ACTO
The All-in-One Commercial Learning Platform

Historically, the life sciences industry has been largely unaffected by the economic downturn, but the current post-pandemic macro environment has taken its toll. The economic uncertainty has resulted in pharma, biotech, and medical device companies putting a greater focus on operational efficiency. While this may imply a pullback on investing in technology, the opposite is true. Life sciences organizations are looking to improve efficiency through tech consolidation that has a bottom-line impact. In the life sciences commercial training space, one company has emerged that is making that task easy.

As the only learning platform built specifically for the life sciences industry, ACTO is delivering capabilities that used to be siloed in over a dozen point solutions in a single, unified platform that addresses the unique learning needs of pharma field teams while also providing valuable insight into the impact of training on sales performance.

In 2014, the company was founded by three friends, Parth Khanna, Kapil Kalra, and Kumar Erramilli, who shared a common vision of making a positive impact on the world. Since then, ACTO has changed how the life sciences industry approaches commercial learning and development (CL&D). It, in fact, has been recognized as a trailblazer in life sciences technology for its innovation in commercial learning analytics and artificial intelligence by Everest Group, a leading global tech analyst and research firm. Currently, more than 75 life sciences customers and over 35,000 sales reps are using the ACTO platform.

“What Veeva has done for marketing and sales execution, ACTO does for commercial learning and insights. Together, Veeva and ACTO are initiating a new era of sales effectiveness and performance,” says Khanna, CEO, ACTO.

Streamlining Training for Commercial Excellence

“If you think about training pharma sales reps – whether through new hire onboarding, for a new product launch, or at a National Sales Meeting, there are always three elements of the learning journey: home study pre-work, live training, and post-event training reinforcement,” says Khanna, “Currently for a pharma sales rep, all these activities take place across multiple systems. For home study, reps must access an assessment tool and an e-learning system, while in live training, they will have to sign into a meeting app, perhaps engage in gamification on another app, and then get certified on what they learned via another tool. Then, once out in the field, they will have to use another system for coaching. It’s a real mess.”

The other challenge with this fragmented commercial learning environment is that it is virtually impossible for reps to refer back to learning when—considering the depth and complexity of what they must learn about the therapeutic area, disease state, product, competitive landscape, market access, formulary, physiology—it is critical.

This is where ACTO makes a world of difference. Its commercial learning platform has been designed from the ground up to meet the end-to-end needs of the life sciences industry for product launches, new hire onboarding, and sales meetings.

“Together, when you think about what Veeva's done and what we've done, we've really helped to streamline and simplify the tech experience or the tech environment that a sales rep needs to operate in,” notes Khanna.

Moreover, ACTO partners with leading medical content agencies like Axiom, ERS, and Red Nucleus to make their content available through its platform.

“We support microlearning by turning heavy content into a digestible format. Our platform allows content tagging by therapeutic area, disease state, and product as well as enables keyword search based on the tagging,” says Alison Muller, chief marketing officer, ACTO.

ACTO has made everything—from on-demand learning to live learning, and field coaching to certifications—seamlessly accessible through a multi-tenant SaaS platform, which functions as an app. The platform connects all the critical points in a rep’s learning journey while layering key takeaways and pro tips onto learning content, making it easy to quickly reference later in the moment of need. The ACTO platform is readily available on field reps' smartphones and tablets, allowing them to easily access anything in the flow of their work. The platform also connects reps with their managers by supporting field coaching reports and video scenario coaching. This makes it easy for managers to take action following coaching interactions by assigning additional training, all in the same system, to help the reps become stronger.

What Veeva has done for marketing and sales execution, ACTO does for commercial learning and insights. Together, Veeva and ACTO are initiating a new era of sales effectiveness and performance.

With all the commercial training activity – from pre-work to live learning to post-event pull-through – happening on a single platform, rich data can be gathered to understand rep behavior. This insight on ACTO can help commercial teams understand not just “knowledge transfer”, but “knowledge application.” Thanks to the close partnership and integration with Veeva, commercial leaders can even pull sales data from Veeva into ACTO, so they can understand the impact of training on rep performance and take action to make sure everything is trending the right way.

Continuous Innovation to Improve the Rep Experience

Because of its exclusive focus on the life sciences industry, ACTO is able to anticipate the needs of customers and work closely with them to map out the future innovation of the platform.

“Our extensive experience with the life sciences industry and our deep understanding of their unique needs has led us to collaborate with some of the world's top pharmaceutical companies, including Gilead, Novartis, and Philips,” says Muller.

For instance, one challenge in the field is reps knowing how to speak to the marketing assets they are given in support of the products they sell. To address this, ACTO has built a strong connection between its platform and Veeva in order to strengthen the link between training and sales. With ACTO TalkTRx™, life sciences companies can pull approved marketing assets from Veeva into ACTO and layer key takeaways or “talk tracks” on top of the assets to help field reps have more meaningful conversations. Not only does this encourage the use of approved content on Veeva, it ensures reps know exactly how to speak to them
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In an industry where billions of dollars are spent on research and development over the course of 15 years to bring a single new drug to market, getting the commercial strategy right is paramount. A critical element of this strategy is developing a commercial learning program that ensures field reps are competent, confident, and equipped to speak with HCPs about the drugs, devices, and new therapies they represent. Alongside Veeva, ACTO has emerged to help the life sciences industry make the learning journey for field reps a smooth, engaging, and continuous one. With a unified platform that connects training to sales and provides insight into the impact of training on performance, ACTO is helping their customers achieve commercial excellence, and, more importantly, helping them get their products to patients waiting in need.