Optimizing Life Science Analytical Solutions – Part 1
So you’ve invested a lot of time and effort in developing a Life Science commercial analytics solution to monitor the market performance of your drug or medical device. Are you getting what you expected from the investment? Obviously, the goal is to see a dramatic shift in business performance through use of analytics. At the end of the day, it’s about increasing sales – making the Field more productive by helping them focus on the right things, see the data they need to see, while lightening the workload of the home office analytics team.
One of the best ways to realize the value of your investment is by measuring your sales force utilization of the solution. Are they really using all of that clever work? If utilization is low, it may be time to reassess the implementation and try some new techniques. In this 2 part series, we will highlight just what you need to do in order to optimize your analytical solutions for Life Sciences.
Design the Solution Around the Business Process
Many companies (with the best of intentions) spend abundant time and resources building reports to suit every request and every need of the Field. While this effort leads to many impressive reports, it also causes information overload – too much irrelevant information!
Sales reps and managers want it simple. First, give careful thought to the user business process (e.g., sales rep pre-call planning) and second, the typical business questions that might arise from this process (e.g., how valuable is the MD? With what payers is he affiliated? Is he writing your drug? Is the hospital ordering your device?). From this research, an elegant analytical solution can be designed that fully supports your business process and in turn optimizes performance.
This change in mindset means giving the Field the information it truly needs, in as few reports as possible. Wondering if that beautiful dashboard is actually needed? Try excluding it one week and see if anyone notices.
Realize Your Audience Is Not a Group of Analysts
Field Sales is good at (and paid to) sell. As impressive as a pivot table can be, asking a sales rep to interpret its contents can be expecting too much. Using only relevant information and adding targeted, intelligent business alerts can help the rep quickly synthesize the data and see what is most relevant to his business – and get on with the important work of impacting sales and increasing performance. Removing the user pain points of manipulating data, searching for insights and understanding analytics will increase the usage, and thereby value, of your solution.
To Be Continued…
Want to learn even more ways to boost Life Sciences business performance? Stay tuned for part 2 of this series as we look at additional methods proven to significantly augment the power of Analytical Solutions.
