The Non-Linear Lie

An oncologist does not wake up and decide to step neatly into your marketing funnel.

Yet commercial teams keep designing as if she will: a rigid, five-step drip campaign with an email, a webinar invite, a face-to-face rep call, a rep leave-behind with a QR code leading to the website. This approach is borrowed from B2B software or B2C e-commerce and dropped onto a clinician managing thirty patients a day.

Medical Affairs swings to the other extreme. Every interaction is treated as an untouchable, unscripted scientific exchange. Too nuanced to measure, too easily misconstrued as commercial if it looks systematic. The defensive intent makes sense, but the result is blind spots: Medical often has no real signal on which scientific narratives actually shift clinical practice, or where persistent uncertainty clusters.

Both models ignore how physicians actually learn and make decisions.

Real engagement is non-linear and unscheduled.

A doctor archives five unread marketing emails. Two weeks later, at 11:30 PM between clinic shifts, she pulls up a peer-reviewed paper on PubMed. Three weeks after that, she glances at a leave-behind a rep shared contextually, and only then reconsiders a treatment protocol.

No campaign calendar maps that behaviour. And the industry benchmarks show the mismatch:

1. The content graveyard: Industry data shows that up to 77% of approved pharma marketing content is rarely or never engaged with by field teams or HCPs. Teams build elaborate multi-stage asset libraries, yet only a fraction ever enters clinical conversations.
2. The push fatigue: HQ push emails routinely hit the predictable wall of sub-20% opens and single-digit click-throughs. Over 70% of clinical research happens independently, out of hours, and on-demand, not inside an inbox at 10 AM on a Tuesday.
3. The journey myth: When pharma measures linear completion, the drop-off is brutal: roughly three out of four HCPs drop out of predetermined marketing sequences.

HCPs are just ignoring your fictional engagement journey. That mismatch is expensive in a very specific way. Budgets get apportioned neatly by stage.

• Spend for awareness
• Spend for consideration
• Spend for advocacy.

When most of your audience never reaches stage three, you waste these investments on the wrong geometry.

Fixing this requires two shifts that operate together:

1. Dynamic, behavioural segmentation over static deciles. Grouping doctors by speciality and historical prescription volume tells you what they did last year, not what they need today. Effective segmentation groups HCPs by clinical barriers, scientific mindset, and preferred consumption habits, re-scoring them dynamically as their real-world actions evolve.
2. Cohort aggregation over individual choreography. Accept that any single physician's path is inherently unpredictable. Stop trying to script individual journeys step by step. When you measure population-level signal across an entire cohort—what questions get asked repeatedly, which clinical data assets resurface weeks later, where hesitation lingers—the real pattern emerges clearly.

Medical Affairs needs this architecture just as much as Commercial.

Scientific dialogue must remain organic and unscripted in the room. But the underlying signals shouldn't live exclusively in an individual MSL's head, only to vanish when they switch territories.

Stop building sequential funnels for people who don't walk in straight lines. Build modular, high-value clinical touchpoints that meet physicians where they already look, and track aggregate signals across the cohort rather than policing individual clicks.

If your engagement metrics show drops after step two or your content library is largely sitting idle, let’s talk. Drop us a DM, and let’s look at where the disconnect actually lives.

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