Commercial teams nowadays are being asked to deliver sales pitches while swimming in an ocean of product, customer, and performance data. This is nowhere more challenging than in the highly regulated pharmaceutical industry, where promoting new treatments must be calibrated so as to grab the attention of busy clinicians with little spare time and convert it into business without resorting to hard selling, all while reaching the right stakeholders whose influence can multiply the effect of a sale. Deploying a Big Data-driven market research approach can be a powerful tool in orchestrating such a tightrope act.
Today, a dependence on labour-intensive manual research on the one hand and an overwhelming amount of raw data on the other can surpass the analytical capacity of even the most effective sales rep, leading to missed opportunities to leverage untapped insights.
This is where a Big Data-driven approach can help. A well-designed research methodology can breathe new life into lead generation by identifying with laser-like precision those clinicians that are most open to receiving sales pitches in a particular disease area. To generate such insights, it can automate the tracking of some clinician activities that tend to go unnoticed, the number of times a drug or therapeutic area is mentioned in a speech or presentation, or pre-print publishing in medRxiv and other non-peer reviewed repositories. The value of monitoring these activities is that it pinpoints in real time, sometimes serendipitously, the latest medical topics that circulate in the medical community before they make it to top journals. Having such customized knowledge at their fingertips can be extremely valuable for reps and marketers alike, as it provides them with a blueprint for personalizing their communication with individual clinicians. This increases the odds of securing precious “attention share” and, ultimately, converting attention into sales.
Another way Big Data can aid brand teams in refining customer value propositions is by providing insights into KOL feedback and scientific discussion around a given drug or disease area. Such insights, derived mostly from social listening via Twitter, Reddit, and other online platforms, allow pharma teams to filter marketing pitches on individual KOL criteria as expressed in more subtle and informal ways. Insights may include conversations about competitor products and activities that can help reps anticipate and “disarm” unhelpful comparisons, and they may even be geolocated for even higher customization.
To apply this level of granularity to their B2B and B2C operations, pharma companies need to invest in the necessary tools and capabilities. Opting for an external platform that collects, consolidates, and analyses such data can be a powerful, cost-effective solution.
However companies choose to go about it, the important thing is to let go of the “analogue mindset” and pivot to more data-rich, nuanced business intelligence tactics. The stakes of not doing so are simply too high: insufficiently targeted marketing, sales pitch overload for clinicians, burnout for sales team members, and reduced market share for the firm. Some organisations are fully aware of the benefits of leveraging Big Data in their marketing strategies, yet are failing in the implementation.
Healthscape, a software platform that transforms pharma-relevant data into actionable insights, has answers to these questions. By simplifying the process from data collection to analysis across multiple categories – clinical usage, social listening, competitor activity, events, and publications – it removes a major logistical challenge for marketing and sales professionals, as they no longer have to extract and triage this information manually. Its suite of customizable tools and algorithms slices and dices the data any which way that makes decision-making most efficient and coherent. In a nutshell, it helps commercial teams develop a more sophisticated understanding of HCPs and empowers them to focus on the highest-hanging fruit: building KOL loyalty and long-term sales potential.
So talk to us and let us show you a demo of how Healthscape can supercharge your business. We are sure it will delight you.
