Pharmaceutical Customer Relationship Management (PH96)

Pharmaceutical CRM Report Sample

The following excerpt is taken from Chapter 1, "CRM Structure and Resources." For an in-depth look at this topic, including data points and analysts' recommendations, please purchase the full report.

Making CRM the Central Marketing Strategy

The first solution to the "problem" of CRM structure may be to eliminate entirely the issue of structure. This happens when CRM is not a separate program but a central tenet of the entire marketing organization. At Company 6, the marketing function oversees the CRM program. The company aims to fit all of its CRM activities into its brands' relationship marketing strategies. For brand teams and the broader marketing organization, customer relationship management is not a discrete program that simply covers data warehousing or add-ons such as direct mail campaigns. Instead, comprehensive relationship management is the dominant paradigm for all marketing teams.

By avoiding the disjointed, uncoordinated efforts, all elements of customer management occur under the broader umbrella of customer relationship management. Patients and physicians move through a process that begins with education and awareness for relevant brands and treatments. Individuals then move through customer acquisition to adherence and, finally, advocacy. The steps are not new, but the marketing organization views customers holistically by understanding their position and progress on the CRM ladder.

Company 6's brands oversee their own CRM. Ultimately, profit and loss responsibility falls to the brand team, which owns all relationship marketing and CRM activity for the brand. Brand heads report into business unit leaders; in the US, each brand tends to fall under the oversight of a vice president of marketing. Other groups that support the brand and work with the CRM system might include marketers focused on healthcare professionals, medical education, consumer marketing and managed care teams.

This excerpt is taken from Chapter 3, "CRM Challenges and Opportunities."

CRM Challenges

As Cutting Edge Information began exploring the topic of CRM, one prevalent challenge emerged. The lack of education and ambiguous definition of what customer relationship management is appeared to be major challenges for many companies. CRM means different things to different people and even to entire organizations. At some companies, CRM is an all-encompassing system that includes all of a brand's marketing efforts, whereas at others, CRM is primarily understood to be a database that gathers information on specific audiences. This great variance in definition even among marketers themselves has left the concept of CRM to the whims of personal interpretation. Unfortunately, this lack of clarity makes it more difficult to achieve success per se, since few boundaries or standards are available to benchmark efforts.

The first step to alleviate this challenge at a company is to determine what CRM means to the organization — including parameters, objectives, tactics and goals. Then it becomes a struggle with internal education so that everyone understands what CRM means, at least from the company's point of view. This education must extend beyond the boundaries of marketing because several other internal functions are involved in the development, support and maintenance of CRM. For a CRM initiative to be successful, cross-functional involvement and cooperation are imperative.

An interviewee from a top pharmaceutical company noted that the inner bureaucracy a team has to deal with to consistently maintain support of the CRM project becomes even more troublesome because of a lack of education. This problem is exacerbated by constant turnover of employees. Oftentimes, new employees will have little knowledge about what CRM is or they may simply not believe in it. This makes it all the more challenging because these functions are responsible for providing content and supporting the CRM program. So the inner-bureaucracy of a company coupled with a lack of education about CRM, makes it an ongoing challenge to maintain support of CRM.

Companies 6 and 9 both identified CRM's lack of clarity as a major obstacle. It is difficult to run a CRM program when CRM is not even clearly defined. On top of that, how do CRM leaders win buy-in from other functions when CRM remains a mystery?