Optimize Revenue Generation Engine through Performance Management

By Niteo Partners

The life sciences industry continues to be challenged by the competing demands of regulatory drivers, distribution requirements and changing patient demographics. The key to an organization’s survival is the ability to forecast sales, anticipate customer demands, minimize operational cost and forecast the impact of regulatory change. To be successful, companies need to better understand the data they have and transform it into actionable information. Performance Management solutions can help organizations address this critical issue by ultimately allowing companies to align tactics with strategy and integrate traditionally separate data silos and applications such as CRM, BI, ERP, HR and supply chain applications.

Aligning performance metrics with strategic corporate goals is perhaps the most pressing challenge facing companies today. Whether you’re trying to track and analyze revenue, identify top sales performers, or measure the effectiveness of your new product marketing campaigns, organizations must demonstrate an understanding of actual performance as compared to overall objectives. With Performance Management business solutions delivered by Niteo Partners using platforms such as Cognos, pharmaceutical companies can start taking immediate steps towards alignment of tactics with strategy.

Niteo’s Life Science solutions leverage vertical solutions and blueprints built with our strategic Performance Management partners. These powerful business applications support alignment at every level of your organization, across every department. Enterprise planning drives your operating plan while performance dashboards monitors your performance against that plan and presents an actionable visualization of your performance.

The key is to start small, but start now. Sales and Marketing are two areas that can immediately benefit from Performance Management technologies.

Driving Performance through Sales and Marketing

Performance Dashboards are an effective way to prioritize the information needed by various users and present that information in an optimized manner consistently across your organization. Sales and Marketing can quickly benefit from this information from the strategic level down to individual field representatives. Advanced visualization techniques such as charts, gauges, traffic lights, and alerts deliver the information in easily understood and immediately useable format.

Organizations have a wealth of information in various applications such as sales, ERP, CRM and other functional applications. The power of BI and enterprise planning is to leverage the data for use in strategic decision making and operational forecasts.

To determine the data required for particular business or operational needs, the challenge is to Integrate data from different points across your company convert it to actionable information that delivers a detailed and in-depth view. In sales, this can be used in scenarios such as customer purchase patterns, revenue, growth, lifetime value, satisfaction, service calls and costs, total sales to date, and more. This can be used to identify customers who are most valuable to your organization, whether that’s based on revenue, purchase frequency, or profitability.

Customer Management Dashboard

Once you indentify your ideal customer profile, you can also identify the ‘current state’ of your customers and how they match up to the profile. You can put meaningful information at the fingertips of your sales representatives that show the complete snapshot of a customer’s history with your organization and your sales representatives can use this data to create more successful sales calls. An average sales visit by a representative lasts a mere three minutes, so this information can make the most efficient and impactful use of this time.

At the sales manager level, you can monitor information on your sales team performance. This can be divided quickly into meaningful segments – such as number of sales calls, success rate, or success with specific product lines and specific customer types. Once you understand the strengths and weaknesses of your sales force, you can take steps to streamline your sales process, lower the costs of sales, and allocate your resources more efficiently against customers and sales goals. Having the right reps and resources in the right places means you will maximize the opportunity of each sales visit and meet your goals more quickly and consistently.

At the product level, there are other critical data points to integrate and analyze. For instance, samples management and compliance can be a costly issue in terms of time, resources, and investment. But Performance Management solutions are available to track samples and help ensure regulatory compliance that streamline these tasks and allow your team to focus on selling. By analyzing the performance data captured with sample management, you can identify successful trends and usage and recommend them in less productive regions to improve performance, while the system also tracks inventory, lot numbers, and automates FDA reporting.

Sales Rep Performance Scorecard

Scorecards are an effective tool for tracking goals and priorities. This is a key component of aligning every day behavior with overall corporate objectives. For example, you can use a scorecard to ensure that the expectations for your sale and marketing teams is communicated, measured and reported in a consistent manner across all teams and regions. Every team member can see their performance and understand how they are doing compared to key performance indicators that are relevant to their job function. More importantly they can see how they actions they take day today ‘move the needle’ and show results. Meanwhile, the data is aggregated and rolled up so that management and executives can monitor the big picture, and take corrective action in a timely fashion that can still influence the outcome, not simply see the historical results in next month’s meeting.

