Sales Effectiveness: Strategies for Improved Results

While pharmaceutical companies have traditionally depended on detail representatives calling on physicians to kick-start and sustain drug prescriptions, the changing healthcare landscape now demands new approaches.

With the industry’s vertical integration (hospitals acquiring physician practices) access to physicians is severely limited. In fact, 34.7% of medical practices owned by health systems have no-see policies and 52% require appointments. The average physician detail rep meeting lasts less than 5 minutes for primary care and 8 minutes for specialists.

Today it is large employers, hospitals, health plans, and prescription benefit managers that determine the sales success of newly launched pharmaceuticals. The sooner those entities add the drug to their formularies, the more successful the drug’s launch. A key success metric today is Time to Formulary™.

Key Facts for Winning in the New Pharmaceutical Marketplace

  • Employer-sponsored formularies control roughly half of all pharmaceutical spending in the US
  • Tier positioning of drugs is a primary factor in most physicians’ willingness to prescribe
  • At a time when physician practices are increasingly consolidating into larger systems, those systems are also moving to limit access by pharmaceutical sales representatives
  • Purchasers are demanding a higher quality interaction with sales representatives
  • Pharmaceutical companies need a clearly defined value statement which utilizes clinical studies and evidence-based medicine

Thomas Group Approach

Thomas Group’s change agents have extensive experience restructuring, redesigning, and reenergizing business process improvement. In the area of pharmaceutical sales, Thomas Group offers a pragmatic approach to generating winning strategies and solution implementation that lead to rapid, sustainable business improvement. A key underpinning of Thomas Group’s approach is to conquer complexity with a systematic approach to identifying key improvement levers and prioritizing and sequencing improvement initiatives for maximum benefit. One of those levers is Time to Formulary.

Enhanced Time to Formulary can be a critical competitive advantage to maximize Return on Investment (ROI). We define Time to Formulary as the time from drug approval to inclusion on the formularies of health plans and large, self-insured employers. Thomas Group offers Time to Formulary solutions that can be deployed independently or together depending on your needs.

Formulary-Driven Sales and Marketing

Thomas Group’s formulary-driven sales and marketing strategy can position you for success in this rapidly changing landscape. Key elements of the strategy include:

  • Creating a sales pipeline by targeting the formulary decision-makers at large employers, health plans, hospitals, and prescription plans
  • Identifying and executing new strategies to gain access to these formulary decision makers
  • Migrating the role of the sales force to that of a value-added, consultative model
  • Retraining sales representatives to work more efficiently and boost customer satisfaction by sharpening sales strategies and collaborating across multiple business units
  • Integrating components from marketing and clinical support to create a truly value-added consultative offering that guarantees you a seat at the table.

Today’s market requires a sea-change in sales strategy. Thomas Group can help you design and implement a turn-key solution to meet this need.

Formulary Driven Commercialization

In today’s environment, the commercialization process for a new product must include a focus on accelerated Time to Formulary. Many pharmaceutical companies do not even measure this time, let alone actively manage it.

The keys to success for accelerated Time to Formulary include:

  • Correctly defining and measuring this time
  • Identifying and integrating the right resource skill sets, generally those people who already have knowledge and experience addressing large employers and health plans
  • Formally incorporating appropriate tasks and accountabilities into the new product commercialization process

Perhaps you have not yet defined the path from clinical trials through commercialization in a way that measures and addresses Time to Formulary. Or if you have done a preliminary review, you may not be happy with what you have found. Either way, Thomas Group can help you assess the shortcomings and define a rapidly implementable solution to optimize new product ROI through dramatically improving this critical revenue constraint.

Strategy and Tactics

Whether it is sales and marketing, channel management, or new product development and rollout, we have the experience in strategy development and implementing operational tactics to help you get the results you need and want. We work hand in hand with customers to collaborate and coordinate within many pharmaceutical company business units, including:

  • R & D
  • Clinical Trials
  • Strategic Planning
  • Sales and Marketing
  • Operations
  • Analytics, Metrics, etc.

Thomas Group also works with its clients on:

  • Merger integration – resources, culture, strategy
  • Organization alignment
  • Effective use of sales team
  • Metrics and accountability
  • Communication platform for strategic accounts – how to communicate outward
  • Organization and infrastructure recommendations

Benefits to successful program implementations include reaching economies of scale, freeing capital for profitable investment options and considering more make-or-buy decisions. The entire supply chain is connected and ready to rapidly launch new products on the market.

Contact Thomas Group for more information implementing Time to Formulary sales strategies in your organization.