Critical Ideas On Marketing – Segment to Survive

Have we been focusing on a "one-size-fits-all" approach to sales force effectiveness? As the sheer size of a typical pharmaceutical salesforce comes into focus and as budgets are under pressure like never before, the pharmaceutical consultant may find that senior management is beginning to ask questions, just like this. We have long been able to use the 80/20 rule as a great indicator in business and we can always apply this to the productivity of a salesforce in any particular situation, but it is now time for the pharmaceutical consultancy to work with the sales company to find out why the level of sales force effectiveness is not up to par.

Consider many of the metrics that are traditional in our world and consider the approach that is often used as a sweeping, across-the-board approach to the issue. There is far too much generalisation and far too little segmentation, resulting in "below par" results. We can see evidence of this when we look at high-volume prescribers, who represent a favoured port of call due to the fact that they seem to have unlimited budgets. Little attention is paid to the individual doctor’s primary motivation, what he or she happens to like, dislike, or what happens to move the doctor to purchase; rather, an assumption is made that spending will be allocated in this niche, irrespective. This is not a very educated approach, as the professional does not run on autopilot and this is definitely not what pharmaceutical marketing training seeks to tell us.

We need to focus on industry intelligence, casting our net wide to find out how competitors interact with particular professionals. It's not acceptable to use this metric alone when deciding to target, yet this kind of broad brush approach is often used. Results may have been incurred, but the results could have been far better and perhaps more fruitful if the professional had been approached from a different angle. This is why it's important to analyse the behaviour of different groups of end-users, so that the most appropriate drivers can be targeted. We cannot assume that a particular course of action is going to work and we need to dig deeper to really find out what drives a decision-maker to make that decision. Through a process of segmentation, we can arrive at a variety of different categories and can start to explore more productive results. The pharmaceutical consultancy must embrace diversity and move away from a rather general, middle-of-the-road approach to pharmaceutical marketing training in the modern day.

While it may once have been okay to buy data, resources and other lists based on so-called "intelligence," this should be questioned today. These could well be the same lists used by competitors and this practice could well have contributed to the overload experienced by certain doctors, due to that style of targeting. There is far too much at stake to take this generic style of approach and a pharmaceutical consultant needs to help management determine a way of “dialling in" data, in order to determine a far more targeted solution. Members of the salesforce itself may already have a lot of this data and intelligence, due to their one on one interaction over the years. This is the kind of intelligence that we need to use.

Alan Gillies is the CEO of L2L Consulting, a cutting-edge pharma consultancy firm which specialises in optimising productivity and performance within international companies by applying tailored organisational strategies.