Network Insights – Do you know where your customers are?

Every company needs accurate customer profiles, and most use services or tools to clean addresses—making sure that zip codes are filled in and street names are spelled correctly, for instance, ensuring that the customer data is usable. While such tactics might help with more efficient sales and marketing execution for the short term, they don’t offer companies a way to adapt to what is a rapidly changing landscape.

For example, over the past 12 months in the USA

• ~328,000 new or additional provider addresses were generated
• ~118,000 providers moved from one location to another
• ~126,000 new direct patient care facilities opened up, and ~78,000 locations shuttered

These address change statistics represent both challenges and opportunities to find new physicians and/or align sales territories for maximum effectiveness. While most companies perform territory alignments and set targeting strategies on a trimester or quarterly basis, they run the risk of failing to capture these highly dynamic customer movements in time.

When you combine those numbers with another statistic that indicates

• On average there are 3 practice locations for every practicing MD/DO

It means you not only have to keep up with new and changing addresses, but also the best call-on location for each target customer.

Traditional methods for gaining actionable insights include using expensive, proprietary one-time services that become outdated quickly. Life sciences companies also subscribe to data lists and undertake the laborious task of filtering and reconciliation them against internal customer master databases and applications.

I last blogged about how we created a forum for experts to discuss the network effect – the process by which the data in Veeva Network gets better and better over time. Life sciences companies come together in the cloud to contribute updates to Veeva Network Provider database data, which, when verified by Veeva data stewards, are entered back into the Veeva Network Provider Database. The panel’s discussion made it clear that crowdsourcing to create a single, trusted, and up-to-date shared database would lead to industrywide network insights. Address data is just the tip of the iceberg.

I look forward to sharing more network insights with you in future posts and how the collective momentum of the network effect will allow these companies to improve their multichannel initiatives and sales productivity in exciting, new ways.

Dan Goldsmith is general manager, Veeva Network at Veeva.