CoverStory
By Jenn Muszik, MTS
As senior director of commercial learning & leadership development at Alkermes, I’ve seen firsthand the difference that effective partnerships can make. The best external collaborators do more than support your project. They integrate seamlessly with your team, offering experience and expertise that can mean the difference between merely launching a project and truly making an impact.
But what happens when your project exceeds the capability and capacity of any one agency? This was the question our Alkermes Psychiatry Commercial Learning team faced early in 2025, when we recognized the need to enhance our new-hire learning plan to support the expansion of one of our sales teams.
The solution broke new ground for us. Instead of relying on a single partner, we brought together multiple leading, innovative agencies into one integrated team. To make it successful, we had to rethink — even reinvent — how we managed agency relationships. Our purpose was to focus each of the partners on what they excelled at, whether it was strategy, content development or technological deployment.
The rewards of this collaboration more than justified the effort required to forge this multi- agency team. Just as important, the lessons learned have unlocked even greater possibilities for more effective work going forward.
Change can be intimidating, yet it can also create new opportunities. Inviting multiple agencies to partner on a project could disrupt long-established ways of working or spark fresh ideas and approaches.
For our commercial learning team, the decision was driven by necessity. We realized we would need to double our training volume from the prior year while also supporting the sales team’s evolution by aligning skill development to new competencies, strengthening coaching across evolving leadership and providing data to support decision-making.
We realized this challenge was too great to tackle either on our own or with a single agency. We needed diversity of thought and perspective at the table with us.
We considered working separately with multiple agencies but believed that splitting our focus would be inefficient, and managing agencies separately would require an untenable level of coordination of the various projects, timelines and deliverables. As a result, the project would be in danger of devolving into a series of disjointed tracks rather than working as a cohesive whole.
With all this in mind, it became increasingly clear that we needed to develop what was, for us, a new model of partnership.
Ultimately, it was our commitment to learners that convinced us to take the risk and form a multi-agency partnership. Being learner-centric meant that each agency working on our project needed to be free to connect, collaborate and innovate together. We did not want siloed experts, no matter how skilled. We needed to form a team.
Before bringing on our partners, our internal team developed a plan of action to unite everyone through a focus on a common goal. Though every multi-agency partnership may be unique, these seven steps helped ensure our approach accomplished its goals.
Assembling the right organization required us to balance the strengths of individual agencies with their ability to collaborate. It was a relatively straightforward process to identify agencies that could support us in key areas, including needs assessment, data analysis, technological solutions and customized curriculum creation.
In the end, however, our selections were based as much on trust and our belief in our partners, as they were with our sense of an agency’s expertise.
Understanding that this would be a new venture for everyone and that it might be unsettling for agencies to partner with their competitors, we began by speaking individually with leaders of each agency. Hoping to foster a sense of psychological safety, we used these calls to explain our vision for this partnership and answer their questions.
We never assumed an agency would sign on. We had to be sure each was up for the journey.
It was an exciting moment the first time we brought all three agencies together on a video call.
Beyond the introductions and a project overview, our chief goal during this meeting was to help our agencies feel like true partners, not suppliers. This distinction helped give them ownership in our project and a stake in our shared success.
As the commercial learning team, we were committed to our role in developing a learning program that supported the organization’s North Star — to be one of the industry’s highest performing sales organizations. We carried this aspiration into our multi-agency partnership, using it as a consistent guidepost at every stage of the work.
Anchoring on a shared, enterprise-level goal aligned our contributors, strengthened collaboration and ensured our learning strategy directly enabled broader business excellence.
Each week, we brought the entire team together for a 30-minute video call to focus on three key areas of the project. These meetings became the cornerstone of everything we achieved. It was here that we truly began to gel as a team, learning to trust and challenge one another while figuring out how best to work together.
Having guaranteed weekly time for collaboration, ideation and connection was critically important to our shared success.
Technology played a pivotal role in allowing our remote team to communicate, collaborate and create.
Along with our weekly video meetings and group emails, we used project templates to quickly and conveniently keep each other up to date on project developments each week — key accomplishments since the prior meeting, planned work and assistance needed. We also leveraged our team SharePoint site for real-time collaboration on important project materials.
As our team evolved, we empowered our agency partners to collaborate with each other when needed before reporting back. While this shift was uncomfortable at first, the benefits quickly became clear.
The bonds between our partners strengthened as they took initiative and ownership. Efficiency, collaboration and emotional investment increased greatly, leading to a successful outcome.
By assembling a multi-agency partnership, our commercial learning team gained the insights and expertise needed to achieve our goals. Together, we succeeded in expanding the breadth and depth of our training program while ensuring the content and overall time commitment would meet business needs.
The level of effort, creativity and skill required to bring this program to our sales team would not have been possible without the combined strength of our three-agency collaboration.
Our multi-agency partnership proved equally successful in supporting the sales team’s continued evolution.
We launched an integrated learning and coaching platform that provides access to core resources and includes coaching conversation guides that ensure consistency across territories. This tool has proven to not only accelerate time to sales readiness for our new hires but also has ensured that skill development creates sustained improvements and measurable progress in the field.
While we continue working toward our North Star, our progress to date speaks volumes. Thanks to our agency partners, we’ve made significant progress toward our goal of building one of the best- performing sales organizations in the industry.
Considering these accomplishments occurred in little more than a year, we are eager to continue leveraging the benefits of this unique approach in the months ahead.
Jenn Muszik, MTS, is senior director of commercial learning & leadership development for Alkermes and a member of the LTEN Board of Directors. Email Jenn at Jennifer.Muszik@Alkermes.com or connect through linkedin.com/in/jennmuszik/.
