Execution Excellence in Life Sciences | Commercial Chapter

In the world of pharmaceuticals, the effectiveness of commercial operations refers to using a big, up-to-date, relevant, personal, tailored set of data sets to guide a medicines lifecycle, anticipate investments and other needs, and craft targeted, effective marketing messages based on that. Commercial excellence is the set of steps that an organization can take in order to identify their target customers and plan their value proposition delivery, supported by superior sales and marketing execution. Such metrics allow business leaders to determine areas for focus in order to build deeper relationships with and gain more sway over customers.

KPIs for sales forces should derive from metrics of customer-centric effectiveness, and they should ensure brand strategy is clearly expressed in each customer engagement, with each brand-building opportunity being fully developed. Companies often field sales forces without considering their overall advertising strategy, however, sales force performance should be measured precisely relative to key brand metrics in order to maximize ROI of field resources. Clear, Measurable KPIs to Drive Performance: KPIs must be more than just targets for pharmaceutical marketers and sales representatives; they should guide desired behaviors and outcomes.

As pharma companies prepare to engage in telemarketing activities to launch, they can help their sales reps develop new capabilities that may increase their influence in the success of the launch. In doing so, pharmaceutical companies are able to personally connect with HCPs with relevant, timely messages, drive commercial superiority, and deliver a much better customer journey and experience than is traditionally achieved with a mass-marketing campaign.

This growth of the marketplace--combined with tailored treatments and the increased volume and expense of launches--is forcing pharma companies to focus on maximising the prospects of successful launches. Pharma companies need to blend these critical ingredients (modernized commercial strategies, bright cores, and polymaths) in order to succeed in the diabetes market. Achieving launch success is harder than ever, and it is critical that pharmaceutical companies define the competitive advantage of each product and build operational excellence to thoughtfully execute.

With an estimated $252 billion in sales at stake in 2026 as a result of rising generics and biosimilars, impending patent expirations, and increasingly crowded, competitive markets and therapeutic areas, pharma companies must create tailored strategies for each and every launch, powered by simple operations and a diverse workforce to execute each launch. For the pharma company looking to reimagine their business model, the new product launch is the golden opportunity to test out new technologies and measure their impact before rolling them out wider. As commercial leaders think about their new drugs commercialization plans, they have the unique opportunity to try new approaches without upending their whole business model. Innovations developed for a new drug that are found to be valuable to commercial success will transform a firms commercial strategy.

Achieving all this requires a strategic, holistic approach to change, including evaluation of potential sales and marketing innovations in the context of the long-term company strategy and the future commercial orientation toward practitioners, patients, and payers. An operational model that aligns a companys strategic goals to its business plans--and one supported by technology--can result in improved patient outcomes and opportunities for innovation. Many pharmaceutical organizations are beginning to adopt new operational models, which seek to eliminate organizational silos, build hybrid teams that work together to optimize processes, and make sure that every step of a customers engagement journey is thoughtfully executed and explicitly linked to the brands strategy. Todays leading pharma companies are taking advantage of the convergence of mobile, social, cloud, and other insights to use analytics in new ways that are transforming sales processes and creating greater focus and value for customers.

Innovations that enhance the understanding of customers interests, preferences for information, and impact on their decisions are driving value to leading-edge pharma sales organizations, according to data from IMSs new-to-brand sales insights (NBRx), which measures brand effectiveness. Companies who listen to these lessons of the past will have the greatest success using advanced analytics today to help their sales organizations deliver new levels of customer attention and value. Sales and marketing teams must redefine the customer experience, developing stronger partnerships in order to provide solutions that generate the right outcomes for customers.

Now, the onus is on sales and marketing teams to make sure wherever their target customers are looking for CHC products, their brands are there, waiting to fulfill their needs. Many companies are centralizing their data and creating centers of expertise, which enhance sales and customer analytics in different countries and regions. To learn about a doctors personal preferences about engagement frequency and channels, innovative companies are building data lakes, building predictive models, and tapping into unfamiliar data sources--not just customer-relationship-management systems (CRMs), sales records, and quantitative surveys, for example, but provider-level data from the doctors office.

To guide the insights-generation process and experiment with new methods and ways to work, some companies are setting up Launch Situation Rooms, which combine sales data, unit take-up, and other standard metrics with in-field insights gained from representative apps to analyze the effectiveness of launches in real-time. For instance, in one analysis, Novartis used customers insights to refine targeting, leading to larger sales increases and better productivity. Several tactics enabled Roche Diagnostics to build and maintain a sales culture built on analytics, including a robust, well-respected sales analytics team, processes to leverage analytics to inform each decision, and metrics for tracking success.

Roche Diagnostics created a sales strategy that drove us toward our goals through data analytics using multiple statistical models. Through an extensive secondary research combined with industry expert consulting, we provided insights on customer preferences, market conditions, pricing strategies, risks, and competitive landscapes--enabling the company to create a robust sales strategy to secure its commercial success in Algeria. Refined and helped implement a refreshed market strategy and approach for a commercial team at a food service parts producer, leading to an immediate performance improvement in the sales team. Transformation of a sales force, including processes and organization overhaul, for a global BPO services provider, leading to major improvements in sales productivity and significant new customer acquisitions.

During any key POA, product launch, or Blitz initiative, sales leaders need to work on-site, where monitoring and coaching are critical. With your sales managers in the field leading/coaching the execution, your sales managers will have firsthand knowledge of what challenges and successes are facing their representatives.

To make sure that every one of your reps is performing at an elite level, get their sales managers in the field with them, watching what they are doing, and what they need to be doing. It is critical for your sales managers to be on the field 100% of the time during your first month, and then 80% the following month, and 60% in the third month, because that will enable them to drive execution and maximize their reps influence. Other functions, like product development, engineering, and customer support, that are typically siloed from sales and marketing, must foster greater cross-functional collaboration in the organizations other functions in order to innovate in products and services, as well as to provide for a companys value proposition.