On the marketing side, there are many key activities that can be challenging to model. Many companies, for example, struggle to measure the actual results of marketing campaigns, and their impact on sales and brand awareness. Performance Management solutions that combine data from sales, marketing, and CRM systems can pull together the necessary data elements from these separate sources and integrate it into a coordinated view to answer these questions. For example, you can compare the costs of individual campaigns with the responses they generated and changes in sales, demand, and close rate. This can then be used to fine-tune your future strategies for more effective results. When applied to the complex system of integrated marketing campaigns using different tactics with different products and regions, Performance Management can indicate which product campaigns are most effective, which work best with what customer groups, and which are costing more than they return.

Performance Management and Performance Optimization

A successful Performance Management System is interconnected, so it becomes easy to share data across your organization and, more importantly, share learnings and successful strategies. By creating a consistent interface and look and feel, people can move fluidly from one information set to the next and quickly identify the critical trends that influence success. Performance Management solutions integrate information about sales volume, customer profiles, market share, sales activity, ongoing promotions, and marketing programs into a single source of data that’s instantly available to anyone and everyone who needs it. Dashboards and scorecards let you communicate your plans and strategies as a set of interconnected performance indicators. Dashboards display performance data from multiple points across your organization in a single display. All of this makes collaboration and coordination simple and effective – and increase the performance of the entire organization.

Closing the Loop: Comparing Plan to Performance

At the corporate office these elements can be aggregated and monitored, while details are still immediately available to support specific analysis. Here, the focus can switch to effective Financial Planning and Budgeting. With the pressure on to make the most of every dollar, using a solution that streamlines and improves your core financial processes -- budgeting, planning, consolidations, forecasting, and reporting -- can provide immediate, tangible results. By presenting a unified view of your sales and marketing budgets that can be easily segmented by department, project, or territorial expense level these financial planning and analysis applications will help you keep track of your actuals, budgets and plans. All of this gives you the clear, concise, and accurate information you need to analyze your current financial performance and predict future performance with confidence. Finally, the budgeting process itself is streamlined as people are able to contribute in a collaborative, parallel process instead of working off of individual spreadsheets that take additional time and require substantial integration efforts. The time savings can be used to better understand the information and drive results.

Bringing it all together

Niteo Partners Performance Management solutions built for Sales & Marketing leverage critical enterprise data systems which results in optimized performance and realized opportunities through scorecards and dashboards to align tactics with corporate strategy. Once your business intelligence and enterprise planning platforms are established, Life Sciences firms can introduce other complementary technologies such as predictive analytics to take the understanding of the factors that affect your performance and take it to the next level of recommending particular business actions to be taken, customers to target, and profits that can be achieved. Once proven in sales and marketing, the path is set for deployment to other business areas such as clinical trials or any process that requires optimization in today’s business climate. Results can be achieved with rapid deployment of performance dashboards or incremental introduction of planning models. To survive and succeed in one of the most challenging climates we have seen for some time, the key is to start small but start now!

About Niteo Partners:

Niteo Partners, a consulting and systems integration firm, leverages both business expertise and technology to deliver innovative solutions for Global 2000 companies. A wholly-owned subsidiary of NEC Corporation of America, Niteo Partners offers solutions in Business Intelligence, Corporate Performance Management, Operational and Financial Dashboards, Enterprise Planning and Migration Services. Niteo has sales and solution centers in the United States and utilizes a dual-shore capability in Chennai to create additional value and cost savings to their clients.

Niteo Partners new solutions focus on three major competitive objectives for BI and EP to maximize the ROI for customer performance management investments:

Standardize: Establishing an enterprise BI platform to achieve consistent, actionable information throughout the enterprise.
Optimize:Streamlining and improving the enterprise planning, budgeting and forecasting processes by linking plan vs. actual performance for Finance, HR, Sales, Supply Chain and Operations.
Visualize: Delivering advanced performance dashboards and scorecards at the strategic, executive and operational levels to provide actionable insight into all levels of organizational performance.

Niteo's solutions provide clients with tangible business value from the latest technologies. By dramatically improving the quality and analysis of information, clients make smarter decisions, faster. For more information on our services, please visit www.niteo.com.