coherence. It is no longer about message but about meaning.

Customer Excellence is the discipline that turns transformation into conviction and conviction into capability. It is how marketing, sales, and launch come together to form a single commercial operating system built for the realities of modern healthcare. It is how science earns permission, experience earns preference, and organizations earn the right to lead with both.

Science drives the Path-to-Prescribe. Experience headlines the Path-to-Fulfillment. Customer Excellence unites them both.

Science earns permission. Experience earns preference. Customer Excellence earns both.

Five Takeaways for Commercial Leaders

1. Science remains essential, but experience is now existential. The future of differentiation will belong to companies that deliver experiences as precise, credible, and consistent as their science.

2. Customer Excellence is the bridge between functions and the backbone of trust. It aligns marketing, sales, and launch into one customer-aligned commercial operating system, ensuring coherence across the enterprise.

3. Experiential factors are the new measure of commercial value. Intangibles such as trust, empathy, and ease are now quantifiable and increasingly recognized by capital markets as core drivers of enterprise value.

4. The commercial model must evolve from funnel to flywheel. Growth will depend on the ability to compound value across acquisition, retention, and expansion by building systems that feed momentum, not fatigue.

5. The next competitive advantage is cultural alignment. The companies that win will not be the ones that automate fastest but the ones that humanize most, building customer-centric cultures that move as one.