Download article - closerlook, inc.

Are you seeing the whole picture?
Gain insight and clarity through physician CRM.
The job of a pharmaceutical product manager used to be straight-forward.
The agency of record essentially managed the brand identity, and
the marketing associate, usually on an 18-month rotation from the sales
force, oversaw the budget and made sure nothing went wrong.
Often just keeping the sales aid current with
regulatory updates could keep a manager busy
until it was time to return to the field. Typical
life in a regulated industry.
That was then.
Today there are many new market pressures
and expectations from consumers, patient groups,
providers, payers, regulators, competitors and
even shareholders. A number of industry trends
have emerged, forcing pharmaceutical product
leadership to revisit their approach to marketing
strategy.
More turbulence, more complexity
Four significant social and economic trends have
emerged, introducing a level of market turbulence
and complexity that is challenging the way brand
teams form and execute strategy. Managed well,
a new approach can result in greater marketing
effectiveness and lead to enhanced value for key
customer groups. But if fumbled, these trends
will undermine even the most ambitious plans
and lead to market share erosion. These four
trends are as follows:
©2012 closerlook, inc.
closerlook.com
1.The explosion of disparate promotional
channels and digital transactions is
overwhelming even experienced marketing
managers as they struggle with how to integrate
these new channels into their strategic plan and
manage their multiple vendors. New modes of
social media engagement are already disrupting
the traditional sales cycle and its reliance on
one-way, outbound media.
2.This burgeoning of new marketing programs
creates a “big data” challenge. If embraced,
this plethora of information will provide better
physician insight but will ultimately undermine
traditional research planning methodologies,
demonstrating the need for new and faster ways
to sort, analyze, segment and target customers.
3.The decline in physician access and the
increasing influence of payers are changing the
balance of power. This is forcing brand teams to
rethink the standard promotional approach.
4.The move to specialized products targeting
smaller patient populations with more focused
physician segments means marketing teams
have less margin for error in planning and
execution.
page 1
Are you seeing the whole picture? Gain insight and clarity through physician CRM.
How well do you know your physicians?
©2012 closerlook, inc.
Future tactics
Conventions
Social media
Teleconferences
Online media
Samples on
demand
Physician
CRM database
Sales force
Peer-to-peer
programs
Mobile
eDetails
Physician
CRM-enabled
websites
E-mails
Tablets/
closed loop
Capture all physician touchpoints
These four trends have one thing in common:
each represents an environment of complexity
or turbulence that requires a much deeper
understanding of the customer. However, the
traditional pharma brand planning process that
worked well in the past is proving inadequate
in a world of unprecedented change and speed.
The point-in-time snapshot of segmentation or
messaging or social media captured by formal
market research has a shorter half-life than before
and misses the dynamic influences of social media
and consumer word of mouth.
This is catching many marketing executives and
their agencies by surprise. According to Forrester
Research, even direct marketing service providers
who have deep expertise in developing and
managing customer databases and campaigns
are playing catch-up with the need for crosschannel customer intelligence that is relevant
for enhancing customer experience and for
transforming the business to meet these market
challenges.1
©2012 closerlook, inc.
closerlook.com
Traditional market research provides a strong
overarching brand strategy, but it’s not as helpful
for understanding needs at the individual
customer level. Traditional customer relationship
management (CRM) promises customer
intelligence but mostly provides reports on
transactions, usually focused on the performance
of the sales force, and that’s not particularly
actionable for making marketing decisions at the
individual physician level.
What’s required is a way to get to a different
set of questions. Customer questions, business
questions, are-we-offering-a-unique-valueproposition questions. Questions that just might
lead to a different way of segmenting your audience
or delivering value once you know the answers.
Answers that might challenge the way you’re
doing marketing today and engage your audience
in a way that feels authentic to both sides.
For example, how well do you know the
answers to these questions?
•
ow effective are your various tactics at
H
the physician level, and do you have a plan
for variable spending based on channel
preferences?
•
re you aware of the difference between
A
channel preference and channel effectiveness
at the physician level?
•
ow do you know if your segmentation schema
H
overestimates the value of past prescribers and
underestimates the potential of non-targets?
•
ow would physicians rank you in terms of
H
customer experience across your various sales
and service touchpoints?
•
ased on how a physician responds across more
B
than two marketing tactics, can you predict his
or her likelihood to prescribe your product?
•
ho are the most peer-influential physicians,
W
and how do they use social media?
page 2
Are you seeing the whole picture? Gain insight and clarity through physician CRM.
•
•
“
o you know which physicians respond better
D
to clinical information vs. clinical trial
opportunities vs. access to speaker training?
I f you were asked by senior management to
decrease or increase your promotional budget by
50 percent, do you know how you would cut and
minimize impact, or where you would focus your
increased budget to make the biggest difference?
apturing [all] data about healthcare
C
professionals from multiple sales
and marketing programs can provide
the raw material to address much of
the market complexity we now face.
Continuous customer monitoring
”
To get the most accurate answers at the individual
level, we need access to customer attitudes, behavior
and value on an ongoing basis. Just like a continuousmonitoring glucose meter is more effective in
managing insulin levels than a twice-daily finger
stick, so is the ability to monitor and manage
multiple customer touchpoints better than
quarterly focus groups.
At any given moment, most brands have
numerous sales and marketing efforts deployed
to reach their target set of physicians. Each one
of these touchpoints can contribute a nugget that
adds up to a rich lode of customer data. Capturing
transactional, behavioral and attitudinal data about
healthcare professionals from multiple personal
and non-personal sales and marketing programs
can provide the raw material to address much
of the market complexity we now face.
