Promotional Resourcing— Call Quantity vs Quality

by David Ledger

Many companies are seeing diminishing ROI per call at the same time that they see reductions in call frequency to key customers (effectively a double whammy!).

While the band-aid approach may be to reduce sales representative numbers (to improve profitability), that will not address the underlying issue of improving promotional resourcing to the key prescribers who can positively (or negatively) drive your brand sales.

It would certainly appear that a few companies have recognised that there is significant productivity gain to be had by improving their call allocation and specific brand detailing strategies. Significant improvements in detail frequency for key brands to selected target segments can be gained through resource re-allocation initiatives with no increase in sales force expenditure.

Differentiated brand messages and value added service strategies to specific customer segments are also playing a more important role in helping companies drive improvement in call quality, message perception and willingness to prescribe.

Call Allocation

The first step to improving call allocation is to understand the current situation. Companies are typically measuring total calls and the percentage of calls that are going to targets. In addition, they are measuring average calls per target and the % coverage of targets.

These metrics will often give very little insight into what is really happening around sales representative call allocation. Call allocation needs to be driven by more meaningful metrics in order to understand where under-resourcing and over-resourcing are taking place.

The highlighted metrics in the example below may satisfy the organisation that everything is well, but the % detailed @ frequency metric (which is often not measured), highlights that most targets are undercalled. When this metric is analysed in combination with the other data, you can also see that a small but significant number of targets are being detailed with very high frequency (overcalling). Additionally, while the calls to non- targets make up 30% of total calls, the coverage, call frequency and % detailed @ frequency metrics indicate that a moderate number of non-targets are also being seen too often.

Because of the metrics being measured, the organisation may not even be aware of this inappropriate resourcing issue.

In the example above, additional resource can be unlocked in two ways;

• By shifting more calls from non- targets to targets.
• By reducing overcalling on targets

Both will have the effect of improving the % of targets detailed at budgeted frequency objectives—a key driver of revenue improvement.

Brand Detailing Strategies

When setting a brand strategy, one of the key objectives needs to be determining the level of promotional activity you want to achieve for each target customer. While promotional activity can be interpreted very broadly and includes all types and channels of promotion, the focus here is on brand detail frequency. (We will explore resource allocation modeling and complimentary/supplementary promotional channel strategies in future articles).

Few companies have the luxury of promoting a single brand. For those who have multiple promoted brands and sales teams, the challenges of brand strategy implementation are many.

• How well aligned are the brands’ target audiences to each other?
• Can I gain synergy by promoting multiple brands across sales teams?
• How many details does each representative need to make for each brand?
• Should I consider the relative importance of brand detail position?
• How responsive can I be if a competitor increases their detailing effort?

All difficult questions!

Many companies compromise by selecting a target audience who are deemed to have relevance across the brand portfolio. Detailing strategies are replaced by more manageable call strategies. Typically then, a company with three sales teams and three promoted brands ends up forcing a first, second and third brand detail order which is flip-flopped from team to team.

While this makes targeting implementation manageable, the downside is that all of the brand strategies usually suffer and performance metrics based on call activity will not provide meaningful information about what is happening at the brand level.

Targeting Effectiveness

We have calculated the efficiency of this detailing approach to be typically as low as 30% (not very efficient!). This is normally for the following reasons;

• Fewer that 50% of the target doctors have a strong interest in the primary brand(s) that are being detailed in 2 of every 3 calls.
• It is recognised that the “value” of a brand detail in second and third position is reduced (vs first detail).
• As many as 50% of calls never achieve a meaningful second (or third) brand promotional message.

So where the brand of interest is in the second or third detail position, the chances of it being detailed are low and the value of that detail are significantly reduced.

We have calculated that when a brand is planned to be detailed 6 times by three sales teams, where the detail position is 1, 2 & 3 for each team respectively, rather than the customer achieving the desired 18 details, they will only get ~8.5 detail unit equivalents (as seen in the example above). On top of that, as many as 66% of the target customers seen will not be relevant for that brand.

Brand strategy and targeting effectiveness are areas worthy of review for companies as the opportunity to drive performance gains in these areas is truely significant.

Call Quality

One of the easiest ways to improve call quality is to ensure that the brand(s) that is being detailed is relevant to the individual customer. This is significantly more difficult than it sounds! Customer profiling, segmentation, brand portfolio alignment and targeting implementation all play a critical role in achieving a high percentage of brand detailing activity to the right customers.

Other aspects of call quality come from aligning the brand promotional message, detailing frequency, value added service strategies and sampling strategies with the individual customer’s profile. Organisations that recognise and implement differentiated strategies to customers which are determined by that individuals product uptake, prescribing usage patterns, product experience and other defined profile elements will achieve much higher call quality scores, message recall and willingness to prescribe.

Quantity comes with Quality

By considering call quality in the context of the right brand to the right customer with the right detail frequency and the right promotional message, it is possible to drive >50% increase in details to targets with no increase in overall promotional resource.

While the challenge of monitoring and managing the implementation should not be underestimated these types of performance improvement are definitely achievable.

About Vedere Group

Vedere Group help clients improve revenue and profitability through improvements in sales and marketing performance. Vedere Group provide a range of Reporting Suite Performance Reporting Services, Profiling & Segmentation software, Performance Scorecard software, Strategic Sales & Marketing Consultancy services and Strategic Data Analysis services to the Pharmaceutical industry.

About the Author

David Ledger is Managing Director of Vedere Group. David has 18 years experience consulting to and working within the pharmaceutical industry. After heading up the global sales and marketing effectiveness group for a top 10 Pharma company based in Europe, David set up his own company in 2000 to help clients improve revenue and profitability through sales and marketing performance improvement. Over the last 6+ years, in addition to working with all of the top 10 international R&D companies, David has achieved accolades for twice winning New Zealand Exporter of the Year (Services & Emerging categories) and Deloitte Top 50 fastest growing company in New Zealand.