Insight-Driven B2B Selling

Sales force dependent businesses are always looking for innovative ways to better meet market needs and drive more efficient growth.  Using segment-based customer and consumer insights to tailor each sales call is a particularly effective approach, and has been proven in the wireless telephony, healthcare, financial services, and consumer packaged goods industries.

 

The example profiled below describes how one pharmaceutical marketer used personalized, insight-based selling to improve salesforce effectiveness, increase physician support, and drive breakthrough launch results.  It provides a good benchmark for any company looking to increase sales production.

 

One Marketer's Approach

This pharmaceutical marketer used an innovative segmentation approach to give sales reps an improved understanding of each physician's belief structure to enhance their selling effectiveness, optimize their call plans, and drive more rapid acceptance of a new drug at launch.  To make the program successful, the company established the underlying segmentation would need to:

 

• Determine the optimal physician targets and call prioritization

• Inform the sales force training curriculum and materials to support the launch

• Define physician call lists

• Inform the development of marketing materials.

 

The Segmentation

Physicians' belief structures are comprised of needs, attitudes and behaviors toward a patient's condition, the therapeutic category in general, and the array of potential therapies. Segmenting physicians along these dimensions as they relate to this product launch's therapeutic area vividly revealed that each doctor's beliefs explicitly drove his / her interest and willingness to prescribe this marketer's new drug.

 

For example, one segment had a high likelihood to prescribe the category and focused on patient outcomes and their ability to best support their patient, whereas another high potential segment sought new, innovative therapies because they were motivated by clinical progress. Non-target segments preferred to wait to see how fellow physicians adopted the therapy and how the physician community reacted overall, before switching.

 

Segmentation-Driven, Personalized Selling

To effectively drive Personalization into the selling process, this marketer first used segmentation results to prioritize physician targets for launch, refine the product positioning to make it personally relevant to the highest value targets, and develop optimized marketing messages for each segment.  The company then developed a sales training program to immerse reps in the segmentation, educate them on segment-specific insights, and arm them with segment-tailored scripts and collateral.   The last step was to implement physician tracking programs to monitor awareness and trial across all priority segments.

 

The Result

"Two months after launch the drug has exceeded plan, the two highest potential physician segments are writing prescriptions at twice the rate as the two lowest potential segments, and the entire organization has embraced personalized, fact-based marketing" says Greg Ellis, Rosetta Senior Partner. He added, "In an environment where physicians are increasingly demanding value-added interactions with their pharmaceutical sales reps, the sales reps love the fact they now know which key message points will be personally relevant to each doctor".

 

 

 

 

 

The Keys to Your Success

What would it take to personalize sales training and launch support in your organization? To ensure success from the start, companies must:

 

• Effectively characterize the distinct audience targets in terms of the needs, attitudes and behaviors that drive brand choice and category usage
  

• Train your sales force to apply this deeper, segment-based insight to personalize each customer interaction

• Measure and track the impact of each personalized sales and marketing initiative, and continually optimize message tailoring and target prioritization