Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
There has been much commentary focused on the trends in pharma promotion
spending in general, and detailing in particular. The decreases in detailing head-
counts in the USA have been attributed to causes that include considerable merger
& acquisition activity, a reduction in blockbuster drug launches, growing infl uence
of managed care organizations, pricing regulation pressures on physician prescrip-
tions, and growing resistance of physicians to seeing reps due to increasing time
constraints (e.g., Baldwin
2011
). According to one study by Cegedim-SK&A, now
one in four physicians refuses to see reps. In the past, pharmaceutical companies
could draw a direct correlation between share of market and share of voice. So they
kept ratcheting up the volume by way of throwing more reps at physicians (popu-
larly labeled the
detailing arms race
, e.g., Elling et al.
2002
). The evidence suggests
that this approach actually worked in an era of frequent waves of blockbuster
launches. However, today, that is no longer true as new blockbuster product devel-
opment has slowed down. As a consequence, sales forces have taken a hit as they
have been downsized and redeployed for more effective as well as effi cient promo-
tion (Baldwin
2011
).
In this era of massive changes in the healthcare sales environment, especially in
the USA, whether or not traditional pharma sales forces have a future is being seri-
ously debated in many quarters. Some commentators have asserted that due to online
technology advances that can inform and respond adequately to buyers' questions,
outside sales forces will disappear. For example,
Selling Power
(Gschwandtner
2011
) suggests that it is likely that of the 18 million salespeople in the USA today,
there will be only about four million left by year 2020! Realistically speaking, how-
ever, due to the important role face-to-face selling plays at different stages in most
industries' sales cycles, outside sales forces of signifi cant sizes are likely to remain
in place in the foreseeable future (e.g., Mantrala and Albers
2010
). However, sales
force structure and deployment are likely to signifi cantly change as new selling
models are devised. In particular in the pharma industry, aided by advances in tech-
nologies such as new smartphone apps and e-Detailing (e.g., Alkhateeb and Doucette
2008
), pharmaceutical detailing style, deployment, and messaging are likely to sig-
nifi cantly change, e.g., moving from a one-size-fi ts-all approach to scientifi c match-
ing of messages to individual physicians (Baldwin
2011
).
As the pharma industry struggles in the face of maturing product portfolios to
develop and implement new effective selling strategies, and appropriately size and
deploy its medical sales forces in the USA and Europe, it would certainly help to
have answers to the following core questions: (1) How effective is personal selling
or detailing to physicians? (2) What is a generalizable quantitative estimate of
detailing effectiveness? (3) How does detailing effectiveness vary by product life
cycle stage and geographic region? Our objective in this chapter is to answer these
questions and shed light on their implications for pharma companies' optimal
detailing spending to sales ratios. The methodological approach we follow is to
draw empirical generalizations from a meta-analysis of the accumulated quantita-
tive knowledge to date with respect to pharma detailing effectiveness. Given its
prominence, numerous individual quantitative studies of pharma detailing effective-
ness in various market settings and therapeutic categories have been conducted
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