On a busy clinic day in Lagos, a cardiologist may see dozens of patients, many of them short of breath, swollen at the ankles and back for the second or third time in a year. Between consultations, information about new treatments arrives from every direction: a medical representative waiting in the corridor, a conference session she attended months ago, a journal article she has not had time to finish, a webinar invitation on her phone.

For a pharmaceutical company with a proven medicine, the challenge is not only having the evidence. It is getting that evidence in front of the right physician, through a channel she trusts, at a moment when she is ready to act on it.

At Novartis Nigeria, Isaac Awulu addressed this challenge as Brand Marketing Manager. Mr Isaac led a demand-generation programme for Entresto, the company’s sacubitril/valsartan therapy. The programme combined physician detailing, targeted digital advertising and ongoing performance analytics. It recorded a 35 percent increase in lead generation, a measure of healthcare professional engagement with the brand.

Physician outreach takes place in a competitive environment. Doctors assess treatment options against clinical evidence, patient needs and established guidance, while company representatives compete for limited consultation time. Mr Isaac’s work focused on coordinating outreach and measuring the response.

A disease that strikes early

Heart failure in sub-Saharan Africa does not look the way it does in Europe or North America. The Sub-Saharan Africa Survey of Heart Failure (THESUS-HF), a registry of 1,006 patients admitted to 12 university hospitals in nine countries, with Nigeria among the largest contributors, found that patients were on average just 52 years old. Hypertension was the leading cause, responsible for 45.4 percent of cases, while the ischaemic heart disease that dominates Western registries accounted for fewer than one in ten.

The outcomes were sobering. The researchers, publishing in the Archives of Internal Medicine in 2012, estimated that 17.8 percent of patients died within 180 days of admission. Heart failure in the region strikes people in their most productive years, and it kills them at rates comparable to those seen elsewhere in the world.

These findings provide context for physician education on heart-failure treatment. Engagement with a medicine’s information is distinct from prescribing, patient access and clinical outcomes.

Clinical evidence and physician communication

Entresto did not lack evidence. In the PARADIGM-HF trial, which enrolled 8,442 patients with heart failure and reduced ejection fraction and was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2014, sacubitril/valsartan cut the combined risk of cardiovascular death or hospitalisation for heart failure by 20 percent compared with enalapril, a long-standing standard of care. The primary outcome occurred in 21.8 percent of patients on the new therapy against 26.5 percent on enalapril. The trial was stopped early because the benefit was clear.

The United States Food and Drug Administration approved the medicine in 2015, and major cardiology guidelines in Europe and North America subsequently incorporated it into their recommendations for eligible patients.

Evidence alone, however, rarely changes prescribing habits overnight. Physicians first have to hear about a therapy, understand which of their patients it suits, and trust the source of the information. A medicine that replaces a familiar drug asks doctors to change a routine they may have followed for years. Mr Isaac’s task was to widen that funnel, moving more physicians from awareness to genuine engagement, without compromising the scientific credibility on which pharmaceutical marketing depends.

Many channels, one message

The way doctors learn has changed. Physicians now draw information from conferences, peer-reviewed publications, professional associations, digital platforms, webinars and company field teams, often all in the same month. A campaign that relies on any one of those channels risks reaching only a fraction of its audience, and a campaign that uses several without coordinating them risks sending mixed signals.

Mr Isaac treated demand generation as a business initiative rather than a single promotional push. The starting point was understanding how physicians actually consumed information, where their engagement stalled, and what barriers stood between awareness of the medicine and serious consideration of it. The answers shaped a coordinated communications framework designed to support awareness and consideration among the stakeholders who mattered most. Field detailing remained the backbone.

Face-to-face visits give doctors and company representatives room for substantive scientific discussion: the kind of conversation in which a physician can ask about a specific patient profile, raise a concern about side effects, or test a claim against her own experience. Mr Isaac worked to align promotional resources with what physicians actually needed, while keeping field messaging consistent with the brand’s wider objectives.

Alongside the field force, the programme ran targeted digital advertising and other technology-enabled outreach, keeping Entresto visible at touchpoints that a detailing visit could not reach. A physician who could not spare time for a representative could still encounter the brand’s message through digital channels, and one who had already met a representative would find the same message reinforced elsewhere.

The aim was a single, coherent experience for the physician, whichever channel the information arrived through.

Measuring while it ran

Mr Isaac’s approach included measurement during campaign execution. Reviewing engagement while activities were running gave the team an opportunity to adjust outreach before the programme ended.
Engagement data, audience response patterns and campaign performance were analysed throughout the programme’s life.

Resources moved accordingly: activities that performed well kept their funding, those that underperformed were adjusted, and emerging opportunities were identified and acted on quickly. The effect was a campaign that improved as it ran, rather than one that could only be improved the next time.
The programme recorded a 35 percent rise in lead generation. A lead is a marketing measure of interest or engagement; its interpretation depends on the programme’s definition and tracking methods. The reported increase measures outreach performance rather than treatment uptake or patient outcomes.

The result indicated increased engagement with the programme. Establishing whether outreach changed prescribing or improved patient access would require separate evidence.

The work behind the number

For Mr Isaac, the programme reinforced a principle he applies across his work: strategy has to be tied to measurable performance, and demand generation succeeds when it delivers useful information through channels physicians already trust. Effective healthcare marketing, in that view, requires understanding not only commercial objectives but also the needs of the physicians, patients and health systems on the other side of the conversation.

The effort also depended on people outside the marketing team. A programme of this kind draws on sales, medical, analytics and marketing functions, each with its own priorities and its own view of the customer. Building alignment among those teams, so that field representatives, medical colleagues and analysts were working from the same picture, mattered as much as the execution of any single campaign element.
The work illustrates the coordination involved in pharmaceutical outreach.

Customer insight, scientific communication, analytics and field execution each contribute to how a commercial team plans and evaluates physician engagement.

Building for what comes next

Mr Isaac is now pursuing a Master of Business Administration at Arizona State University. The programme’s training in leadership, business strategy, finance, analytics and innovation builds directly on his pharmaceutical experience, and extends it beyond brand management toward broader leadership responsibilities in healthcare and the life sciences.

His graduate studies extend his professional development into broader questions of organisational strategy, finance and leadership.

The Entresto programme brought together physician outreach and campaign measurement under Mr Isaac’s leadership. Its reported 35 percent increase in leads provides a commercial engagement result. The contribution described here lies in coordinating channels, reviewing performance and adapting execution to the information needs of healthcare professionals.