Can Behavior Science Drive Commercial Excellence in Pharma: Vivek Khanvilkar

Background and Career Journey

Anant: Thank you so much for taking the time to give us your inputs and feedback. Before we begin, we’d like to get a little background about yourself, your experience, and what has brought you till this point.

Vivek: I’ve been in the pharmaceutical sector for a little over 25 years. I’ve been very exploratory in my career aspirations and choices. Of these 25 years, probably seven to eight years were spent on the larger consulting, analytics, and strategy side, being in the service sector. The balance—nearly 15 to 18 years—has been working with pharmaceutical companies on the implementation and execution side.

Being on the service and consulting side at the beginning of my career, I was privileged to get exposure to very senior leadership roles across different pharma companies. We interacted with the very helm of the companies.

But after spending seven to eight years on that side, I realized it’s much easier to stand up and make observations about how business performance should be enhanced. The real challenge is actually making it happen. That’s where I took a conscious call to transition to the industry side.

In one of my preliminary career stages, while pitching a project to a client, I got a phone call from their HR head offering me a position. I couldn’t refuse because that’s what I was thinking I should be doing—getting firsthand exposure to managing business challenges and being part of the execution aspect of business performance.

I’ve worked with large-scale Indian pharma companies all along—Glenmark, Wockhardt, and now between Ranbaxy and Sun, it’s nearing fifteen years. Currently at Sun, I lead project management, CEO’s office, strategy, commercial excellence, market research, digital marketing, and direct marketing—several portfolios for Indian business at Sun.

Anant: That’s fantastic. It’s very rare to get such broad and deep experience, and even rarer still to have someone who’s been on the advisory as well as the implementation side. So you’d have a sense of the challenges at both ends of the table.

Defining Commercial Excellence in Pharma

Anant: Given your experience, how would you define commercial excellence in the pharmaceutical life sciences space, and how have you seen it evolve over the last couple of decades?

Vivek: If you try to look at different evolved companies, you’ll still find aspects of the role that are common, and elements that differ across companies. Fundamentally, what gets closely associated with commercial excellence is largely SFE (Sales Force Effectiveness) and SFA (Sales Force Automation) led transformations, analytics, and strategizing around entire field force excellence.

While it has strategic value and contribution in a company setup, it depends on how much the function is empowered by leadership to contribute. In many cases, companies have commercial excellence as an independent function, but beyond some basic data mining and digital transformations, the function doesn’t have authority to drive certain decisions. It’s important how the commercial excellence function is embedded into day-to-day business operations, able to identify bottlenecks and areas of influence, and empowered to make a difference.

Over the years, it has significantly evolved. Perhaps 10 years back, this was a fanciful vertical existing only in multinational companies. Today, most large to medium-sized Indian companies have a defined department called business excellence, commercial excellence, or SFA transformation. It exists as a standalone enabling function, which is great. It’s evolving beyond just SFA analytics to take on more aligned strategic responsibilities in pharma companies.

Introduction to Behavioral Science

Anant: At what point did you hear about behavioral science and its application in sales for driving productivity or engagement for teams?

Vivek: As a distinctive subject, behavioral science was first introduced to me through my parenting role, thanks to evolved school management approaches. I’ve always been sold on the concept of behavioral science at a personal level. But at a deeper, more digitized level for leveraging this in large-scale organizations and corporate setups, worxogo was the first formal agency I had the privilege to interact with. I remember Ramesh coming and making a pitch presentation at a conceptual level, and he gave us the book. I went through the chapters around “nudge.” That was my first exposure to behavioral science in a more structured, professional fashion.

Anant: For your peers, business leaders, and transformation experts, what insights would you share about bringing behavioral science into their operations?

Vivek: I think it’s extremely important, especially in today’s era where we’re discussing adoption of technology and digitization of many processes that were previously manual. With more technological interventions, people who’ve operated in traditional, conventional ways often get defensive about things they don’t know or are apprehensive about digitization exposing their “secret recipes” they’ve guarded for years.

