Coordinate a Scientific Resource for a Department Chair

A department chair calls you directly with a scientific question about a trial result or an off label use they are considering for their department. They know you and trust you, and they want a fast answer right now. But you are a key account manager, not a medical scientist, and giving them your own interpretation crosses a line that exists for good reason. Your job in this moment is to move the conversation toward the right person without brushing the chair off or making them feel like they hit a wall.

Why This Request Puts You in a Bad Spot

The chair does not think about your job title when a scientific question comes up. They think about the relationship. You have been reliable on formulary questions, samples, and logistics, so when a scientific question surfaces mid conversation, answering it yourself feels like the natural next step.

That instinct is the problem. Commercial roles and medical roles stay separate for a reason. A commercial answer can drift toward what helps the account, even without anyone intending that. A medical answer needs to come from someone trained to present data with its full context, including where that data falls short. If you answer as though you were the medical science liaison, you put the company at risk and you put the chair in a position where they cannot fully trust what they just heard.

There is also a coordination gap that makes this awkward. The chair does not always know that a fellow, a medical science liaison, or a scientific director exists to answer this exact kind of question well. A flat redirect can read as evasive instead of as a professional handoff. Your task is to make the handoff sound like a service, not a fence.

Prepare Before the Chair Calls

You cannot improvise this well every time, so build a routine before you are on a call with a chair.

Know who the appropriate medical resource is for the therapeutic area before you need them. If you cover several products, keep a short list of medical science liaisons, medical directors, or scientific colleagues and their coverage areas, so you are not scrambling once the chair is already on the line.

Understand how the chair's department actually convenes people. Some chairs want a formal grand rounds style session, some want a short call with two or three people, and some want written questions answered before anyone even schedules a meeting. Guessing wrong on format wastes time for everyone involved, and if you want a fuller sense of how much this varies by site, look at Discover Why Sites Use Different Workflows for a picture of how differently sites organize this kind of exchange.

Have a clean way to describe the scientific colleague's role, one sentence you can say without sounding rehearsed. You are not telling the chair you cannot help. You are telling them they deserve a better answer than you can give, and that you already know who can give it.

Decide in advance how fast you will follow up. A chair who raises a question on a call should hear from you about scheduling by a specific day, not whenever you get around to it. If you want a model for pacing that kind of commitment, Set a Cadence for Account Service Escalations lays out how to set expectations for response time on account issues, and the same discipline applies here.

What to Say in the Room

Picture a chair with a specific question about how a therapy performed in a patient subgroup relevant to a study their department is planning.

The chair says, "You have sat through enough of these meetings, you probably know this data as well as anyone on my team. What does it show for that subgroup."

You say, "I want you to get the full answer, not my guess at one. Let me bring in our medical science liaison for this therapy area. They can walk through the data properly and take your team's follow up questions directly. Would a short call work, or do you want a longer session with more of your group."

The chair says, "A short call is fine. I do not want to turn this into a production. Get them on with me and one fellow this week if you can."

You confirm you will reach out to the liaison that same day and have times back to the chair by tomorrow. You also suggest the fellow write down the specific questions the team wants covered, so the call stays focused instead of drifting.

Notice what happened. You did not answer the science, and you did not lecture the chair on compliance rules. You gave a reason centered on the quality of what the chair gets, and you closed the loop on timing and format in the same breath. That is most of the skill in this conversation, delivered in a handful of sentences.

Mistakes That Undermine the Handoff

A flat refusal with no alternative is the most common failure. Saying "I cannot answer that" and stopping there leaves the chair with an open question and no path forward. Attach the redirect to a next step every time.

Overexplaining the compliance reason is another failure. The chair does not need a lecture on why commercial and medical roles stay separate. One sentence about wanting them to get the right answer covers it. Anything longer sounds defensive and slows the call down.

Vague timing costs you trust fast. Telling a chair you will "get someone in touch" with no day attached means they call you again next week wondering what happened. Name a day and hold it.

Skipping the logistics question is a quieter mistake. If you do not ask how the chair wants the group to convene, you might arrange the wrong format entirely, a formal session when they wanted a short call, or the reverse. That one question saves a rescheduled meeting later.

Guessing at the science because you half remember a slide from a training deck is the worst version of this mistake. A partial detail stated with confidence does more damage than admitting you do not know, because the chair has no way to tell the difference from where they sit.

How to Practice and Score This Conversation

This conversation is worth rehearsing before it happens live, because once a chair asks you something scientific, you have a few seconds to respond well or poorly.

Set up a practice scenario where the counterpart plays a chair who pushes for an informal answer and resists being redirected. A realistic version pushes back at least once, the way the chair above did when they asked for a short call instead of a larger session. If your first attempt caves and you start answering the science, you will notice it immediately and can correct course before it happens with a real chair.

Score the attempt on four points. Did you state the boundary without sounding evasive or apologetic. Did you capture the actual scientific question accurately enough that the medical colleague you bring in will not have to ask the chair to repeat it. Did you confirm the meeting format the chair actually wants. Did you commit to a specific follow up time instead of a vague promise.

A manager coaching a key account manager can run this scenario several ways, once with an easygoing chair, once with an impatient one who pushes twice, and once with a chair who is skeptical that a redirect is even necessary. Managers who want a broader set of these situations can find them among the Pharmaceuticals practice conversations built for exactly this kind of role separation.

Keep the Handoff Clean

Your value in this moment is not scientific expertise. It is making sure the right person answers the right question, quickly and without friction. Get the logistics right, name a specific follow up time, and the chair walks away with more confidence in your account, not less.