Taking Control - how to take real control of your segmentation and targeting

“The days of relying only on a third party to supply you with your target lists are ending. The key to effective segmentation and targeting lies in combining your own internal customer knowledge with purchased data, through intelligent process, and having a robust understanding of your customer.”

How many times have you asked yourself whether your salesforce could be targeting accounts and customers more effectively? How often have you heard the usual complaints about the target lists you send out, such as:-

“These targets are all well and good, but I can’t see them”, or,

“Half of these people have no interest in our product at all and I’ve known them for years”?

Whilst buying a target list can be useful, it’s an expensive solution. You will get greater accuracy and a better implementation if you develop your own segmentation processes by using wider and more innovative sources of information.

The challenges – third party supplied target lists

Segmentation and targeting can be a tricky business: more often than not, you place your trust in the supplier that an expensive list is accurate and will help you deliver your sales budget.

There lies the risk: when it comes to meeting your financial goals, you place a large weight on the shoulders of your externally provided target list, trusting that it provides you with a sound basis for directing your salesforce activity.

The search for the ultimate target list is perhaps the pharma industry’s very own quest for the Holy Grail - a list of those customers who will prescribe (or influence the prescribing of) your products in high volumes.  Various list providers compete for your business, and each one may have an advantage. Some claim to be able to provide you with a named list of your highest prescribers; others can supply a list of surgeries ranked by various sales measures. They all have, however, one inherent limitation - they only use and supply their own data. They can’t do the really smart thing, which is to combine other sources of information (from other providers and sources outside of their company) to enrich the list of targets. Further, the list you buy could also be available to your competitors. So it’s easily conceivable that both you and your rivals could be targeting the same customers and the same accounts.

Another key disadvantage of a third party supplied target list is that a list based on sales patterns is only looking at past prescribing behaviour. There is no account of the many additional factors that will affect the future uptake of your product. Actual historical usage alone does not give you the full view of a customer’s ability to continue prescribing for you, and more importantly no real foresight as to how much more they could prescribe.

So, given a choice, when you are deciding how to update your targeting process, what could you do differently?

Plotting a Measurable Way Forward – targeting with precision and ROI

Whether you have a large multiple team salesforce or a small specialist team, representatives need to be focused where the likelihood of ROI is the highest. This requires leading edge segmentation and targeting processes.

Whilst external data sources have undoubted value, their real value is fully found when they are combined with your own thorough understanding and measurement of customer value. This is achievable through a robust process.

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Questions or comments? E-mail us at info@evantageconsulting.co.uk

“eVantage devised and implemented a segmentation strategy far more accurately and practically than we could ourselves: their industry experience and high calibre consulting service produces a powerful and valuable combination that has allowed us to implement something truly excellent”.

 

Drummond Paris, CEO

Novartis UK