The 2015 Report of AffinityMonitor reconfirms that access to important doctors for pharma Medical Representatives (MRs) continues to decline. Now, fewer than half of all doctors are truly accessible to the MRs, down from nearly 80 percent in 2008. In other words, though MRs continue to be the best way to engage the average physician, this “best way” is steadily getting worse.
However, for physician engagement, all digital channels put together to rank the second highest. These include both digital “push”, such as, email or alerts sent to a physician’s smart phone – followed by telemarketing, direct mail; and digital “pull”, such as content that doctors can access on their own from the Internet, and peer interactions, like webinars.
With the new digital channels emerging, pharma companies will have a wider range of promotional and engagement channels to reach out to not just the doctors, but also other important stakeholders. Additionally, various non-personal marketing channels could also help pharma companies overcome the declining trend of restricted access to physicians for MR.
No single channel works for all physicians:
Although, no single channel works for all physicians, as each doctor has a unique preference for how he or she wants to receive information across various channels, most doctors will engage with pharma players in some way. The findings of this report are based on data compiled from more than 100 pharma brands, including engagements with 632,000 physicians across a wide range of specialty areas, and more than 123 million individual physician interactions.
The report suggests that by understanding those channels on a physician level, and targeting their marketing and promotion accordingly, pharma companies can hone the effectiveness of each physician engagement, and thereby improve sales and marketing productivity considerably, for excellence in business.
Similar trend in India with varying degree of difficulty:
Similar trend, though with varying degree of difficulty, can be noticed in India, as well. Over the past several years, many top pharma companies have been already experiencing the steadily declining quality of access of pharma MRs to many important doctors.
This is primarily due to the number of patients coming to these busy practitioners is fast increasing, and as the doctors are trying to see all these patients within the same limited time that was available to them, as in the earlier days. In tandem, their other obligations of various kinds, personal or otherwise, are also overcrowding the same highly squeezed time space.
Thus, an increasing number of MRs, which has more than doubled in the past decade, is now fiercely competing to get a share of lesser and lesser available time of the busy medical practitioners. Added to this, a gross mismatch between the inflow of doctors with similar prescription potential and ever increasing inflow of patients, is making the situation worse.
Reevaluating traditional marketing and sales communication models:
In this complex scenario, the key challenge before the pharma players is how to make sales communication with the busy medical practitioners more productive?
Consequently, many pharma companies, across the globe, have started reevaluating their traditional sales communication models, which are becoming increasingly expensive with diminishing returns from the MR calls.
As I discussed in some other article, a few drug companies have commenced using various interesting multi-channel digital platforms, though mostly fall under the traditional pharma sales communication process.
I shall now briefly glance over the trend of responses of the Indian pharma companies over a couple decades, to meet these challenges of change.
MR based Experimentations:
With a strong intent to squarely overcome this challenge, many Indian pharma players initially tried to experiment with several different MR based approaches, in various permutations and combinations. It was initially directed to make the prescription generation process more productive, by equipping the MR with a wide range of soft skills................
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