These are challenging times for the pharmaceutical industry. In their bid to ensure continuous sales growth and satisfy shareholders, companies must completely rethink their conventional approach to marketing and sales – and strive for a whole new level of commercial excellence.
Commercial excellence goes far beyond the activities of the sales force, embracing all commercial interactions with customers. Ultimately, it aims to optimize impact by maximizing profit contributions on all levels. Commercial excellence comprises three dimensions: sales excellence, customer excellence and new business models.
Whereas sales excellence focuses on improving the performance of the traditional pharmaceutical sales model, customer excellence seeks to maximize the impact of interactions with an ever larger group of customers and stakeholders. New business models require more work than the other two dimensions, but also promise the greatest impact.
The study reveals the major trends and obstacles in each of these three aspects. Although there have already been continual efforts to achieve sales excellence in the past, industry interviewees believe that further improvements will remain beneficial. That explains why the majority of companies are still investing heavily in this field, focusing on targeting, call quality, performance and people. At a time when governments and other payors, health providers and patients are becoming increasingly dependent on each other, the participants of the study believe that only a holistic approach to customer excellence can succeed. The executives we interviewed identified three areas as having high priority: customer strategy/CRM, customercentric organizations and optimization of the promotional mix. In this context, it is vital to note that the relative significance of stakeholders is changing. National authorities and specialists are becoming increasingly important, whereas the interviewees believe that general practitioners will lose some of their influence in the years to come. Consequently, companies are no longer organizing around their products, but around their customers – and shifting resources to match the changing relevance of their stakeholders. As they adopt this more “surround sound” approach to marketing, the promotional mix beyond the sales force is becoming more varied. Innovative channels are amplifying the traditional sales force, and the mix is increasingly being driven by individual preferences. As a result of the dramatic changes currently taking place in the healthcare environment, pharmaceutical companies are developing new business models in an attempt to improve their customer focus and maximize profitability. A vast majority of industry executives expects those new business models to be rolled out over the next two years.
