Your POA is D.O.A.
Traditional pharmaceutical marketing dictates a quarterly review of market data, strategies, and tactics and implements a reset to the field thereafter. But does this make sense in light of customer behavior?
With the influx of real-time data sourced from developing media, combined with new tactics in harnessing existing interaction data, the pharmaceutical organizations still relying on this quarterly method are missing out on many opportunities to better understand their customers.
This significant shift to a real-time model is both a great organizational change and a strategic one as well. Many other industries are moving in this direction, led by financial services, utilizing every customer interaction to dive deeper into the relationship and uncover new business opportunities.
Its time for the pharmaceutical industry to catch up and learn to leverage the volume of relevant data already in house and combine it with the new information the market now bears. These data provide the holy grail of customer behavior, sentiment analysis, and at least a shot at taking the pulse of the consumer communityboth HCPs and patients alike.
The fact is that much will have to change to make this a reality; pharmaceutical companies have not changed their analytics and sales operating model while their customers are interacting in an entirely new manner.
Technology has evolved to enable access to a wide array of data from a variety of interactions. Many organizations have implemented systems which focus on automating more traditional interactions: eDetailing, SFA, HCP Portal, Customer Communities, Surveys, and Convention Booth monitoring.
The opportunity exists in learning how to connect the combined data and act on it. Additionally, emerging interaction data is now available from social monitoring/media and mobile channels.
The power is the synergistic combination of these two seemingly disparate data sets into insights that can transform sales and marketing planning. Delivering analysis across connected channels enables proactive customer focus. Insight-driven agility and predictive modeling delivers the opportunity to proactively address customer demands and unmet needs.
Organizations willing to take the leap beyond traditional POA planning will have the advantage as the market shifts to an on-demand model. POA analysis needs to happen on an ongoing basis, with real-time dashboards which enable on-the-fly analysis and connectivity across enterprise systems providing transparency from the territory representative to executive management.
Only today, after many years of the CRM moniker, does the industry have the technology and infrastructure to support this level of interoperability. I believe this is the time to make a genuine shift away from the POA and to a more fluid model which provides insight, not just data, across the organization and empowers those who can affect customer relationships