Analytics’ growing importance in sales and marketing

Companies today thrive on managing and interpreting customer data, and the life sciences industry is no different. The sales and marketing operations at these companies need an in-depth understanding of the customer base and must have metrics that deliver insight to identify market trends and changes.

The list of sales and marketing needs is long: Management must know where there is peak demand, which customers to target, which products to market to each customer, the value proposition for different segments and much more.

Generating that information requires a high level of sophistication. Life science companies must integrate and aggregate data from multiple sources, evaluate key performance indicators and put that information on performance dashboards that are easy to use and understand. The complexity can be overwhelming.

Those companies that are growing require data operations that can keep pace with a growing sales force or risk stagnation. Simply adequate data management is no longer good enough.

Finding meaning in a sea of data

Phadia, now a part of Thermo Fisher Scientific, makes leading medical diagnostic products for allergy, asthma and autoimmune diseases. This division of Thermo Fisher Scientific employs a national sales force aimed at primary-care physicians and labs—it resembles a pharmaceutical company’s sales force but operates in different ways.

A couple of years ago, its sales model was helping it grow, but Phadia’s analytics capabilities were not keeping up.

“We were adding more reps and labs, and were in situations the data model couldn’t handle,” says Andrea Grieser, senior manager of financial and business analysis at Phadia.

Phadia had more than 80 data sources without a dedicated analytics customer master. Integration was handled through spreadsheets; the sales force lacked immediate insights from the data. “We needed a tool at salespeople’s fingertips so they could have an informed conversation with their target physicians,” Grieser says.

Building dashboards that delivered insight

ZS and Phadia identified the most important metrics, and aggregated data sources and internal information using ZS’s proprietary business intelligence platform.

Because ZS understood Phadia’s unique market status, it delivered a sophisticated, focused dashboard. ZS then automated and hosted Phadia’s data management operations, lowering costs and improving data quality. In total, the changes were striking:

• ZS integrated more than 80 data sources.
• Strong data-governance procedures ensured quality.
• Dashboards tracked performance on the most important metrics.
• Streamlined, automated data management reduced turnaround time and errors.

An empowered sales force and lower costs

The ZS solution delivered greater insight while keeping a lid on expenses:

• ZS’s dashboards enabled Phadia’s salespeople to identify and profile their top customers.
• Scalable technology allowed for future expansion.
• Operational costs for data operations fell 25%.
• Cycle times for project turnaround dropped 70%.

“ZS’s market acumen was key to the project’s success,” Grieser says. “ZS understood the subtle but important differences between Phadia and a pharmaceutical company. We’re a diagnostics company with a pharma-like sales model. ZS didn’t treat us like another pharma company—ZS treated us like the company we are.”