Call Planning That Delivers on Brand Strategy

Using new information sources to determine prescriber value to a brand by Matthew Linkewich and Jay Margolis, IMS Health.

“When a call plan is developed narrowly on the basis of physicians’ new prescription volume and brand market share exclusively, the sales force cannot hope to support the brand strategy with any degree of precision”

The challenge of optimally reaching physicians with resonating messages is an involved process. Each stage along the way is dependent on the precision of the one before. Creating a call plan may be a rather mechanical last step, but its impact hinges upon the thinking that has gone into the overall strategy — most particularly in the segmentation and brand strategy phases much further back in the overall process.

The case for change
About 75 percent of pharmaceutical companies are still determining which physicians they’ll call on — and how often — just as they did ten years ago when the name of the game was “reach and frequency”. Even in a time of increasing financial pressures, thinner profit margins, a migration to specialty products and physician backlash against a waiting room full of pharmaceutical reps, companies still continue to allocate their sales resources on the basis of physicians’ prescribing volume and market share alone. With leadership focusing on improving field force productivity, it only makes sense to rethink the way sales efforts are directed.

For a product to have the best opportunity to win in the marketplace, there must be a seamless progression from market intelligence and analytics to brand strategy and finally to sales execution. When a call plan is developed narrowly on the basis of physicians’ prescription volume and brand market share exclusively, the resultant plan is not only a divergence from the brand strategy, but also can be widely inefficient given unseen or unaccounted market pressures such as managed care. As such, representatives will buy themselves executing an errant plan that does not maximize their full potential.

When properly conceived and configured, the call plan directs reps to those physicians whose practice characteristics, constellation of prescribing behaviors and attitudes are conducive to supporting the brand goals. Even without involving primary research to uncover physician attitudes, segmentations based on secondary data sources can identify — and subsequently the call plan can direct reps to — physicians who, for example, support the brand, and in the case of a new brand are early adopters of new treatment alternatives and generate true new business (as opposed to repeat prescriptions).

Fortunately, there are solutions available to help companies capitalize on these additional insights in their call plans. In many cases, use of these additional insights has aided representative inputs to the overall process, in many cases raising their satisfaction with the insights delivered by the home office.

When to refresh call plans
In general, pharmaceutical companies should be refreshing their call plans about twice a year. One sure sign that it’s time to overhaul the call plan, not simply update it, is if sales efforts are not gaining any traction in the marketplace. Other triggers include a major market event (loss of exclusivity), change in the company’s product portfolio and a change in a competitor’s product mix. The bottom line is that as products advance through their lifecycle and market dynamics shift, brand strategy should be continually reevaluated and therefore the call plan should be revised to reflect the new marketing approach.

Call planning, being downstream from segmenting and identification of prospects, is totally dependent on the thoroughness and accuracy of these earlier steps.

Let’s review the information components currently available from secondary data sources for segmenting and selecting physicians before we cover the call planning process itself.

Identifying the right physicians
The secret to a good call plan is a highly refined prospect list. And the secret to a good prospect list is choosing the right variables upon which to segment the physician universe in the first place. While the industry is not yet broadly using many of the behavioral information components on the following list, all are readily available and provide insight into the brand potential that resides within each physician’s office:

• Standard prescribing volume and market share metrics
• Promotional responsiveness
• Physician practice and patient characteristics from APLD
• Managed care affiliations
• Lifetime value of physicians
• Portfolio value
• Affiliations and influence

Call planning made easy
Following the segmentation exercise (which ideally was conducted on an array of variables), all physicians in the universe are assigned a ‘score’ based on their estimated value to the brand. They are then segmented based upon their overall portfolio valuation. Now, it’s a matter of determining which segments to include, which to exclude, how many calls should be directed at each individual and in what order products should be discussed.

A computer program then tests various scenarios, territory by territory, to determine the optimum number of calls for each physician and the best order of the product details. It is important at this stage to look across the portfolio and to make trade-offs according to what will be most beneficial to the company overall. To find the best approach for the company, the analysis must take a holistic approach to evaluating the portfolio mix and promotional allocation.

For each scenario, the computer model will estimate the expected impact on sales associated with each level of effort, product by product.

A blueprint for field success
The resulting call plan provides each rep with a road map that specifies which physicians to call on, how often and in what order to detail products. Depending upon how much information the company wants to share with reps and on the capabilities of its sales force automation system, individual call plans can also indicate the reasons behind the instructions for each physician. For instance, the plan might indicate that a physician is particularly responsive to promotion and that is why he or she is to receive a higher volume of calls. Or, it might explain that one physician who is a high volume prescriber is nevertheless to receive few calls because of his or her managed care status. Or, it could specify that a given physician frequently switches patients from the company’s brand.

While not all companies want to share this level of detail with reps, it is potentially important because the reasons for channeling effort to two physicians in the same decile might be completely different. It can also help reps adjust to the changes — sometimes dramatic — that they see in their call plans when factors other than prescribing volume and share are taken into consideration. The new plan may ask them to forego calling on physicians they’ve always regarded as their top priority and suddenly begin calling on relatively unknown physicians.

The more reps understand about why decisions were made, the more confidence they will have in their new direction. Ultimately, this will lead to a greater ability to effectively implement brand strategy and drive portfolio performance.

A prime example
One company operating in a chronic therapy market with a relatively small sales force needed help in creating a call plan that would allow it to compete effectively against much larger companies. Sales for the company’s product were relatively flat; only 11 percent of its market growth was coming from new patients and persistence was low across the class.

Given its market situation, the company realized that its success depended upon capturing market share within physician’s offices that may not be on the radar screen of its larger competitors.

The company’s initial volumetric deciling exercise reduced the number of prospective physicians for their product from nearly 300,000 in the universe to approximately 71,000 — still too many for the company to reach given the size of its sales force. However, once a new initial filtering process and segmentation parameters were applied to the universe of physicians the prospect list dropped to a much more manageable 32,000 physicians. Physicians were selected for in-person promotion based on their new to brand volume, product share, promotional response level and managed care influence.

Money on the table
Traditional volume-based call planning has been utilized for years due to its simplicity and ease of implementation. However, this has come at the expense of the brands’ ability to capitalize on their strategy and positioning. Companies that fail to take advantage of the new information resources available are ultimately sacrificing brand success by not properly equipping their largest promotional investment, the sales force.

The real issue is the money on the table. Whether it is sourced via potential expense reductions, better overall use of promotional resources or though sales increases, the use of these new information resources can provide a more precise, informed and focused call plan.