The Importance Tracking Spend During a Program Life Cycle

Pharmaceutical marketing is maturing fast. Increased scrutiny like the Sunshine Act and other recent government action are forcing pharma companies to pay much more attention to capturing HCP interaction data and tracking every dollar spent. HCPs are increasingly busy, and not as receptive to traditional sales pitches.For these reasons, pharmaceutical manufacturers are being forced to re-evaluate their traditional speaker programs, asking themselves how they can drive speaker program efficiency and ROI.  The latest technology plays a vital role in making this a reality.

As with any business, pharmaceutical manufacturers have been working for many years to cut down costs on other aspects of the business – trials, operations, distribution etc.  Now they’re turning their attention to marketing, with sales reps and their speaker programs representing the largest chunk of pharma marketing budget. Managing these budgets and ensuring compliance are two of the biggest headaches faced by pharma execs. Budgets continually change as new brands, products, and topics are added. And there’s a regular need to reorganize sales networks which adds further complication in managing budgets over time. Inevitably, the planned budget doesn’t end up matching the final Actuals, for various reasons.  It all makes accurate planning and tracking of budgets very difficult.

Traditionally, it may also have been difficult to accurately track ROI for activity like speaker programs.  They were ‘soft’ and hard to directly attribute results.  There are also ethical questions about tracking prescription writing by HCPs, making it hard and almost undesirable to directly track an ROI.  But, with the increasing focus on efficiency, it’s nonetheless important for pharmaceutical companies to try and track effectiveness of speaker programs, at least at a regional/brand aggregate level.

 New technologies provide critical support for this new direction:

• Automation of every step of the process—from management budgeting of brands and regions, Reps requesting new speaker programs, Planners setting up the logistics and invitations, to the on-the-day execution of the event and through to post-event feedback
• The latest cloud-based technology not only streamlines all these previously manual operations, but it enables new improvements to the process—e-signature capture, location-based automatic attendee surveys, integration of NCP data on HCPs
• Enables automatic integration with existing CRM and Expense systems, connecting all the relevant data seamlessly for cohesive review and improvement.

 Pharmagin is uniquely able to deliver on all these needs, tying together complete program automation with full data capture, ensured compliance and integration with existing systems. All in one cloud-based solution.

• Detailed budget tracking from Statement of Work to Estimate to Billed to Actual.
• Integration of defined budget caps means new programs can be flagged immediately if they exceed the cap, either for a sales team/region or for a particular KOL speaker
• Reports and charts at Brand, Region and rep levels for a full picture relevant to each stakeholder—Sales Rep, Planner, Manager or Execs
• Track every element of planning, usage and spend at the individual rep and HCP levels.