Pacira Biosciences is a publicly traded pharmaceutical company that delivers innovative, non-opioid pain therapies to transform the lives of patients.
Pacira faced two central challenges in preparing its sales teams for high-stakes conversations with healthcare professionals. First, ensuring clinical accuracy and regulatory compliance was critical. The FDA closely monitors how products are discussed in the pharmaceutical and medical device industry, so all customer-facing staff need to communicate with precision, avoiding unsupported claims and casual superlatives.
Second, sales reps often lacked the fluency and confidence to manage complex customer discussions. Many of them found high-pressure settings difficult to navigate, and struggled to redirect conversation to the benefits of a product when the busy prospect wanted to talk about reimbursement.
Mastery of clinical terminology was another barrier. Mispronouncing a medical or clinical term could undermine sales reps’ credibility. Reps also frequently glossed over key clinical details and needed to be trained to consistently cover essential points.
Elaine Jones, Director of Internal Professional Education at Pacira BioSciences, introduced Second Nature’s AI-powered training role plays just before a national sales meeting, to ensure consistent and compliant messaging for a new indication for one of Pacira’s existing products.
Jones’ team designed role plays with an explicit focus on precision and compliance. The team spot-checked submissions for clinical and technical accuracy, and made sure the Second Nature engine consistently flagged use of superlatives. Training role plays were also engineered to help reps steer discussions back to clinical value when healthcare providers interrupted or shifted the conversation. Over time, Elaine’s team refined the scripts to make dialogue with the AI sales training avatars more natural and realistic.
Jones and her team set clear expectations when they introduced Second Nature, telling sales reps that low initial scores were normal. They stressed that what mattered was reviewing the platform’s feedback, integrating it, and practicing until they reached a passing grade. “We also emphasized to the reps that this is AI. This is you and the avatar having a conversation. This is a safe place to practice and hone your talk tracks, your talking skills,” said Jones.
Operationally, the professional education team became more efficient at building role plays, reducing development time from about an hour to 20–30 minutes. During moments of urgent need, Jones also relied on support from Second Nature; their customer success manager was able to turn around new role plays within 24 hours when internal bandwidth was constrained.
Practicing with an AI-powered training avatar quickly became a natural part of how the organization prepares for customer interactions. “Adoption probably took about two to three months to go from ‘this is weird’ to ‘it’s kind of cool’ to ‘it’s just part of what we do,’” said Jones. Sales representatives began suggesting new scenarios based on real-world objections they encountered. “Anybody who’s come across with a suggestion has been all in on helping us develop that because they know it’s going to make them better, it’s going to make other members of their region or their team better,” observed Jones.
Pacira saw clear improvements in the preparedness and effectiveness of its customer-facing teams. Representatives became consistently more accurate and compliant in how they discussed clinical data and delivered it with precision. “Compliance is really of the utmost importance in a pharmaceutical and medical device space, so we really need anybody from our organization who is customer facing to be really buttoned up on that. And that’s one one of the great things that Second Nature has helped us with,” said Jones.
The repeated practice and detailed feedback that Second Nature enabled significantly strengthened conversational fluency. Reps became more confident navigating complex interactions with healthcare providers. “Their ability to practice before those types of situations has been key. We’ve talked about building confidence and building just fluency and how to navigate a conversation, control it, steer it back to where the account manager wants it to go. And that’s what the Second Nature platform has done for us,” said Jones.
Jones began by integrating Second Nature for new-hire onboarding, but as adoption grew, she rolled it out for other situations such as preparing for big national sales meetings and to upskill experienced customer-facing employees. Overall, Second Nature enabled reps to think for themselves, internalize clinical messaging, and deliver more controlled, confident, and compliant conversations in the field.
Elaine Jones plans to expand Pacira’s use of Second Nature, as the company re-enters markets outside the United States. With international expansion on the horizon, the platform will play a key role in preparing global teams to communicate accurately and consistently across regions.
A major focus will be leveraging Second Nature’s multi-language capabilities to deliver training in native languages, to better support non-native English speakers and help new international hires ramp up more quickly.
As Pacira begins working with non-U.S. regulatory bodies, the platform will also help the regulatory team outside the U.S. to become more familiar with clinical data and navigate differing review standards.
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