Download A Customer-Centric Approach to Promotion Planning

A Customer-Centric
Approach to Promotion
Planning
By Mike Powers
A Customer-Centric
Approach to Promotion
Planning
By Mike Powers
As the global healthcare landscape continues to evolve, many biopharmaceutical
companies remain stuck in their old ways, employing a scattered, mass-market
approach to targeting healthcare providers through a wide variety of channels
and tactics, which often include a high volume of sales rep visits, emails,
telesales calls and speaker programs, among others. In effect, many of these
companies are hoping that if they throw enough assets at enough customers,
something will eventually hit the mark.
From the customer’s perspective, this barrage is unrelenting—and potentially
unwelcome. According to ZS’s 2016 AffinityMonitor™ research, the most
valuable healthcare professionals are receiving approximately 2,800 contacts
from biopharmaceutical companies, which is equivalent to eight contacts per
day, every day of the year. Based on the qualitative feedback that many HCPs
provided in our survey, this promotional onslaught is overwhelming and likely
ineffective at helping messaging stick.
Furthermore, these customers are harder to engage than ever before. Pressed
for time and focused on efficiencies, hospitals and doctors are restricting faceto-face access for biopharmaceutical sales reps, making traditional engagement
methods difficult to execute. According to ZS’s AccessMonitor™ survey, 56% of
physicians have restricted access to sales reps in 2016 compared with 33% who
did so in 2008.
In this era of diminishing doctor availability, traditional sales and marketing
methods are becoming increasingly ineffective, and it’s more and more difficult
for biopharmaceutical companies to promote their products and stand out from
the crowd. And by continuing their old ways, marketers might even be making
the situation worse. With sales and marketing teams functioning in silos and
optimizing campaigns around a single tactic, companies are targeting the same
customer with multiple, uncoordinated campaigns or touches, which results in
inconsistent or mixed messages.
It’s a negative customer experience, to say the least. This dated approach leads
to wasted effort, unhappy customers and, ultimately, lower sales.
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A Better Way: Integrated Promotion Planning
A more effective approach than the scattered, mass-market method is a
customer-centric marketing approach. With customer-centric marketing, sales
and marketing efforts are coordinated, and customer insights and technology
are used to deliver the right message at the right time through the right
channel, and in the right sequence. A key method for delivering customercentric campaigns is integrated promotion planning (IPP), which integrates and
optimizes customer preferences, promotion options and delivery frequency for
each individual customer or segment into one holistic plan. This approach allows
a company to strategize and coordinate how, when and where to communicate
with customers based on those customers’ needs and preferences.
Take, for example, Dr. Smith and Dr. Jones. Both are high-potential physicians,
and as such, they are targeted in exactly the same manner: the same frequency
and sequencing of emails, sales calls and speaker programs. However, an IPP
approach would take into account the fact that Dr. Smith vastly prefers email
communications about new treatment options, and Dr. Jones prefers in-person
visits from biopharmaceutical reps (see figure 1). With an IPP plan in place,
Dr. Smith now receives more emails, and Dr. Jones receives fewer. Adjusting
email outreach based on the physicians’ preferences will likely result in boosted
engagement and a more positive customer experience.
Taking it a step further, an IPP plan could leverage not only physicians’
communication delivery preferences, but also the type of content that physicians
prefer. For example, touch points geared toward Dr. Smith—such as emails and
in-person visits—would highlight research and data since that’s how he prefers
to learn about biopharmaceutical products. Dr. Jones, on the other hand, prefers
to learn via real-world experience, so her specific touch points would highlight
case studies and physicians’ own experiences with the products.
How IPP Fits Within a CustomerCentric Approach
Customer-centric marketing requires
strong customer insights to target and
engage the right customer, and IPP
is a key tool in the customer-centric
marketing toolbox: IPP helps integrate
and optimize customer preferences,
promotion options and delivery
frequency on an individual customer
basis.
