Increasing sales force effectiveness by wringing value from commercial data
Industrializing their approach to analytics offers pharmas a means to drive competitive differentiation. Simply gathering customer, product and promotional data is not enough, the group urges.
By on Jan 24, 2007Industrializing their approach to analytics offers pharmas a means to drive competitive differentiation. Simply gathering customer, product and promotional data is not enough, the group urges. To be successful, companies must consistently collect and integrate compelling data, analyze it effectively and quickly use the insights to make informed business decisions.
The Accenture Institute for High Performance Business reports that high-performance businesses are five times more likely than poor performers to cite analytics as a key contributor to their competitive edge. By making information analysis and management a distinctive capability, firms can outsmart and out-manoeuvre the competition, says Paul Nunes, an executive researcher for the institute.
Some companies, the group says, have built their very business on their ability to collect, analyze and act on data. Business processes are among the very last remaining points of differentiation, Accenture says. And analytic competitors wring every last drop of value from those processes, the group stresses.
Just as companies like Amazon.com, Google and Capital One have created significant competitive advantage using analytics consistently to inform business decisions, so too can pharma, the group says. Based on its own experience with clients, Accenture believes industrializing the use of analytics in the pharma industry can improve a company's profitability by 5 to 15%.
Senior management teams, however, must commit to making analytics a strategic priority, instilling in their organizations a culture of data-driven decisions and investing in the necessary infrastructure and processes. To become analytic competitors, Accenture suggests that pharmas must develop systemic means of creating proprietary data, managing and analyzing that data in a way that is relevant to the business strategy and efficiently and repeatedly transforming that data into informed decisions that drive high performance.
For example, the group helped one top-five pharma client to industrialize its promotional resource allocation by establishing a standard ROI methodology and optimization process that enabled the company to direct spend to the brands expected to deliver the highest ROI and better allocate resources across promotional activities.
Accenture says others are concentrating on acquiring and acting on new, unique data sources that are proprietary to their company. One company, the group says, is equipping its sales force with tablet PCs that allow them to electronically navigate physicians through the company's promotional materials and focus on messages that appeal to them most.
The company can collect data on not only which physicians received calls from sales reps, but also much richer data on how much time the doctor spent with the rep, which messages were conveyed and in what order. Later, the group says, the company can correlate the information to the physician's actual prescribing volume.
This allows marketing and sales teams to constantly test and refine their sales messages to maximize impact on each physician or physician segment. They also can tailor targeting and frequency and combine the data with other information, such as managed care access, for additional insights.
Many companies lack any consistent means to weigh investments against returns across brands, Accenture reports. And brand leadership often lacks insight into the most efficient use of their investments across the various strategies, tactics and channels they use. Bringing analytics out of the isolated pockets in which it is usually performed allows it to become an internal, organization-wide and ongoing capability, the group says.
To become successful analytic competitors, pharma companies must take a different approach and mindset to analytics, however, Accenture advises. To build analytics capabilities, companies must:
Establish senior management sponsorship and commitment;
Develop the tools, technology and expertise to capture and maintain proprietary data that enables differentiation;
Develop analytic skills and methods to address a broad range of needs, including marketing mix optimization, sales force sizing, call planning, multi-channel marketing and contracting optimization;
Establish reporting templates and tools to that allow quick and easy access to insights to decision makers throughout the organization; and
Develop data translation and insight generation capabilities to translate analytic outputs into actionable insights.
Pharma industry executives surveyed by Accenture say commercial analytics will be one of the top five factors critical to outperforming the competition over the next three years. But pharmas must move beyond generating transactional and other data and learn to leverage the analysis of this data to increase profitability and market share, the group says.
High performance companies will industrialize their analytic processes, tools, data repositories and governance, Accenture stresses. Pharma companies that fail to derive value from their data will find themselves lagging, the group warns.
To learn more about the report, visit www.accenture.com/h&ls.
And to gain more keen insight into sales force effectiveness strategies for today's dynamic pharmaceutical marketplace, make plans to attend eyeforpharma's 5th annual Sales Force Effectiveness Summit Europe being held 7-9 March in Monaco. For more information, please visit www.eyeforpharma.com/sales2007 or phone the eyeforpharma team at +44 (0) 20 7375 7203.