Technical Data

Sector: Pharmaceutical & Life Sciences.

Objectives: Reaching a correct sales force sizing and containing the laboratory’s strong sales cost structure, in order to improve their competitiveness in an especially complex environment.

Solution: Implementation of Sales Force Effectiveness Strategies that, supported by Marketing Intelligence techniques, help to correctly segment the market and optimize the prescriber’s performance.

Result: Six of the leading laboratories in terms of sales growth use Sales Force Effectiveness strategies based on Intelligent Marketing.

Despite the provisions of a sales force reduction at pharmaceutical laboratories, more than 90,000 visitors continue to perform their duties in the U.S.A., and close to 15,000 in Spain. Maximizing sales network efficiency is critical for the pharmaceutical sector. Laboratories are faced with a strict regulatory environment, which is added to a complicated research process, launching, and commercialization of its products.

After R&D, the sales force constitutes the main budget factor for multinational in this sector (between 14% and 16% of sales), and therefore many labs are directing their attention towards the sales network as a way to optimize costs..
Medical visitors are faced with the arduous task of:

• Prioritizing their timing to increase productivity, and investing long hours of effort in finding out the sales possibilities. (According to recent data, this sector’s sales reps only dedicate 23% of their time to sales. They devote the rest of their time to searching for information that helps them optimize sales processes.)
• Increasing their pro-activity in visits, with prescribers more and more overwhelmed by their own schedule and the competition among labs.
• Keeping up to date quickly in complex scientific environments that evolve very dynamically.
• Targeting the prescribers with the greatest potential, many times without having the most appropriate information.
  > presenting themselves to the prescribers as “the face” of
  a company that might be failing in other channels.

Marketing Intelligence actions are the alternative being progressively adopted by the majority of laboratories, acting in two environments:

• Sales Force Effectiveness: the objective is to know the prescriber. Prioritize visits to clients of greatest value, using targeting actions, profiling, and analysis of the prescriber’s affinity with the product. This segmentation of current and potential “clients” must be done market by market and product by product, since the “targets” vary enormously according to the medical specialty and pharmaceutical. The majority of laboratories tend to direct their efforts to a “selection” of physicians, on which the visitors focus. The principal of this selection is valid, but the problem is that the “selected” physicians are not always the ones of greatest value for the laboratory. “Coaching” the sales reps is critical: this doesn’t mean imposing on the visitor who he visits, how frequently, and with what messages, but rather involving him and collaborating with him in a more effective commercialization process for the company and its own sales objectives.
• Marketing Effectiveness: This is about opening the pharmaceutical sector to alternatives to the traditional visit. SMS, telephone or Internet contacts are bringing favorable results with products that once had low sales, since the physicians save time and are more receptive. This piece of information is proof enough: physicians spend close to 23 minutes making online purchases, as opposed to the brief time they spend on a visit. Usually, the launching of new medications or periodical reinforcement of sales activity is done by means of support from external task forces. This is a valid resource, but it is not enough. These new channels allow the laboratories to reach the prescriber in a different way and with an added value: with information that fits the physician’s profile and interests.

 The medical visit is and always will be the cornerstone of this industry’s sales strategy, based on an extremely relational model. However, channels are emerging with the power to offer not only products, but also services that offer value to the physician. The sector must know how to respond to this challenge.