From Data to Decisions: A Guide to Commercial Analytics in the Pharma Industry

Posted on : September 9th 2024

Commercial Pharma Analytics

In the pharmaceutical industry, the role of commercial analytics is becoming increasingly crucial for driving growth and enhancing operational efficiency. As the industry faces tremendous pressures from regulatory bodies, rising R&D costs, and a more competitive market, leveraging advanced analytics has emerged as a key differentiator. This blog explores how pharmaceutical companies can leverage commercial analytics to enhance their operations, maximize market opportunities, and achieve sustainable success.

Understanding Commercial Analytics in Pharma

Commercial analytics in the pharmaceutical industry involves the systematic use of data and analytical techniques to support decision-making in areas such as marketing, sales, and market access. The scope of commercial analytics extends from understanding market dynamics and customer behavior to optimizing sales strategies and ensuring regulatory compliance.

Key components include:

• Market Segmentation and Targeting: Identifying and categorizing customers based on their needs, behaviors, and potential value to tailor marketing efforts effectively.

• Sales Force Optimization: Utilizing data to allocate sales resources efficiently, ensuring that the right products are promoted to the right healthcare providers (HCPs) at the right time.

• Pricing and Market Access: Analyzing market conditions, competitive landscape, and regulatory requirements to set optimal pricing strategies and ensure product accessibility.

• Customer Engagement: Personalizing interactions with HCPs and other stakeholders to improve engagement and enhance the overall customer experience.

The Role of Advanced Analytics in Pharma

The integration of advanced analytics, such as machine learning and AI, into commercial operations has changed drastically how pharmaceutical companies operate. These technologies enable more accurate forecasting, better understanding of market trends, and improved decision-making processes.

How do we help?

• Automating Market Adaptability in Pharmaceutical Pricing: One of the major challenges in pharma pricing is the time-consuming manual tracking of drug prices. We help automating this process and as a result the pharmaceutical companies can significantly improve their operational efficiency, ensuring accurate and timely price monitoring and compliance with healthcare regulations.

• Tailoring Communication Strategies: We help build personalized communication strategies for HCPs (healthcare professionals), driven by advanced ML algorithms. This can improve the order and priority of messaging to each individual doctor.

• Personalized Incentive Compensation: We analyze historical sales data from pharmaceutical companies to identify key factors driving the success of sales representatives with incentives and rewards. Implementing our personalized sales incentive solution leads to a notable improvement in sales performance. Our advanced analytics models consistently achieve a remarkable 90% accuracy in predicting sales outcomes, providing reliable insights for precise decision-making.
  
  We use Machine learning algorithms to identify the relationships between call activities and sales outcomes, and it can improve the sales call efficiency and accuracy in the machine learning models.

• Personalized Prompt Engine: This solution provides prompts to sales representatives in various situations, such as during start-of-day or mid-day planning, pre-call and in-clinic activities, end-of-call reviews, data quality checks, and overall performance assessments. The model designs these prompts to be social, motivational, and situational, activating based on specific triggers, circumstances, and frequency.

Strategic Benefits of Commercial Analytics

The strategic deployment of commercial analytics offers several benefits to pharmaceutical companies:

• Enhanced Market Penetration: By accurately identifying and targeting high-value segments, companies can better penetrate the market and increase their share.

• Improved Customer Satisfaction: Personalized and timely interactions with HCPs and other stakeholders improve the overall experience and build stronger relationships.

• Optimized Resource Allocation: Data-driven insights enable more effective allocation of resources, ensuring that investments in sales and marketing yield the highest returns.

• Compliance and Risk Management: Advanced analytics helps in monitoring and ensuring compliance with ever-evolving regulations, thereby mitigating risks associated with non-compliance.

Overcoming Challenges in Commercial Analytics

Despite its potential, the adoption of commercial analytics in pharma is not without challenges. Common obstacles include fragmented data sources, lack of data integration, and resistance to change within organizations. However, by adopting a structured approach, such as the RADAR Data-to-Value Methodology, organizations can systematically address these challenges and fully unlock the value from their data​.

Conclusion

The future of pharmaceutical commercial operations lies in the effective use of analytics. Companies that invest in and adopt advanced analytics will not only stay ahead of the competition but will also be better equipped to navigate the complexities of the market, drive growth, and enhance patient outcomes. As the industry continues to evolve, the role of commercial analytics will only become more central to achieving strategic objectives. At Straive, we have been working with leading pharma companies for the past few years and doubling up their revenues with custom commercial pharma solutions.

Want to know more? Book a free demo call with our commercial pharma analytics experts..