Can digital marketing compensate
for the reduction of your GP sales force?

While most pharma companies are strongly reducing their GP sales force efforts, the GP continues to be a gatekeeper and in many cases a key decision maker for medicines. We asked our digital pharma marketing expert-trainer Fonny Schenck how pharma can keep its strategic link to GPs and whether multichannel marketing really offers a/the solution.

His company, Across Health (www.a-cross.com/health), has performed several simulations and forecasting exercises over the past few years, leveraging the so-called “rep-equivalent” concept based on their marketing mix assessment projects. This approach, which relates the rep impact to that of other channels, has consistently shown that “alternative channels” indeed can compensate for the loss of sales force SOV (Share of Voice) under the condition that the scale of multichannel communications can be dramatically increased, the competitive environment is favourable and attitudinal segmentation is rigorously implemented.

Two recent examples illustrate this point perfectly:

• In the US, Astrazeneca decided to significantly reduce its GP field force support for its best-selling drug Nexium and bring in an outbound call center with 110 agents, a full-service website and 300 service reps. In this way, 837 reps (or 2.2 million call equivalents) were transitioned to 50% of this (300 service reps + 110 call centre agents) at a lower cost per customer-facing agent. The brand preference and market share remained strong during the reporting period (around 1 year). More info can be found on http://bit.ly/iciyMf (pages 27 and following)
• In a similar vein, Ferring UK reduced its (rented) sales force efforts towards GPs for a specific brand to zero and replaced it with a robust multichannel approach, i.e. not just a one-off digital pilot but a solid investment into multichannel campaigns. The results? Sales continued to go up while the cost-to-serve dropped dramatically (this case was presented at Eyeforpharma e-marketing conference in 2010).

So, what does this all mean?

Pharma continues to up its investment in multichannel, but only incrementally. According to Across Health’ research in 2010, pharma spends less than 5% of its marketing budget on digital. This boils down to less than 1% of the total sales & marketing budget ... while leading industries are earmarking 20% or more to digital! A radical resource reallocations and zero-based budgeting is overdue. The examples of Astrazeneca US and Ferring UK show what a bold approach can be very effective.

“ The digital marketing course is a must for both newcomers and more experienced people in digital marketing. Bringing together marketing strategy and e-tactics, this course will help anyone to implement a rigid strategy in his/her company.”

Nico Smets, Market Manager Primary Care, Merck Serono - Belgium