Three steps to developing a strong
insight-based customer strategy
Capturing data, creating actionable insight and
delivering on that knowledge are three important
steps that product managers can take to develop
and execute a strong customer strategy. This is
not an insignificant undertaking and requires a
strong visionary leadership team to maintain
the necessary rigor.
1.Get the data
The first step in a physician CRM program is
collecting all physician interaction data from
internal sources and all the various agencies involved, and making sure that they’re identifiable
and attributable at the physician level. Although
these data may be scattered around various offices and ad agencies, they need to be identified
and consolidated into a single dataset.
This process can involve delicate negotiations,
but it must be done. Eventually it will be
automated with technology, but even just
pulling and merging monthly files is an
important first step and will reveal just how
disconnected physician profiles and datasets
have become.
2.Unravel the ball of data
The second step in building strong physician
insight into your strategy is to analyze this
consolidated dataset for answers to your key
business and customer questions. Unraveling
the data stream to determine what works at
the physician level, where to overinvest
(or underinvest) and what combination of
content, tools and channels will be most
relevant to attention-constrained physicians
will help create a strong strategy and build the
intelligence to achieve competitive advantage.
These methods are rooted in physician CRM.
The result is more efficient and effective marketing.
©2012 closerlook, inc.
closerlook.com
page 3
Are you seeing the whole picture? Gain insight and clarity through physician CRM.
Engagement metrics are important proxies
for what physicians deem important, but
the ultimate business measure is how those
engagement metrics lead to market share
growth. Prescription trend data need to be an
input to allow marketers to measure the return
on sales and marketing investments at the
individual physician level.
The transactional, behavioral and attitudinal
data that will come from multiple campaigns
are not only voluminous, as in “big data,” but
can also be very granular, sometimes called
“nano data.” Sifting through terabytes of data
hoping to stumble across “insight” is expensive
and needless. Better to start with the right
business and customer questions and build an
analysis framework for developing a strong
customer strategy.
3.Make change happen
The final step in creating business impact
is to take the insight from the data analysis and
develop a unique customer-centric strategy
and implementation plan. By learning how to
provide the content most relevant to the brand’s
most valuable targets how and when they
want it, you create the much-vaunted two-way
conversation with healthcare professionals
to which every brand should aspire. CRM will
evolve from a top-down process to one that
allows physicians to also participate in
managing their relationships with the brand.
This ongoing virtual conversation provides the
brand team with a growing body of intelligence
to make better marketing and resource
decisions, and using predictive analytics, to
begin to confidently anticipate the needs of
its customers. Physician CRM provides an
opportunity for a pharmaceutical product
team to make change happen on its own terms.
Given the increasing complexity and turbulence
of our industry, we need a framework and a set of
tools that enable us to provide business leadership
and customer insight. Physician CRM begins with
the right business and customer questions, finds
the necessary answers through the capture and
analysis of physician data across multiple channels,
and then implements a new marketing and content
plan validated by the continuous feedback loop of
physician engagement.
Are you ready to do this?
According to Brian Smith, professor and author
of Making Marketing Happen, the process for
developing marketing strategy in an environment
of both complexity and turbulence requires a
balance of sophisticated research and vision.
Research works to unwind the complexity of a
multifaceted environment and provide the timely
customer insight needed to make smart marketing
investment decisions. Vision comes from leaders
with the nerve to honestly acknowledge and
engage the market turbulence head-on.
Our experience at closerlook, inc. is that
without the internal cultural support within
the pharmaceutical company for both of these
components—the permission for the product
marketing team to take risks and the willingness
to follow what the data reveal—the marketing
strategy will be weak and the execution
disappointing.
Physician CRM involves a serious investment
of resources and commitment, but given the
inexorable market trends we are experiencing,
it is our best path forward for transforming our
businesses to effectively and efficiently deliver
the best value we can for our customers.
Reference:
1.
©2012 closerlook, inc.
The Forrester Wave™: US Database Marketing Service Providers, Q1 2011.
closerlook.com
page 4
Are you seeing the whole picture? Gain insight and clarity through physician CRM.
David Ormesher, CEO
In addition to his entrepreneurial leadership,
Ormesher is also active on several non-profit
boards. He serves on the boards of the Lyric Opera
of Chicago; i.c.stars, an innovative business and
leadership training program for inner-city youth;
and Global Relief and Development Partners,
building the capacity of entrepreneurs in emerging
economies. He is also an adjunct professor at the
Illinois Institute of Technology Stuart Graduate
School of Business, where he teaches Customer
Relationship Management.
Since founding the company in 1987, Ormesher
has created a rich, cohesive culture at closerlook by
maintaining a hands-on approach to building client
success and sustaining lasting account relationships.
He has guided the growth and evolution of the firm,
attracting a world-class team of account strategy,
user experience, design, technology and relationship
marketing services experts.
Want to continue this discussion? Get in touch
with david ormesher at [email protected]
or follow him on Twitter @ormshr
David Ormesher provides
leadership and direction for
closerlook, inc., a strategic
marketing agency serving
healthcare. As founder and
CEO, Ormesher has taken closerlook from a
small, creative media boutique and grown it
into a recognized leader in creating innovative
relationship marketing solutions that help
pharmaceutical companies get closer to their
most important customers.
Ormesher is a frequent speaker at marketing
conferences and is a recognized thought leader
in the areas of interactive and relationship
marketing for healthcare.
A version of this article, titled “Putting the ‘Relationship’ in CRM”, appeared as the cover story
of the February 2012 issue of PM360 magazine.
©2012 closerlook, inc.
closerlook.com
page 5