Angela Wilson and Jaclyn Strauss: Advancing Public Health Through Strategic Partnerships

Jaclyn arrived from a different angle. A Certified Public Accountant (CPA) by training, she began as a tax consultant before spending more than 15 years in pharma across vaccine sales, integrated account management and biosimilars, co-founding a document management startup along the way. Her specialty is buy-and-bill: the contracting, reimbursement and access work at the heart of vaccine commerce.

What brought her to Sanofi was watching the Strategic Accounts team evolve. "I heard noise in the market directly from shared customers mouths that Sanofi Vaccines was starting to bring them innovative solutions," Jaclyn says.

From product and price to partnership

What Jaclyn was watching from outside, Angela had lived through from inside. When she joined what was then the Key Account Manager team, the job was largely transactional. "Honestly, when I would go to a customer, it was, 'Here is my product and here is my price.' You were creating relationships, but ultimately, product and price were pretty much it."

Three years ago, the team rebuilt the role around a different premise: that Sanofi's largest customers should be engaged as B2B partners. Account managers were retrained in value-focused engagement (VFE), a framework that starts with the customer's strategic goals rather than the product on offer. The shift opened up broader conversations with C-suite and D-suite leaders Angela had not had reason to meet before. "It makes every day a lot more fun, because nothing is ever quite the same."

Trust, in that model, is no longer assumed; it is earned. "Customers are skeptical of pharma. No matter what, I still am 'big pharma' when I show up," Jaclyn says. "Our job is not to give you more work. We want to fit into your current operating plans or the way you already do business and potentially enhance them. A small change can have a large impact."

A health equity pilot in the Southeast

For Jaclyn, the shift is most evident in how she prepares for a meeting. She walks in with data on vaccine utilization gaps, the customer's own strategic initiatives, and a clear point of view on where Sanofi can help. "I'm walking in with a point of view, not just a presentation."

A recent engagement with a large integrated delivery network (IDN) in the Southeast shows where that approach goes. The IDN had publicly committed to addressing health inequality. While reading the Community Health Assessment for one of its hospitals, Jaclyn noticed that 85% of babies born there came from underserved populations. The IDN's existing power plan for Sanofi's antibody for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) in infants, covered only babies in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), and this hospital had none.

After verifying the eligible population, Jaclyn proposed a pilot at the two hospitals that stood out demographically rather than asking the system to overhaul access across all twelve locations at once: one RSV season, real numbers, real impact. "It gave them a low-risk entry point that aligned directly with their own stated mission around health equity."

Last RSV season, Jaclyn's sister-in-law sent her a photograph of her baby nephew in the hospital, on oxygen, hooked up to monitors. "When it's your own nephew, it sparks something deeper," she says. "When I'm working through an RSV contract or pushing for better utilization, I know exactly what's on the other side of that number. It's not an uptake metric. It's a family that didn't get a picture like the one I got."

That, she says, is where the commercial work and the public health mission line up. "Sometimes it's just knowing that the work you did last quarter means fewer families go through what mine did."

A team where colleagues want each other to win

Both women come back to the same point about Sanofi's culture. "I want everybody to do well and succeed, and we are all here to support each other," Angela says. "When you think about business in general, it is tough to find."

The team supports development through "gigs" – short-term stretch assignments outside an employee's day-to-day role. The one Angela calls "the cornerstone of my professional development" placed her in leadership meetings, gave her a behind-the-scenes view of strategic priorities, and stretched her into building the team's first year-long longitudinal training plan. Along the way, she partnered with brand and marketing teams and co-created workshops that contributed directly to team development. "It is a really wonderful way for Sanofi to show its employees, listen, we are willing to invest in your development if you want it."

For anyone weighing one of the new Strategic Account Manager roles, Angela and Jaclyn return to the same handful of qualities: curiosity about customers and the healthcare market; self-direction, which the home-based, territory-led work pattern demands; comfort with constant change; and a willingness to ask the obvious question. "You have to be confident enough to put your tail between your legs and just say, 'I don't know,'" Jaclyn says. "We don't have all the answers, and that's okay here. That's embraced."

Twelve years in, Angela's version is shorter, and points to the same thing. "What brought me to Sanofi was the people. You're not just filling a role; you're contributing to something bigger than yourself." It's the people, she says, that make her stay.

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