Should I go into MedComms Client Services?

Are you interested in a career in MedComms, but you don’t think medical writing would be right for you? Or maybe you just want to understand all of the options before you start applying for jobs.

Either way, you’re in the right place.

I’m Eleanor Steele and I’m the MedComms Mentor.

Last week I explored the skills, experience, and mindset that you need to be a successful medical writer, and today I want to do the same thing for client services.

Now there are definitely areas of overlap between the two types of role, and in some companies there actually isn’t a distinction at all – everybody does both.

But I think it’s useful to understand each role in isolation so that you can make an informed decision about what kind of job and what kind of company would suit you best.

I’ve got six questions that you can ask yourself to see whether a life in client services would be right for you, and I’m going to explore the answers that you might give partly to see if client services is the right career path, but also whether MedComms is the right industry for you to focus on.

1. Are you interested in healthcare?

MedComms is a fairly niche industry to work in.

In essence, it’s a client service industry where agencies are hired by clients to deliver a wide range of communications projects on their behalf.

Obviously, there are plenty of related industries, so consumer advertising runs in a very similar way, just with different clients, different types of products, and pretty different types of compliance considerations and types of audiences that we target.

But the underlying business model is similar in a much bigger range of industries too. Basically anywhere where the client needs a project or a series of connected projects to be developed and delivered, and that’s what they pay the agency to do, whether it’s building a website or an advertising campaign, or even an actual building.

 The agency will scope out the strategy, develop the budget, manage project delivery, create the content and bill the client based on the time that they spend.

So if you are interested in client services roles, MedComms isn’t the only place you can find them.

But if you are particularly interested in healthcare or the pharma industry, that’s a great reason to consider a client services role in MedComms – even if you’re not developing the content, you will be heavily involved in the projects.

A science degree isn’t mandatory for client services roles in MedComms, but it can be helpful.

The majority of MedComms clients are teams within pharma companies who work on a specific drug or maybe a portfolio of products within a certain therapy area.

They will hire an agency to help develop a specific project or an account of projects that could include developing publications for peer review journals, presentations for medical conferences, educational events for doctors, disease awareness websites, apps that doctors can use. And many, many more different types of things.

 The client services team are heavily involved in the practical aspects of this, but also the underlying strategy that’s used to inform what kind of project is chosen and how it will be executed. Though obviously this is in collaboration with the scientific team members too, and that brings me onto my next question.

2. Are you a people person?

Client relationships are obviously important for client services, team members to build and maintain, and relationships with internal agency team members are also crucial within your account teams and the broader company. This includes other client services, colleagues, Medical Writers, Medical Editors, and Senior Leadership, and possibly other departments.

It’s useful to think of the client services team member as the client’s representative in the agency team, and the agency’s representative in the client team – you basically have to wear two hats all the time.

You also need to be able to build a successful relationship with lots of very different types of people, adapting how you interact to get the best out of them, even if it’s very different from how you naturally relate to people.

I don’t mean that you need to be fake or disingenuous, but there are some clients who like to start meetings with a chat about everyone’s weekend, so they will ask after your pets and remember who just went on holiday, and these chats are a really important part of your working dynamic with them, and will make sure that your interactions get off to a really good start.

Other clients just want to hit the ground running. It’s not that they don’t care about who you are and what your life is, they just have a much more focused way of working, and a good client services person can read the client and adapt their responses accordingly.

It works the same internally too. You will get to know which writer needs a bit of hand-holding before a call with an author, and which just wants to be left alone with a big stack of data.

Understanding how everyone works best and encouraging this, adapting to it, will help make sure your team works like a well-oiled machine.

But it’s not all about the relationships.

3. Are you a logical planner?

Project management is a key part of what the client services team does.

When a client hires an agency to work on a project, they will outline their brief and their expectations, and the agency team will then work together, including scientific and client services team members to create a very detailed budget.

This will include a breakdown of all of the stages of the project into their key tasks, and show how long each task will take the team members involved.

