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Blueprint for excellence: in a time of slow growth, true innovators change their commercial model, integrating marketing and sales strategies to map out new vistas of information, new measurements of success, and new relationships with core customers.

Article Excerpt
Pharmaceutical brand promotion is undergoing a dramatic shift, with the biggest customers--healthcare practitioners and patients--moving away from mass media to more focused forms of promotion. The fastest growing professional channel is the Web, up 20 percent in 2007. Spending to reach these consumers accounted for 40 percent of the industry's promotion budget last year, according to IMS Consulting.

Yet despite access to growing amounts of information, drugmakers and their field sales forces are struggling to make meaningful connections with their customers. Only one out of three sales calls is rated as "helpful" by physicians, and fewer than 10 percent of US reps have access to robust information about healthcare practitioners, such as patient-level behavior and adherence trends.

Innovation is pharma's first line response to diminishing return on investment (ROI) in sales and marketing. But innovation takes time, and the outcomes are unpredictable. New strategies for improving commercial productivity must harness emerging sources of information to deliver a better understanding of the influences acting on prescribers and deeper insight into prescriber responses. They can also recommend where to implement change within the organization to take best advantage of commercial opportunities.

These strategies revolve around enhancing four key drivers of growth:

* Customer knowledge: a more complete picture of prescribing tendencies and reasons for prescribing

* Promotional resources: optimizing spending, including tailoring promotions to particular customer segments

* Alignment of the sales force with brand strategy

* Technologies that execute and assess customer response to promotion

While these enhancements do not radically transform the pharmaceutical commercial process, they do advance it to the point of higher value through knowledge gained from other industries facing similar fundamental shifts in their business models.

For example, most commercial-excellence initiatives target operating efficiency. Yet when faced with slowed growth, commercial-excellence leaders such as Hewlett-Packard, Proctor & Gamble, Apple, GE, and Charles Schwab implemented commercial changes to drive...

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