This chart shows how companies can
build and integrate customer-centric
marketing capabilities across five
key areas.
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Customer Promotion
Planning
3
Customer and Preference
Analytics
Integrated
Promotional
Planning
Across Sales
and Marketing
Call Plan
Development
5
1
Field Validation
(approval)
Final
Call Plan
Orchestration
MCM-Informed
4
Future Promotion Plans/
Customer Planning
Sales Operations
Suggestion Engine™
Customer
Marketing Operations
Campaign
Cadence
Field Validation
(approval)
Deployment: Customer
Tactical Plan
Technology Stack (data, customer 360 database , Veeva, reporting tools, campaign
tools, etc.)
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A SIDE-BY-SIDE LOOK AT INDUSTRY CONTACTS AND ENGAGEMENT FOR TWO
PHYSICIANS TARGETED BY BIOPHARMACEUTICAL SALES REPS
Dr. Smith
Primary Care
Physician
East Orange, N.J.
Dr. Jones
Primary Care
Physician
Charlottesville, Va.
Number of
biopharmaceutical
companies contacting
each physician
20
16
Rep calls per week
2
33
230
(opened/clicked 11%)
404
(less than 1% opened)
None
One call per month
Almost 2 times per week
(responds to less than 1%)
1 to 2 per month
(responds to 5%)
Participates in peer
speaker programs
3 times a year
2 times a year
Pulls digital content
Occasionally (14 times)
Frequently pulls online
sample requests (40 times)
Emails received
last year
Inside sales
connections
Receives mail
Figure 1: In this example, two hypothetical doctors’ engagement behavior can look similar on paper but are
very different. A tailored approach for each physician will increase the impact of your promotional efforts.
Thinking about where physicians go to learn, and the ways that they engage with
content, allows you to design a sequence of touch points and interactions across
channels.
When done well, this approach results in a more harmonized customer
experience and increased customer engagement. IPP can lead to significant
financial benefits, as well, since less time is wasted on ineffective marketing
outreach: Companies that use IPP could see a 5 to 10% increase in incremental
revenue, and a savings of 5 to 15% on promotional costs.
Another potential benefit is the elevated role of the sales representative. IPP
provides a broader view of how we would like to engage our customers across
each sales and marketing channel. With this knowledge, the sales rep will be
better able to orchestrate these multichannel activities over time to best meet
customers’ needs, and the customer should feel like these interactions are
relevant and compelling, leading him to read and engage further.
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This approach doesn’t just require coordination, though. It requires you to
rethink your marketing mix to revolve around the customer (see figure 2).
The weakness of the traditional marketing mix analytics is that customers are
treated relatively the same, even though we all know that they are about as
similar as fingerprints. IPP is a plan-by-customer approach that’s built on past
customer behavior and uses analytic techniques to determine the best ROI on
individual promotional efforts.
Inputs
Customer
segments
and value
Customer
channel
preferences
Channel
promotion
responsiveness
Channel budgets
and other
constraints
Analytics and
Optimization
Multichannel
Promotion
Planner
Tactic
Sequencer
Outputs
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
Campaign
Tree Maker
May
Jun
Integrated Promotion Plan
Figure 2: Companies that get started with IPP must take a more customer-centric approach to their
marketing mix.
Making the Customer-Centric Transformation
Many biopharmaceutical companies understand the need to become
customer-centric, and some think that they’re already there, but a complete
transformation requires changes across many different functions, including
breaking down walls between sales and marketing. An effective integrated
promotion plan will help ease the transition from a brand- or tactic-focused
approach to a customer-centric approach (see figure 3), and will reinforce the
alignment between sales and marketing. With IPP, specific output—such as
separate call plans, email target lists, speaker program invitation lists, etc.—is
no longer planned in silos for each marketing channel and product. Instead,
it’s planned holistically from the customer’s perspective. Here are the four
elements of an IPP plan:
1. Customer segments and value: How do the customers behave in the
market? Do they prefer certain products or treatment modalities over
others, such as a preference for email or rep visits? Are they early adopters?