The time each task will take each person is then multiplied by their hourly or daily rate to give the cost of the project.

The client services team will create this, and the senior members of the scientific team will also be involved in making sure that the tasks are appropriate, and their team members are given adequate time to do what’s needed.

This often involves a bit of internal negotiation. The Scientific Director will want their writers to have plenty of time to write really good content, but the client services team will be pushing to make the budget as appealing to the client as possible. i.e. Cheap! It’s a balance between making sure the team will have time to do a quality job, but also that the client will be able to afford the work.

The budget also has to include other expenses, sometimes known as out-of-pocket costs or pass-through costs.

This includes things like buying copies of references that the writers will use a source material when developing content, paying for licenses from the copyright holder to reproduce or adapt figures or images, but also things like flights or meeting rooms for events.

The client services team will often get quotes from different potential suppliers and may help speakers at meetings book their flights and hotels and things like that.

These costs will often be included in a budget as an estimate so that the client can tell how much they will probably need to put aside, and then the actual costs will be charged later once everything is booked and paid for.

Once the budget has been agreed, the client services team will then use the tasks outlined in it to make a detailed project schedule.

Now this isn’t as simple as simply plotting out the time needed for each task and assigning it to a date, for example, writing the first draft of a slide deck might have five days of time in the budget for the writer, and a day for their team leader to review it.

But taking into consideration the fact that they will both be working on other projects, and the writer will need to save some of their five days to use to take in the comments from their team leader once they’ve reviewed it – it’s sensible to factor in probably 10 days in the project schedule.

The work will happen within those 10 days, but the team members will have some flexibility to deal with that other work and make sure all priorities and deadlines are met.

These project schedules are incredibly useful for making sure that all the moving parts of a project happen as they should, but unfortunately, projects almost never run exactly according to the original schedule that’s drafted when a project kicks off.

Something will inevitably crop up. Maybe the authors will be late with their feedback, maybe the client will change the date of the meeting, maybe the lead author becomes sick and falls behind.

The client services team need to have a plan B, and often a whole alphabet of other potential plans up their sleeves for when things shift.

As you gain experience, you get to know the kind of problems that might crop up, and your senior colleagues will share their experience as you’re getting up to speed so that you can head off potential issues before they occur.

For example, if you know a particular author always needs to be chased several times before they give feedback, and you have to have a response by the end of the month, you actually say you need feedback by Friday, and ask their assistant to nudge them. That way when they send their comments a week “late”, it’s actually just in time.

The client services team is also heavily involved in the financial planning and tracking side of things.

An invoicing schedule will be part of the budget agreement, and this is based on milestones usually. So if the project has a fixed deadline, like holding a symposium at a specific congress, these milestones might be dates.

Other projects, like manuscripts, tend to have slightly more flexible timelines, so their milestones are based on how the project is progressing – so once the first draft is completed, that might trigger the next invoice.

The client services team need to keep track of all of the progress across all of the projects, and send out the invoices at the right point, and make sure they’re getting paid.

This might mean following up with the client’s finance departments, and also chasing suppliers to send invoices that will need to be charged back to the client. All the financial planning and tracking for your projects will be aggregated into the financials for the whole account, and then this will be reported up to the finance team for the whole agency to keep track of things across the business so that there aren’t any cash flow problems and things like that.

4. Do you like spreadsheets?

So the client services team is involved in a lot of planning and tracking activities, and while different agencies might use different apps and tools, they generally boil down to fancy spreadsheets.

Basically, if you love a colour-coded spreadsheet, client services could be the job for you!

Budgets, timelines, project status reports, event plans, invoicing trackers… the list goes on!

As I said though, these days, there are a lot of different tools that agencies might use. There are so many project management apps and programmes, so you do need to be comfortable with picking up new systems, and there are some MedComms specific tools that agencies use for developing budgets for example.

Most agencies also use timesheet software so that everyone tracks the time they’re spending on each project.

That way the client services team can run reports to see whether a project is tracking as it should. In particular, is anyone spending too long on a particular task? More time than was in the budget.