One major reason to give higher importance to behavioral science today is helping people transform and manage change, especially in the digital era. When it comes to execution, a fundamental principle for achieving large-scale success is making people adopt and acknowledge change. You can’t simply enforce things onto people, especially when they need to adopt them willingly. Behavioral science plays a pivotal role in driving adoption, better execution capabilities, and hence better outcomes.

Pitfalls and Challenges

Anant: What potential pitfalls would you share with leaders exploring this new space, and how did you manage them?

Vivek: The main challenge is resistance, which will exist because it’s difficult for someone to comprehend that a behavioral science approach is needed to solve their pain points. People believe they’re successful because they’re doing certain things right. Organizations often get swayed by outcomes alone rather than the process itself.

For sustainable outcomes, organizations need equal emphasis on processes. When it comes to adoption and compliance towards a process-centric approach, you need behavioral science. Otherwise, if you only measure end deliverable KPIs without understanding how things are being done and whether they’re done in the best structured approach. It’s not sustainable.

A key learning is that when dealing with successful people, behavioral science as a concept will always be viewed skeptically at first. You need an interesting approach to navigate that initial resistance level, making people realize you need to start at a pilot scale.

In my organization, I’ve used a simple analogy about how automated nudges make you do things you should have done anyway. For example, applying for leave in the system is an expected behavior, but without reminder nudges from the HR portal, many wouldn’t do it promptly. Similarly, HR reminders about updating KRAs (Key Result Areas) in the online system work effectively. Everyone is supposed to fill KRAs—why do we need thousands of email reminders? But it works. When you keep getting reminders that others have completed a task and you haven’t, regardless of your level or experience, you eventually comply.

These simple nudges are system-automated—no rocket science—but they drive behavioral change and adoption. The best part of behavioral science is its strong capability to cut across age, hierarchy, experience level, and functions. It deals with human beings and has the ability to influence change for any target audience and any chosen task.

Organization-Wide Implementation

Anant: Should we assume that in a few years, you will be incubating and running a large unit within your organization for driving these interventions across the board?

Vivek: Of course, and at a much larger scale. In the past, the ability to leverage technology for behavioral science was jeopardized by the lack of structured data. That’s not a barrier today—we have too much data. The question is about picking the right levers, identifying the right use cases, and using behavioral science to bring about the right change.

In change management, it’s not about sending messages to everyone in the ecosystem. The beauty of behavioral science is that you try to approach an n=1 scenario, making it personalized. That’s where you find responsiveness and adoption far more effective than sending rudimentary, mass-level messages or reminders to everyone regardless of their situation.

Behavioral science isn’t only about nudging someone on tasks they haven’t completed. It’s equally impactful as a strategy to complement good performance, motivate, and boost energy levels for even better future performance. It works both ways—positive nudges and negative nudges.

Challenges for Sales Managers

Anant: In your experience, what are difficult behaviors for sales managers to break?

Vivek: The initial resistance is more at the senior leadership level of managers than at lower levels. They fear this tool might replace part of their role. People resist because they think technology is doing what they’re supposed to do themselves.

Rather than making them believe this will antagonize what they do, it needs to be positioned as an augmented solution to help them work more efficiently. In any sales team, you can categorize individuals into high consistent performers, mediocre performers, and below-average performers. Sales performance isn’t just about relationship management with customers and sales capabilities—it has a strong connection to analytical acumen. [Read also how to use Behavior Science to be a better manager.]

Behavioral science has been leveraged most for people with average or below-average analytical capabilities. To expect them to keep track of every element of the business process while spending quality time with team members is a very high ask. A supplementary tool that handles part of their role while helping them work more holistically adds significant value. We saw firsthand in our pilot project that there’s immense excitement and adoption once people realize the tool is helping them perform more effectively rather than taking away their responsibilities.

Experience with worxogo Nudge Coach

Anant: Any thoughts on your experience with the worxogo Nudge initiative for your sales team?