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What’s the demographic makeup and disease profile of their patient base?
Asking questions like these can help determine a customer’s potential
interest in current and future products.
2. Customer channel preferences: In the current marketplace, most
companies don’t know their customers’ channel preferences—or at least
they’re not using them when planning their promotional strategies. With
IPP, sales and marketing can determine how and when their individual
customers (not just customer segments) want to be engaged: How often?
Which channel? What time frame? In what sequence?
3. Willingness to engage: How responsive, historically, has this customer
been to various types of outreach and promotional efforts such as samples,
emails or invitations to present? This information will help companies meet
the customer’s needs while simultaneously focusing on the channels that
will drive success for the company.
4. Execution planning: While you need to account for everyday constraints—
like budget limitations and “do not call” lists—you also need to account
for how a customer’s preferences and needs evolve over time, and how
you should continue to engage her. We need to share the right information
via the right channels at the right time and, most importantly, in the right
sequence. Creating an ongoing dialogue with each customer over time
helps build up to the desired outcome, but if your messaging or sequence of
marketing tactics aren’t well connected, your touch points simply become
background noise.
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
June
PersonalPromotionFriendly
Non-Personal
Promotion
Pharma-Skeptic
Pharma-Friendly
Figure 3: This chart shows how alignment between sales and marketing leads to a shift from tactic-level
planning to an integrated, customer-focused strategy.
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Getting Started
Chances are, the data that you need to launch IPP already exists. You just need
to gather the analytics and start acting on the resulting insights. Companies that
are ready to develop an IPP approach should follow four key steps:
1. Enhance your marketing mix analysis to incorporate IPP. Existing
marketing mix work provides a great starting point for IPP since it
already leverages data about customer segments, value, and promotion
responsiveness. You can enhance it by incorporating customer channel
preferences and by developing customer-level promotion recommendations
(as opposed to the national-level budget recommendations that are the
typical outcome from marketing mix work).
2. Start small. Focus on one or two brands and six or so customer tactics.
Use this pilot to build a business case to expand within other areas of your
organization.
3. Minimize the change downstream. Use the mechanisms that already exist.
You may want to start by using the sales force call plan as a static input to
your integrated promotion plan, then measure the results of this approach
to help build your business case to scale and expand.
4. Leverage what you have. Most companies already have the foundational
technology and supporting tools—marketing automation tools, CRM
platforms, customer data warehouses, etc.—to successfully implement
IPP. You likely won’t need to invest in new tools and capabilities, but simply
change the way that you work with these existing tools.
Once you’ve created an initial integrated promotion plan, you won’t even need
to execute on it to see the potential benefits. Building out the initial plan might
reveal current inefficiencies and wasted resources, so use it to show the
potential ROI and help build a business case for using IPP within your company.
Once you’ve mapped out your integrated promotion plan and garnered the
organizational buy-in that’s necessary to get started, you’re one step closer
to truly becoming a customer-centric organization.
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About the Expert
Mike Powers is a principal based in ZS’s Princeton,
N.J., office and is one of the leaders of ZS’s business
consulting practice. For more than 11 years, Powers has
partnered with many biopharmaceutical companies
across nearly all aspects of sales strategy, operations
and technology—from customer segmentation and
targeting, commercial organization design and sales
compensation, to territory alignment, call planning and
key account management. In addition to his client work,
Powers helps drive innovation with ZS’s offerings,
including ZS’s multichannel integrated promotion
planning analytics solution.
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About ZS
ZS is the world’s largest firm focused exclusively on helping companies improve
overall performance and grow revenue and market share, through end-to-end
sales and marketing solutions—from customer insights and strategy to analytics,
operations and technology. More than 4,500 ZS professionals in 22 offices
worldwide draw on deep industry and domain expertise to deliver impact
for clients across multiple industries. To learn more, visit www.zs.com or follow
us on Twitter and LinkedIn.
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