In NEW PAINS FOR PHARMACEUTICALS, I discussed the new set of challenges that make it difficult for commercial teams to effectively plan and respond to the customer expectations and market dynamics. Acrotrend has helped its Pharma clients define and execute effective HCP-centric, multi-channel sales and marketing strategies – all based on the insights held by the new age data collected across digital and physical channels.
Our 3-step approach is simple:
1. Unify data sources like Veeva CRM, OpenData, digital asset consumption, webinars and surveys with third party data like IMS to form one view of the data and organise it in a fashion that makes analytics easy.
2. Generate predictive insights like HCP/HCO segments based on behaviours, preferences, territories, affiliations. Once the data is present and in the right format, the data science models take over. However, the models need to be trained and tuned to your specific data with your specific business context. Technically this is not difficult, but it is something that calls for good collaboration between the commercial teams based on shared departmental and functional goals.
3. Produce visualisations and insight outcomes that provide sales and marketing teams with actionable next steps – like creating targeted content topics, engaging with the right content and messages with audience segments, publishing medical information and detailing sessions across the customer-preferred channels and so on.
One of the key aspects of any insight is its context. Deep insight is only valuable when the right people see the level of detail they need so that the information can be interpreted as a natural flow of questions and answers.
Therefore, designing insight visualisations must include: a) global/ HQ Dashboards that dwell on Strategic and Global KPIs for the executive decision-makers and b) Market-wise local reports for the operational, sales and marketing teams that add very specific inputs, make the insight accessible on the right channel to plan their remote detailing sessions with the HCP/HCO, share right medical information when anticipated and deliver value at each touchpoint.
The important watch-out here is how they roll-up and drill down seamlessly across the levels of details without losing the context.
Beyond the right visualisations, some of the advanced analytics use cases that the commercial teams can benefit from are:
- Sales Forecasting and Trending for various territories and comparing that with benchmarks or across similar territories: anomalies can be spotted and sales and marketing best practice amongst different teams leveraged.
- Segmentation of HCP/HCO based on prescription behaviours and symptoms, and recommendations to help increased customer engagement scores as measured by Meeting acceptance rates, email Open rates or recall.
- Identify and eliminate sales and marketing coverage gaps within a market by matching market data with commercial data, advice to increased Reach and Frequency, and Salesforce productivity targets as measured by appointments per week.
Lastly, it is not about the data and the use cases alone, it’s important to develop key business and data capabilities to gain and maintain the competitive advantage, such as:
- Continuous understanding of what patterns of digital engagement, remote detailing, sampling and conversations lead to a script and eventually prescription for any given physician.
- Capability to produce predictive insights on HCP/HCO requirements to drive effective actions and optimise pre-call planning.
- Recommendations on territory alignment based on Field Force experience and changing market dynamics.
- 365-days-a-year Digital Asset and Content planning based on consumption behaviours, HCP preferences and patient outcomes.
- Ability to identify KOL and influencers and uncover new opportunities of information on affiliations, locations, and specialties.