Ferring: Breaking Boundaries for an Immersive Launch Experience

Cover Story – By Ellen Amos, Maria Bavishi and Kristina Belyea

A symbiotic partnership immersed Ferring field teams in training

For Ferring Pharmaceuticals, 2021 was a very big year — it launched its first-to-market, FDA-approved microbiota-based live biotherapeutic, REBYOTA. With this product’s caliber and importance, they knew that their launch strategy needed to be robust, focusing heavily on scientific content and high-engagement training if they were to meet their launch objectives.

To achieve this, Ferring sought partners who shared their “symbiotic partnerships” philosophy and found them in strategy and content provider Axiom, and learning platform provider ACTO.

Together, Ferring and its partners created an immersive product launch learning experience for the field team, built upon an engaging and strategic curriculum and a user-friendly training and event platform. The training program was quickly deployed to 150 learners, with the ability to track engagement, curriculum completion and knowledge gaps. The high engagement scores seen in Table 1 led to improved knowledge retention and behavior change.

Background

The training program for this new product was tailored to provide enhanced stakeholder engagement at Ferring. It offered learners a comprehensive understanding of the REBYOTA product features, benefits and applications through a unique learning journey. This strategy aimed to ensure that all key stakeholders from commercial learning and development, marketing, sales, leadership and market access had the knowledge and tools to bring REBYOTA to market successfully.

This new strategy required robust scientific training content that would drive learner engagement. Ferring wanted to ensure that the content could be provided in an easy-to-digest, condensed format that would support knowledge retention and achieve launch excellence.

Finally, Ferring needed a training and events platform that was immersive and would allow learners to access bite sized training content at their convenience, making it easy to fit the training around their schedule — learning in the flow of work. Learners could complete the training at their own pace, ensuring they had enough time to absorb and understand the material. This intuitive and flexible approach added a human element to training, leading to higher engagement.

Creating the Scientific Training Program

The partnership identified three fundamental needs:

Comprehensive and robust scientific training content: Ferring needed to provide comprehensive and robust scientific training content to launch REBYOTA successfully. This content needed to be delivered through an immersive experience in a life sciences learning platform to ensure effective messaging and selling.
Phased delivery of content: To build learners’ foundational knowledge, the content needed to be delivered in phases. These phases required a partner with the ability to organize a large amount of impactful content and deliver it in a phased approach to maximize effectiveness.
Engaging and data-driven learning experience: The launch strategy required a learning platform that could educate and engage learners through a seamless experience while providing insight into critical success metrics. Senior commercial and clinical leaders wanted to be able to evaluate the effectiveness of the training, making data insight a crucial platform capability. Three solutions were identified and implemented to address Ferring’s needs:
1. The development of clear and concise microlearning content that sales specialists could easily learn and retain. A blended curriculum that included videos, podcasts, infographics and short elearning modules to help learners understand the complexities of the “gut microbiome” and its impact on C.difficile infection.
2. The creation of a learning program theme that linked the nature of the content format to the nature of the disease state. Ferring developed an innovative and creative theme for the launch – “The Journey of Care” — which tied together learning about “gut microbiome” through a microlearning journey that gradually shifted to brand-specific content. This was a subtle way to drive understanding in the field force of the importance and impact of REBYOTA.
3. Using an integrated learning platform that included event registration, pre-work tracking, gamification, virtual meetings and post-event resources. Virtual, field and live coaching also took place to ensure learners were fully engaged and could easily access the necessary resources for post-training support in the field.

Impact and Results

The immersive training experience is an example of how thoughtful presentation of information can improve the effectiveness of training programs. The comprehensive training experience was engaging, informative and effective. The experience:

Successfully raised the bar for Ferring’s launch plan for REBYOTA.
Set up Ferring for future success in terms of learning sustainability, coaching and future launches.
Increased efficiency, engagement and content continuity.

Using a creative theme of “The Journey of Care” helped sales specialists REBYOTA Launch Meeting Phase 3 99 understand the complexities of the “gut microbiome” and its impact. The training Compliance 100 program was designed to be agile and flexible to accommodate the evolving scientific lexicon. The results included:

Table 1 – Completion Data Provided by ACTO (two weeks post-launch) – a 99.6% completion rate across all learning sets

Increased efficiency and engagement: Ferring enjoyed increased efficiency, engagement and content continuity, empowering them to deliver a best-in-class learner experience.
Decreased time and long-term costs: Less time was spent planning, redundant processes were eliminated and overall long-term costs were reduced.
Improved learner experience: The experience excited learners and improved retention and was a testament to the program’s effectiveness.

Ferring is now in the post-launch phase of the project, and is using the data and analytics provided to identify and address any learning gaps or pull-through needs following the launch.

Key Takeaways

Ferring’s collective experience and post-launch insights include:

Set expectations: Everyone has thoughts on what microlearning means; gaining alignment between stakeholders and setting expectations up front help to mitigate potential confusion.
Planning is critical: Creating a solid blueprint for learning before content development makes all subsequent steps run smoother.
Assets are small, but the effort is large: While the individual asset sizes are small, the overall effort to design and create a seamless microlearning journey for learners requires careful strategy and attention to detail.

Conclusion

Ferring’s strategic collaboration perfectly exemplified a “symbiotic partnership” that resulted in the successful development and launch of its groundbreaking product. This highlights the importance of collaboration, innovation and keeping the learners top of mind to achieve training success.

Ellen Amos, ellen.amos@ferring.com, is manager, commercial training-microbiome, Ferring Pharmaceuticals.