Are Alignments Slowing You Down?

Access to physicians has declined steadily since 2008, with about half of physicians in the U.S. placing moderate-to-severe restrictions on visits from pharmaceutical sales reps, according to ZS Associates.

Economic forces and a fierce competitive landscape demand that commercial organizations do more with less. At the same time, changing customer profile information, like office locations, affiliations to larger healthcare organizations, and rules on physician access tests even the best data stewards to keep customer data current. This creates an additional challenge for an already stretched field to effectively engage with their customers.

In order to go to market effectively, you must strategically align your limited resources to the right healthcare professionals (HCPs) and healthcare organizations (HCOs). The practice known as alignment optimization has historically been a painful, protracted process fraught with inefficiencies, errors, and frustration. It is expensive, it requires many data hand-offs between disparate systems and partners, and it is slow. A complete enterprise-sized realignment can take upwards of six months. With the speed in which the market changes, you don’t have time to measure alignment changes in months.

Compounding the issue is rapidly changing customer data. During the alignment process, you are working off of a customer data snapshot that quickly becomes stale. With six-month lead times for a new alignment, even new territory assignments are chronically outdated. So, while your reps should be engaging customers at the start of every new sales cycle, they are instead on the phone with the home office to resolve their alignment inaccuracies. These kinds of inefficiencies lead to poor sales execution, field dissatisfaction and a lack of trust.

Commercial organizations need a new approach to alignments, one that provides new iterations in minutes, not days or weeks, so you know you are allocating your resources effectively. Interoperability with your CRM will enable collaboration with the field for greater accuracy. With a single solution for the entire enterprise, you can leverage the efficiencies of centralized management but still maintain local control.

Although the solution is not easy, there is a means to alleviating many of these challenges. Veeva developed Veeva Align specifically to help sales organizations realign faster and provide sales reps with an easy way to provide feedback on new alignments before they are pushed live. In upcoming releases, you will see how Align enables multichannel and multidimensional alignments, changing the way the industry looks at territories in the future.