Doctor profiling – Sales Management 21
Are you aware of the main reason of Cipla’s grand success in the Indian Pharmaceutical Market?
It is doctor profiling.
Today the Indian pharma marketplace is extremely competitive with so many companies competing for the mind share and the market share. There is a Marketing World War-like situation to create new prescribers.
The Marketing World War gets fiercer and bloody when trying to overcome a bigger challenge, retaining your prescribing doctors and making them prescribe more.
Cipla has succeeded in all this!
Cipla realized long back that the most vital function of pharma prescription business is to understand who your doctor is and who can stay with you for a long time. And that’s where doctor profiling helps.
Doctor profiling is to create “the doctor type,” to represent the typical prescriber of your brand.
Doctor profiling is to paint a portrait of a doctor to help a medical representative and the first line manager make important decisions about a doctor.
Doctor profiling includes his habits, (not just prescribing habits) lifestyles, income level of patients, preferences, prescription behavior patterns and much more.
From correct doctor profiling, you get an insight into the doctor’s mind and this helps you to identify and gain a deeper understanding of the target doctors.
These insights help you to recognize your doctor’s characteristics, behavior and traits.
Having a better understanding of your doctors, will help you understand what they are interested in.
This will help you to communicate with them more effectively.
Advantages of Doctor Profiling:
- Helps you to define a better tactic for a particular doctor.
- It can help you build a stronger bond with doctors.
- You can create more successful and relevant marketing campaigns.
- It can help you generate higher Rx response rates during brand campaigns.
- Doctor profiling can help you in better segmentation.
Doctor profiling is a powerful tool for pharma brand managers and marketers which can provide deep insight and knowledge to improve strategy and brand decisions.
In the approaching patient-centric era, to overlook the value of doctor’s intelligence, or disregard the patient’s tendency to access knowledge of the disease and the treatment, to base your brand decisions on gut feel alone could be a costly mistake.
Doctor profiling will help you gain a definite competitive edge.
Image – Courtesy Bing