Fantastic Points On Marketing - Segment to Survive

Have we been focusing on a "one-size-fits-all" approach to sales force effectiveness? This is a question that we have to ask ourselves after all, due to the fact that the average pharmaceutical sales force budget is under considerable pressure and the pharmaceutical consultant is being asked leading questions by senior management within the company. While it is always true to say that the 80/20 rule is a fantastic indicator throughout the business world and we know that a certain proportion of our sales force is going to be highly productive while many are not, it’s high time that the typical sales company and pharmaceutical consultancy addresses exactly how salesforce effectiveness is – well, just not effective.

If we begin to think about the metrics that we used in the world of business, we find that we often applied a very general approach to all these issues. We are far too willing to accept generalities and not prepared to investigate segmentation, so it should not be surprising that we have less than spectacular results. For example, high-volume prescribers are almost universally targeted, purely due to the fact that they spend a lot of money. 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.

Industry intelligence can be very valuable and can show how effective a company's competitors are at reaching a particular professional. 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. In the quest for the correct tactic and approach, we need to analyse the group behaviour of a broad range of end-users, instead. It's time to stop making assumptions and to start digging deeper, to really understand what motivates a particular professional into making a buying decision. Once these groups have been segmented, they can be placed into appropriate categories, potentially leading to far more productive results. This is where the pharmaceutical consultancy should practice diversity and ensure that pharmaceutical marketing training for the modern era involves fewer generalisations.

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. It is inconceivable that we could be relying on this style of approach considering how much is at stake and the pharmaceutical consultant really needs to steer senior management toward a better way of analysing data, to come up with a much better 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.