The Disconnect: Static Lists vs. Field Reality

After two decades in pharma growing through roles in sales, ops, marketing, training, and senior leadership — I can tell you this much with confidence: nobody ever fully trusted the targeting list.

Year after year, every sales rep knew the call plan was built on stale prescribing data that was a few months old at best. You’d get your segment, see a few familiar names, a few curveballs, maybe a doctor who has retired. And then you’d go out and do what reps always do: make it work.

That disconnect — between what headquarters plans and what actually happens in the field — has existed for years. It’s not because people weren’t working hard. It’s because targeting was treated as a once-a-year event. HCPs were ranked based on last quarter’s prescribing, sorted into deciles, and everyone hoped nothing would change until the next refresh.

But everything changes. Territories shift, competitors launch, patient mix evolves — and a static model misses all of it.

Static models didn’t fail because we lacked data — they failed because the field stopped believing in them. Dynamic targeting changes that. It uses AI to surface live signals the moment they matter, and more importantly, it earns the trust that static lists never could.

How Dynamic Targeting Earns Trust

Here’s what I’ve learned about dynamic targeting and what it actually takes to make it stick in an organization.

First, you have to start with the rep. Reps don’t plan in dashboards. They plan in pockets of time: before the day starts, in the car between offices, late at night. They juggle CRM alerts, marketing reports, emails, spreadsheets, and even tips from the pharmacy. Then they mash it all into a call plan that blends what HQ wants with what their gut is telling them. Dynamic targeting doesn’t replace that hustle. It anticipates it.

When I was in the field, I used to call pharmacies to figure out who was writing. I’d talk to front-desk staff to get a sense of patient volume. I’d track how fast my samples were moving and where. That’s still part of the day-to-day game. But when a system can detect a shift in referral behavior, or flag a spike in brand engagement, and push that signal to a rep before they see it in their own notes. That’s the moment it earns its place.

Reps don’t just get a new name on a list. They get a clear reason why. And when that reason matches what they’re already seeing in the field, that’s when you earn their trust.

Field-Driven Change: Reps Shape the Model

Here’s where most rollouts go sideways: someone builds the model in isolation, sends out the new list, and calls it a pilot. That’s not a pilot. That’s a drop.

A real pilot starts with co-creation. You bring in sales reps early, the curious ones, and especially the skeptics. You don’t ask for blind adoption. You ask them to pressure-test it. Let them show you where it breaks. And when they see the logic behind a change, like when a Segment C doctor suddenly rises to the top, and it actually checks out, that’s when trust starts to build.

We ran a pilot where a rep saw one of their Segment C physicians move to the top of the list overnight. That might have killed trust. Instead of brushing it off, the rep checked in and found out that the doctor had just seen a wave of new patients in the brand’s indication. The system had picked up a spike in diagnostic activity and benefit verifications. That one data point made a skeptic a believer.

You can’t just tell the field that the new system is smarter. You have to show them, and then let them prove it to themselves. Sales reps have long memories. If a system gives them one bad recommendation, they’ll ignore the next ten. And the first thing to go is credibility.

That’s why early transparency matters. If you’re surfacing a new HCP priority, give them the why. Show them the signal. It might even be just a short explanation — “increase in NBRx,” “recent site activity,” “new Dx codes” — is better than silence.

It’s like using Waze for the first time. The first time the app tells you to take a weird back road, you think, “That can’t be faster.” But after a few tries, and after you really do beat the traffic a few times, you stop second-guessing. Trust builds with every successful reroute.

It’s the same with dynamic targeting. The more often the field sees something useful, the more they’ll lean on it.

And when they start sharing wins with their peers and saying, and talking about what popped up on their ODAIA lists that day, that’s when it stops being a new tool, but part of how they think and work.

One of the biggest impacts of dynamic targeting isn’t just smarter lists. It's a shared context. In the old model, headquarters would send down a strategy. The field would say, “This doesn’t match my territory.” And both sides would dig in.

When dynamic targeting works, something shifts. Sales reps start saying: “Yeah, that’s what I’m seeing too.” Marketing sees the same shift that the field is experiencing. Ops sees the same movement in engagement that sales reps are noticing anecdotally. And leadership doesn’t have to wait for the next refresh to act.

The list becomes a conversation, not a command. That’s how you move from resistance to alignment. It’s also how you rebuild morale.

Beyond Lists: Real Field Impact

Everyone talks about field time, but nobody talks about how much gets burned in pre-call cleanup. And it’s not because sales reps are slow, but because the systems they use are not as intelligent as they claim. There’s no context, no prioritization, and no signal explaining why this doctor matters right now.

One of the things sales reps tell us most often about dynamic targeting is how much time they get back. When you surface PowerScores and territory-level signals in one view, tied to what they’re actually being asked to do, it clears the noise and reduces their cognitive load.

They’re not clicking 12 times to get to the insight. It’s already there. And instead of spending Sunday night building workarounds rather than momentum, they’re walking into Monday ready to execute. It’s not flashy, but it’s a real productivity win.

A question I used to hear all the time: “Is it worth it?” That is, is it worth the time, cost, and lift just to change the targeting list?

When you’re doing traditional refreshes every six months, maybe not. The cost is high, the change is incremental, and usually not worth the effort. 

But dynamic targeting isn’t incremental. It’s continuous. It’s not a one-time fix, but a shift in how you sense and respond. And when it’s built with the field in mind, it pays off in more than just better segmentation.

You get a better allocation of field time and better alignment between teams. You’ll see faster responses to competitive moves. And perhaps most importantly, you rebuild something that’s hard to measure but impossible to fake: rep confidence in the system.

Dynamic targeting doesn’t replace the rep. It respects them. It doesn’t override judgment — it accelerates it.

I’ve spent years adapting to systems that didn’t adapt to the field. That’s why I joined ODAIA: to help build one that does. Because when sales reps have real signals, real context, and real trust, they don’t just execute the plan, they shape it.

For a deeper look at how leading teams have made this shift—and practical steps to bring dynamic targeting to your own organization—explore Pharma’s Essential Guide to Dynamic Segmentation & Targeting.

Want to see where your static lists might be missing the mark? Get started with our Opportunity Analysis today.