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As a senior solution consultant, Olga Yaremchuk analyzes client pain points and recommends the best services and solutions to meet their needs. She collaborates with the MMIT sales team throughout the sales process, providing support and subject matter expertise each step of the way.
Tell us a little bit more about your role.
In my role, I collaborate closely with our sellers, representing products within our payer and market insights divisions. Sometimes I’ll be brought in at the start of a client conversation, at the discovery call stage where we’re trying to figure out what the client is looking for. Other times, I’ll be brought in during the capabilities phase, to scope out a specific project or solution.
We present the clinical point of view within the client’s specific indication, and we also give product demos. We help the sellers with value propositions and messaging, packaging execution, etc. Essentially, we provide any support the seller needs so they can be prepared for these clients calls—all kinds of subject matter expertise around our services and solutions.
Working together, we can make a strong recommendation to the client of what will be the best fit for them at this point in their commercialization or pre-commercialization journey.
How did you join the company? What in your background brought you to pharma?
I was a business administration major who was interested in potentially going to pharmacy school, so I started working as a pharmacy tech at a local pharmacy. I loved it there, and I became fascinated with the pharma industry and how far we’ve come in our ability to treat certain conditions. I would see very sick patients come into the pharmacy, and then watch their lives transform when they started on the right therapy: it was like night and day.
So then I moved to MMIT in 2007, back in the very early days when we were called MediMedia Information Technologies. I worked directly with clients in the role we call a client success manager today, helping them with how to get the most utility out of our data solutions. After 11 years, I was ready for a change, so I spent a few years at a boutique agency that did promotional work for manufacturers within the biopharmaceutical industry.
Then, in 2022, I reconnected with the MMIT team right around the time that we were doing so many acquisitions. I was excited by how much our capacity had grown, and leadership talked to me about joining the solution consulting side of the business because I already had a deep understanding of so many of our solutions—and the rest I could learn!
What does your day-to-day usually look like?
Typically, I have internal and external meetings every day. My client meetings could be discovery calls, capability meetings, or proposal briefings, for which we run through the actual proposal and pricing with the client.
My internal meetings generally focus on prepping with sellers prior to their upcoming client calls. Our sellers do an excellent job at this. They’ll put together a document on who we’ll be talking to, what products they already have, what’s in their pipeline, and what we expect they might need.
We try to be as prepared as possible even when it’s a first-time discovery call, because both the client and our team get so much more out of the meeting. It does wonders for us in terms of increasing client confidence, because then clients don’t feel like we’re wasting their time. They can see we’re experts, we’re prepared to assist them, and we know what they do and where they have gaps.
I also help a few of our newer salespeople put slide decks together or complete proposals. It’s definitely worth spending a bit of extra time with them and walking through the logistics, because once they get that process down, they’re going to be good to go. Right now, we have several new folks on our team, so I feel like it’s beneficial to get them onboarded the right way the first time around.
What are some of the larger projects you’re working on?
When a client comes to us with a specific need for a one-off solution, like a promotional tool or an ad-hoc data analysis, we take it from there. But proposal requests, where we’re pitching four or five solutions as a bundle, are typically much larger projects for both the sales team and the solution consultants.
For example, for the past few months, we’ve been working with one client who is interested in doing a complete overhaul of their current vendor engagement. They haven’t been satisfied in terms of the vendor’s customer support, or in terms of how frequently the data is updated. So we’ve been involved in the RFP process, mapping out how that vendor’s products map to MMIT solutions. We want to show them what products they’d need from us to accomplish their goals—and most importantly, the additional value they’d receive if they end up partnering with MMIT.
What are some of the common challenges of your role?
It can be heartbreaking when deals do not work out right at the very last minute. It doesn’t happen often, but I have seen these sellers work so hard on a deal and then we watch it fall apart right before the finish line. It’s not normally anything that we did—it could be that budgets are cut, or the asset is being sold off, or they’re just going in a different direction—but it’s hard. They’re so hopeful the deal is going to cross the line, but then we can’t move forward for whatever reason. That is disappointing for all of us.
What’s been your career highlight to date?
One of my career highlights is being able to witness all the product innovation happening at MMIT. FormTrak was always an amazing promotional tool, but once it was natively integrated into Veeva, our clients had so much more flexibility, and it was incredible to see the impact of eliminating workflow disruption and providing the most relevant access information for these clients.
Right now, we’re seeing the same excitement with our Searchlight product, which uses AI and natural language processing to turn around policy change comparisons within 24 hours. Any time our product innovation hits the sweet spot for our clients, it brings me joy!
What trends are you seeing across the industry right now that MMIT is in a unique position to help with?
More and more frequently, our clients are learning to entrust us with all of their data needs, not just the market access piece. In those first discovery calls, they might tell us they need help with access, HEOR, patient identification, HCP segmentation and targeting, go-to-market strategy, etc.
For clients who know MMIT as just a market access company, they expect us to fill in the gaps around the reimbursement piece and wish them luck with the rest of it. But when we tell them that actually, we have all of these sister companies now with Norstella—we have the consulting arm, and the HEOR arm, and real-world data that includes claims, lab and EMR data—they start to understand that this partnership can fulfill all of their needs.
Honestly, there’s not any question that Norstella as a whole can’t answer for our clients. No matter what their challenges are, we’ll be able to provide data and expertise whether it’s through The Dedham Group, Panalgo, Citeline, or Evaluate. Having been here a long time, it’s really rewarding to see that evolution from our initial core capabilities into all we do now across the entire pipeline-to-patient trajectory.
Which company principle resonates most with you?
Resiliency, mettle and grit. You see this principle in action across the board here, because our teams are so resilient in coping with our growth and all the resulting changes. Within a few years, we’ve gone from a little company to a much larger one, and we’ve been able to thrive regardless of the upheaval.
What would you tell someone just starting their career with MMIT?
Absorb as much as you can, and lean on your team for help! There’s something to be said for having regular one-on-one meetings with your managers, your mentors—really anyone you look up to within your immediate circle of colleagues. When I came back to MMIT and started over in consulting, the onboarding was phenomenal.
But what really made the difference was all the amazing support I got from other solution consultants, who took the time to show me the ropes. They invited me to their calls and let me hear how they interacted with clients. It helped me grow professionally, because I always took some lesson from each of them: how one person framed a new product pitch, how another person leans into process development.
What do you like most about working at MMIT?
Definitely my team! We’re like a big family now. We have each other’s backs and we work well together, which makes our days so much more enjoyable.
What do you like to do outside of work?
I love spending time with my friends and family. We have an energetic puppy right now, so when my kids get home from school, we take him to the park for walks. I also love traveling and planning for vacations, and cooking. We do a lot of baking with my daughter!