Publication

PA's survey on Customer Relationship Management in the Pharmaceutical Industry (2000)

How much longer will pharmaceutical CEOs tolerate the 'organized chaos' of their sales and marketing operation? With the advent of fully integrated IT, direct Internet/intranet relationships and ever expanding customer demands, the argument for throwing hordes of sales people at the market to maximize the hit rate is looking increasingly thin.

PA's survey among the UK sales and marketing departments of pharmaceutical companies indicates that the biggest problems for the industry revolve around its IT capability and also the cultural inertia arising from past success. Putting it simply, nearly all the companies we spoke to shape their sales and marketing strategies around their products and not their customers. The result, in the increasingly segmented healthcare market, is that customers get mixed messages from their relationships with the organization, with the 'left hand' of the company truly not knowing what the 'right hand' is doing.

The industry traditionally tries to overcome this with sheer weight of shoe leather and car miles. But the days of ever larger sales forces must be nearing their end - the ratio of incremental sales versus marginal cost of recruiting/running additional sales people must be moving towards zero. Attacking the culture of selling by the 'warrior salesman' and getting the company's IT to support a single customer view are two large challenges which pharmaceuticals must overcome.