Optimizing the marketing mix in pharma

Context & Objectives

Our large pharmaceutical client invested millions of Euros in a wide range of initiatives to support its sales efforts: sales representatives of course, but also trade publications or call center outbound campaigns. The question was: how do we make sure this is all money well spent? Is there a way to make the most of our sales & marketing investments?

Although drug rep visits are far from obsolete, analytics can improve their return on investment. Thus, a key challenge was to save time and money by prioritizing visits from pharmaceutical reps where it would count the most. 

Approach

We analyzed the sales rep visit patterns and matched them with doctors’ prescribing habits to maximize each visit’s impact, either by altering the visit plan or by recommending alternative products to discuss. We also built scenarios on budget reallocations between other promotional channels such as outbound calls or trade press to further maximize the ROI.

Results

Pharmaceutical representatives can focus on specific physicians in a geographical area with patients most likely to need promoted medication based on predictive analysis.

The recommendations were fed to all international branches into the Pharma’s existing workflows so that no new software was required.

Ultimately, the marketing mix optimization led to a better allocation of hundreds of thousands of Euros in marketing budget globally.