Lilly crosses borders to achieve marketing ROI
Juergen Guenther, Lilly’s Customer Operations Manager, Critical Care Europe, told attendees at eyeforpharma’s 5th Annual Marketing ROI for Pharma Congress in Amsterdam that customer sati
By on May 31, 2006Juergen Guenther, Lilly's Customer Operations Manager, Critical Care Europe, told attendees at eyeforpharma's 5th Annual Marketing ROI for Pharma Congress in Amsterdam that customer satisfaction and profitability can be improved with regional, customer-centric sales and marketing approaches in Europe.
At the conference, Guenther outlined how, in a distinct departure from traditional approaches, Lilly has created a pan-European Specialist Care organization to pilot a new business model with a regional structure and new tools to manage customer relationships. With the new structure, the group hoped to increase sales and profitability using defined budgets and by leveraging on shared and focused European resources.
In the pilot, which involved two products sold to hospital-based customers, Guenther says Lilly created a virtual marketing organization with team members spread out across Europe and a customer service center in Geneva. Sales reps report directly to the pan-European organization, he says, and not through the company's traditional affiliate structure.
To meet the needs of this regional approach, Guenther says, the team developed tools that include a multi-country, multi-channel CRM application, an internal communication portal, the 24 hour/365 day customer service center providing emergency medical information for the two products and customer networking capabilities.
Customer networking, at least in our business, is very important, says Guenther. How can we involve customers in joint projects and in improving healthcare in their region? And how can we get a win-win relationship out of that?
Guenther says it is important to develop integrated service offerings that are tailored to the value a customer can bring. In addition to experienced sales reps, customer services that offer additional availability and connectivity and that provide knowledge search services also are critical. And Web-based services offer customers self service convenience and availability.
For example, Guenther says, a doctor with a gravely ill patient that is considering using your product may have questions about indication and potential side effects that can be addressed by the call center and a team of peer-to-peer advisers. He may also require assistance locating an expensive drug not routinely stocked in his own hospital's pharmacy. Perhaps once the patient has been treated, the doctor may benefit from a follow-up consultation with a sales rep, who might request additional medical information for the doctor from the call center.
This model, established at Lilly across 21 countries, is, in a way, the ultimate customer-centricity that you can offer, Guenther says.
Basically, we give answers that matter, when they matter, we provide individualized solutions and we take care's of customers needs, he says. On the other hand, we have a kind of flexible organization to cope with local, regional and national customer networks. It's quite important to work together with the physicians in their networks on projects like developing treatment care pathways or implementing regional guidelines. We are really available and have support tools to facilitate those networks.
Guenther says, as a pan-European organization, customer networks do cross country boundaries, at least in the specialist care area. And Lilly's internal organization really facilitates project set-up and implementation, he says.
But supporting those networks and delivering stellar customer service, Guenther says, is very costly. So customers must be carefully and stringently selected with a real emphasis on the share and return maximization per customer.
Guenther says organizations must have a CRM approach to balance the push for customer satisfaction against the need to maintain a profitable business. We cannot just spend everything to make customers happy. We want to get the share of market and influence from the customer balanced against customer satisfaction.
Services are targeted by customer value segmentation, preference and interest, with different services offered to different segments, Guenther says.
Coming back to this networkingwhen comparing different accounts where we really supported customer networks, you could really see massive improvements in sales performance in those areas, he says. This win-win relationship could really be established. In many of those markets, health outcomes improved along with sales.
But Guenther says the pilot had to overcome a lot of perceptual barriers, including tendencies to believe that customer needs vary from country to country and that affiliate structures serve customer needs best. They also battled preconceived notions that global and regional marketing teams cannot develop customized solutions.
The pilot has demonstrated, however, that customer networks and treatment practices are not determined by country borders and that affiliate infrastructure may not reach the critical mass needed to allow the quality of customer service attainable at the regional, national and pan-European level, Guenther says.
To learn more about marketing ROI strategies, be sure to join eyeforpharma at its 2nd annual Marketing ROI USA Congress on June 13-14 in Philadelphia (http://www.eyeforpharma.com/marketingusa2006 ) or at the 6th annual Marketing ROI Congress Europe planned for October 23-24 in Amsterdam (http://www.eyeforpharma.com/marketing06) .