2012 Fall Symposium

In this PMSA 2012 Fall Symposium kick-off session, we’ll present targeting landscape and fundamentals, how they build workable call plans as well as some of the features of more sophisticated targeting approaches.

The workshop will be conducted in 3 sections:

• Overview of Targeting Landscape
• Change in overall pharma landscape: shrinking pipelines, tougher approvals, reduced physician autonomy
• Emergence of more effective and lower cost channels
• Move away from calendar-driven periods to event-based implementation
• Basic Segmentation and Portfolio Optimization
• Data collection, brand inputs and customer segmentation
• Promotion response modeling
• Portfolio optimization
• Sales force size and structure
• Alignment considerations
• Call Planning Design and Overview of Advanced Targeting
• Strategic elements of call plan design and maintenance
• Representative autonomy and customer orientation
• Impacts of cost pressures and increasing portfolio shifts
• Lean times, leaner timelines!
• Reflecting the reality and influences of the local market

This workshop will address the important theoretical and practical aspects of launch targeting. (The concepts also apply to new indications and in-line brands.) The workshop will use a practical example of targeting a new weight loss drug as an illustrative case study. This case study will be used in an Excel-based hands-on exercise where the targeting concepts will be used to create a launch target list.

In this open forum, we will discuss how the most successful launch targeting is being done today. The speakers will moderate the discussion of best practices across the industry and will also provide their perspective on these topics based on their experience developing targeting solutions across many therapeutic areas and organizations. The following questions will be addressed in this workshop:

• What is launch targeting? What is the most important goal of good targeting?
• What are the three critical deliverables of launch targeting? When are they needed?
• How does launch targeting relate to other launch activities?
• What factors should be considered in launch targeting? Which ones are most often overlooked?
• How do you quantify the factors? How do you integrate them optimally?
• How should primary market research be used in launch targeting?
• How do you create a launch target list? How does the call plan come into play?

Pharmaceutical companies spend significant time and energy generating call plans for their sales representatives, yet often times these investments under perform because reps fail to execute their call plans. One of the key reasons for poor execution, other than poor call plan design and the lack of field buy-in, is the challenge associated with in-field planning and implementation. This is often linked to the limited field decision support available for call scheduling and routing. To help with this planning problem, we will explore analytical approaches which can be used to improve call plan execution through recommended call schedules and routes, developed using optimization techniques and historic HCP activity data.

A recent case study will be used to highlight the following aspects of the approach:

• How to develop a routing plan to help sales representatives
• Achieve their call plan target frequencies
• Balance weekly capacity
• Minimize travel
• Coordinate with other representatives
• Identify the best days for making calls to each target
• How to create effective zones - geographic subdivisions of a territory which can be covered very efficiently in a single day, and which can be used to facilitate coordination across reps working in mirrored territories
• How to schedule calls that are spaced evenly so that reps are viewed as dependable by customers
• How to evaluate the overall strength of the call plan schedule using diagnostics

The presentation will also highlight the frontier of innovation in this space, which we believe is to implement a very dynamic approach to the problem, which continuously optimizes the proposed schedules based upon the very latest call activity data, and can propose opportunistic calls which can be made based upon the representatives current location using mobile technologies.

Math is only part of the targeting problem: getting field force understanding of the solution and adoption of findings is often more difficult. In an interactive conversation we will bring specific examples of how to increase field force adoption when a new targeting solution is developed. Attendees will hear details behind a number of important human capital aspects of a new targeting solution roll-out, answering some key questions:

• How to explain what you’ve done (Techniques for advanced analytical model and result visualization)
• Case study and discussion around: Goodness-of-fit statistics and the parlor game of coefficient evaluation with business leaders.
• How to explain where you are going (Overall structure of a change management plan)
• Case study and discussion around: The painful process of losing insight in order to traffic light everything for the field
• How to get the field invested (Examples of field planning tools to engage reps in call planning)
• Case study and discussion around: Good change management frameworks and why they often go unused
• How to learn from others (Failure modes and signs of success)
• Case study and discussion around: examples of what worked and didn’t in our more recent experiences

We will explore both success stories and failures en route to concluding with the top “human capital” considerations for a new targeting solution. Too often change management, training, and communication is under-invested in, but this is often the key factor for success in any advanced analytical project or program. After the discussion we would expect attendees to take a broader view of the targeting problem – a view that goes beyond the math and considers the “hard soft problem” – people.

Why Social Networking in the Pharmaceutical Industry
“The new currency won't be intellectual capital. It will be social capital -- the collective value of whom we know and what we'll do for each other. When social connections are strong and numerous there is more trust, reciprocity, information flow, collective action, happiness, and by the way, greater wealth.”—James Kouzes, professional keynote speaker and award winning coauthor, The Leadership Challenge

“Relationships are based on trust. ROI² models can predict a reliable change in behavior for an entire sub-network based on the stimulus of a few correctly identified individuals that have knowledge and trust within their network. More communications is not better. Doctors are not interested in getting more e-mail and are certainly not interested in more meetings. They are more interested in who is disseminating the information and the types of qualifications, including trust, that this person represents, a key output to ROI2’s social network analysis.” – Steve Mallette, Chief Technical Officer, ROI2, Inc.

There’s no shortage of data in today’s internet saturated world, to be sure. Anyone can take enormous mountains of data and create endless lists of interest. Anyone and everyone creates lists that appear to have utility. But most list-based targeting practices overlook the value of including social networking data in the equation. What if you could take these lists of information a step further, analyze the data and make it more relevant and focused? What if you looked at not only nodes of information on physicians, providers, nurses, and practitioners, but next applied a strong analytics solution, optimized to identify relationships and connections between providers? The challenge is the management, activation, and measurement of these social networks; understanding the various relationships that make up the many types of connections between individual doctors, institutions, payers, and policymakers is crucial for success.

This presentation will discuss cases in which the application of IRM (influence relationship management) resulted in effective targeting strategies. ROI2 has applied this methodology to several life sciences industry clients with resulting successes in brand launches, the recruitment of the best and most influential speakers, and Rx uplift.

The ‘Golden Thread’ is a metaphor for the decisions, data / analytical processes, technology, and human behavior that link strategy and results. Each bend, twist and cut of the thread reduces the quality of the gold delivered at the end of the process. How does the ‘Golden Thread’ get tarnished (or even broken entirely) on the journey from strategy to execution?

Rather than drill into a specific methodology, this presentation will trace the ‘Golden Thread’ from strategy to execution, with a special emphasis on targeting aspects.

We will share insights from three complementary perspectives: business, analytics, and technology. In addition, we will share cautionary tales and unintended consequences and wrap-up the session with our (almost) world famous Top 10 List of Targeting Tales based on our Principals’ combined 200 years of experience in targeting. This presentation provides a helpful ‘check-list’ for attendees as they complete 2013 targeting initiatives.