Pharmaceutical Marketing - To Health Care Providers - Pharmaceutical Representatives

Pharmaceutical Representatives

Currently, there are approximately 81,000 pharmaceutical sales representatives in the United States pursuing some 830,000 pharmaceutical prescribers. A pharmaceutical representative will often try to see a given physician every few weeks. Representatives often have a call list of about 200-300 physicians with 120-180 targets that should be visited in 1-2 or 3 week cycle.

Because of the large size of the pharmaceutical sales force, the organization, management, and measurement of effectiveness of the sales force are significant business challenges. Management tasks are usually broken down into the areas of physician targeting, sales force size and structure, sales force optimization, call planning, and sales forces effectiveness. A few pharmaceutical companies have realized that training sales representatives on high science alone is not enough, especially when most products are similar in quality. Thus, training sales representatives on relationship selling techniques in addition to medical science and product knowledge, can make a difference in sales force effectiveness. Specialist physicians are relying more and more on specialty sales reps for product information, because they are more knowledgeable than primary care reps.

The United States has 81,000 pharmaceutical representatives or 1 for every 7.9 physicians. The number and persistence of pharmaceutical representatives has placed a burden on the time of physicians. "As the number of reps went up, the amount of time an average rep spent with doctors went down—so far down, that tactical scaling has spawned a strategic crisis. Physicians no longer spend much time with sales reps, nor do they see this as a serious problem."

Marketers must decide on the appropriate size of a sales force needed to sell a particular portfolio of drugs to the target market. Factors influencing this decision are the optimal reach (how many physicians to see) and frequency (how often to see them) for each individual physician, how many patients suffer from that disease state, how many sales representatives to devote to office and group practice and how many to devote to hospital accounts if needed. To aid this decision, customers are broken down into different classes according to their prescription behavior, patient population, and of course, their business potential.

Marketers attempt to identify the set of physicians most likely to prescribe a given drug. Historically, this was done by measuring the number of total prescriptions (TRx) and new prescriptions (NRx) per week that each physician writes. This information is collected by commercial vendors. The physicians are then "deciled" into ten groups based on their writing patterns. Higher deciles are more aggressively targeted. Some pharmaceutical companies use additional information such as:

• profitability of a prescription (script),
• accessibility of the physician,
• tendency of the physician to use the pharmaceutical company's drugs,
• effect of managed care formularies on the ability of the physician to prescribe a drug,
• the adoption sequence of the physician (that is, how readily the physician adopts new drugs in place of older treatments), and
• the tendency of the physician to use a wide palette of drugs
• influence that physicians have on their colleagues.

Data for drugs prescribed in a hospital are not usually available at the physician level. Advanced analytic techniques are used to value physicians in a hospital setting.

Physicians are perhaps the most important component in sales. They write the prescriptions that determine which drugs will be used by people. Influencing the physician is the key to pharmaceutical sales. Historically, this was done by a large pharmaceutical sales force. A medium-sized pharmaceutical company might have a sales force of 1000 representatives. The largest companies have tens of thousands of representatives around the world. Sales representatives called upon physicians regularly, providing clinical information, approved journal articles, and free drug samples. This is still the approach today; however, economic pressures on the industry are causing pharmaceutical companies to rethink the traditional sales process to physicians. The industry has seen a large scale adoption of Pharma CRM systems that works on laptops and more recently tablets. The new age pharmaceutical representative is armed with key data at his fingertips and tools to maximize the time spent with physicians.