Is that because they’re struggling? Maybe it’s a training need that their line manager should be alerted to? Or maybe the budget didn’t include enough time given what was needed?

That information is really useful, because it means the agency can identify problems and figure out what needs to change very quickly.

Sometimes it means that the client services team will need to go back to the client and renegotiate either the scope of the task or the budget to ensure we can do what’s needed for that project. It also means that future projects can be budgeted more realistically because we can learn from the information that we gather on a specific type of project, or how we work with a specific client.

So while the client services team isn’t working with the scientific and medical data, they are working with an awful lot of data from different sources. Keeping track of that data, spotting the patterns, and knowing what those patterns mean are critical skills for the client services team.

5. Do you have a meerkat mindset?

Meerkats are always scanning the horizon and working together to avoid threats, communicating with the rest of the group incredibly effectively. And that’s why I think the meerkat is the client services spirit animal.

Excellent client services team members are always scanning their projects, keeping on top of where everything is, thinking ahead and spotting problems well before they cause trouble.

If a client mentions in passing that they will be at a congress in a couple of weeks, the client services team will be checking the project schedules – are they due to be reviewing anything then? Do any timelines need to be shifted? Should any meetings be rescheduled so that they can still attend?

Effective communication is part of this – so when someone in the client services team spots a potential problem, they need to get everyone on the same page quickly and efficiently.

The medical writers will be working away on the content for each project, but the client services team need to be able to write really clearly and effectively so that everyone knows what’s going on.

Clients will often be incredibly busy and our projects will only be a tiny part of their workload. They don’t want to be trawling through lots of documents to find out a project’s status or to understand what we need from them to get the project done.

Client services team members need to be really good at constructing updates that make the important information crystal clear, and make it impossible to ignore when they need someone to do something.

Lots of highlighting, lots of directing questions to specific people and coordinating across the internal and client teams to make sure that everything is routed to the people who need it and any problems are flagged to the right people to make sure they don’t blow up into crises.

But occasionally crises do happen.

6. Are you good in a crisis?

No matter how well planned our projects are, sometimes the universe throws a spanner in the works, something that couldn’t be predicted or avoided proactively.

A speaker misses their flight to the congress, or the banners for the meeting get lost en route. A client’s laptop is stolen and they hadn’t sent over the final slide deck yet.

If something goes wrong, everyone turns to the client services team to find a pragmatic solution.

Obviously, the multiple alternative plans I mentioned earlier might come in handy, but being able to stay calm and think through what’s needed is crucial.

Other people might be panicking, and that might be the clients, speakers or even members of your own team.

The client services team needs to stay calm and find that pragmatic solution to whatever has gone wrong.

Can you find an alternative flight for the speaker? Or is there someone else who can step in and deliver the presentation? Can you source a local print shop who can get the banners reprinted overnight?

Can you help the client find a back-up for their slides? Or work with the writing team to reconstruct the version that’s been lost?

I know I said earlier that the client services spirit animal was the meerkat, but I think the swan is a close second – gliding along serenely through the water, but paddling frantically underneath.

That is definitely an important part of how the client services team works!

So is a client services role in MedComms right for you? If:

1. You’re interested in healthcare and potentially have a science degree
2. You’re a people person able to adapt your style to build really strong working relationships with a wide range of different types of people
3. You’re a logical planner…
4. …who likes spreadsheets, but can also pick up other new tools and systems quickly and confidently
5. You have a meerkat mindset, always scanning the horizon to head off any issues before they become a crisis
6. You can also keep calm and pragmatic if a crisis does crop up

…then yes, a client services role in MedComms sounds like it could really suit you well.

You can download a summary of all of the things that I’ve discussed from a link in the video description below, and this could be really handy to help you apply for client services jobs, or to prepare for interviews.

Do let me know in the comments if you have any questions, or if there are any other topics you’d like me to cover in future videos.

And if this video has been helpful, then I’d be really grateful if you could give it a like, and maybe share it with a friend.