Vivek: At Sun, we ran it as a pilot. Sun is a different animal—one of the most successful, dominating, and consistently successful companies. When running such a project, we were dealing with perhaps the most difficult audience. When everything has been working consistently for several years, implementing new concepts presents challenges.

We successfully navigated these challenges by picking diligences that were relatively below Sun’s standard of average performance. The business unit was open to experimenting because they felt it could help them improve. We had strong ownership from leadership at the highest levels. Once that alignment happened, part of the adoption barrier was already addressed.

We also funded the whole project from our centralized budget so the business unit wasn’t burdened. They had nothing to lose—it was all about helping them perform better. We ran the project in two business units as an A/B test, continually evolving our approach to measuring impact. After eight to nine months of the successful pilot, comparing pre and post A/B testing audiences, we saw a phenomenal difference in the KPIs we were targeting—substantial improvements in both sales outcomes and operational KPIs.

It’s been statistically proven beyond doubt that the nudge behavioral science concept works for the KPIs we pursued. Equal credit goes to the worxogo team, who were receptive and exploratory during brainstorming sessions. We weren’t working as vendor and client—we were one cohesive team brainstorming at every stage of interaction with internal stakeholders. There were times we received critical feedback or needed to change our approach, and the team was extremely open to acknowledging areas that needed adjustment. We were all committed to the larger outcome, and the data proved the approach worked.

Effective Nudging Strategies

Suneel: Based on our interactions, managers are often tentative about giving encouraging feedback to their teams. What’s your view on that? How should practitioners learn from your wisdom on dealing with this?

Vivek: There are a couple of principle approaches—no rocket science. First, we must be mindful of which KPIs or tasks we’re trying to build the behavioral nudge around. The n=1 principle comes into play here. You may be actively tracking 10 different KPIs, but which one is most relevant for that particular user? Having an ability to identify this with logic is extremely important.

If you start nudging all users around all 10 KPIs similarly, it doesn’t help. The user should develop trust and confidence that this solution understands their requirements and provides input relevant to their individual performance. This creates better ownership and acceptance.

Second, the timing of the nudge is crucial—when it should be sent and in what language or articulation. Even for a standard KPI like sales target achievement, how you communicate to someone trailing behind matters. Someone who’s competitive might respond to comparisons with better-performing peers. An analytical person might just need to know the delta between their current achievement and the target. For others motivated by incentives, you might focus on potential financial loss—the fear of deprivation syndrome.

The same sales performance data can be articulated differently for different people. The ability of the system to understand when during the day a particular user is most active or has relative free time, and then nudging them at that time, leads to better acceptance—similar to social media campaigns that track user behavior to reach them when they’re active. These principles critically differentiate the impact of such projects.

Personal vs. Professional Nudging

Suneel: How different is it to nudge someone on their work KPIs compared to something personal like marathon running?

Vivek: The whole concept of behavioral science and nudge is personal. Even when nudging an individual around professional KPIs, I’m still personalizing it. As long as that nudge reaches me in a way where I have trust and confidence that it’s for me and will help me improve, I’ll accept it. The beauty is making a person believe “this is for me” and answering the question “what’s in it for me?”

Unlike classical dashboarding tools where everyone who logs in sees the same data and KPIs in the same format, with interpretation depending on individual capability, behavioral science is purely personalized. As long as you believe it’s for your benefit, you’ll embrace it.

Regarding marathon running, it’s personal—I’m doing it for myself, not to prove anything to anyone. I’ve been running for nearly a decade, and I’m still excited to do it every day because I realize it’s for my personal benefit. It helps me stay fit and healthy and might add years to my life.

When I’m running, I’m completely individualized. After the initial few minutes, thoughts enter my mind, but if you ask what I was thinking during a one-hour run or marathon, I can’t recall. It’s great “me time”—I get into my own zone, cutting off from everything else. It’s a dopamine kick, a state of flow. Once you get into that zone, you’ll always want more.

The same applies to sales philosophy. No matter what incremental targets you set, there are people who are consistent performers. They can’t just get lucky for a year or two. If someone performs consistently for many years, there’s something special about them—that’s what drives them.