Kirk Harmon, Vice President and General Manager, Contract Sales Organization, IQVIA
Jave Castillo, Vice President, CSO Solutions, IQVIA
Whether you call them “established,” “mature,” “in-line,” or “legacy,” brands approaching loss of exclusivity (LOE) remain vital assets within your product portfolio. They offer enduring value amid today’s market dynamics, economic pressures, and the uncertainty of pending approvals for pipeline products. Indeed, they often sustain your revenue until new products start achieving commercial success.
However, it’s becoming increasingly challenging to maximize the value of established brands. Several common scenarios illustrate why and suggest how contract sales organization (CSO) solutions can help.
Scenario 1: With LOE on the horizon, talent starts walking.
You’ve spent years building a powerhouse field force. As LOE approaches, you anticipate that top-performing sales professionals will start searching for their next career opportunity, driving increased turnover. Vacancies can have a negative impact on brand momentum, including prematurely eroding share of voice (SOV) and market share. But your organization is hesitant to approve new internal hires when future layoffs are all but certain. How can you navigate the disruption and keep your teams focused while finding ways to maintain promotion?
The CSO vacancy management model can be invaluable when managing turnover leading up to LOE. CSOs provide experienced staffing teams who can rapidly identify and hire highly skilled and experienced talent. They help minimize distraction and can seamlessly integrate with your team, allowing you to stay focused on your brand strategy. Ultimately, this model helps drive brand performance, maximize ROI, and reduce the financial impact of future severance payments.
Scenario 2: A launch brand is taking the lion’s share of focus and resources.
Your company is preparing for a major launch. Resources are constrained, so the launch brand is consuming executive focus and promotional budget, along with transfers of your high-performing sales representatives to growth brands from across the company. As an established brand leader, you feel like you’re being left behind even as you’re asked to do more with less. You see opportunities to optimize to a smaller team and adjust the promotional strategy. At launch, brands need heavy investment in higher-cost field resources to drive disease/brand awareness and adoption. As an established brand, you may be able to recalibrate the profile and cost base of your field and remote resources. How can you gain greater access to local market data and insights so you can make these adjustments while ensuring every engagement is valuable?
This is another prime example of how a CSO partner can deliver real impact. Established brands bring rich historical data about performance and local market dynamics, and an innovative CSO will be able to apply analytics to that data. The resulting insights can help optimize investments for a more efficient, effective promotional model for maintaining awareness and servicing loyalists. They also may surface opportunities to shift to non-personal or lower-cost personal promotion — for example, inside sales reps or customer service representatives — to address your revenue and reputational goals with a smaller budget. A CSO can help you make these promotional and staffing adjustments at a cadence that makes sense for your business.
Scenario 3: The company has shifted focus to another therapeutic area.
You’re responsible for established brands that are not only approaching LOE but also support a therapy area your organization has de-emphasized. Although your products remain critical to your organization’s revenue, the company keeps tightening your budget. In addition to affecting the field sales team, budget cuts can reduce critical operational support roles — from training to commercial effectiveness. You expect market dynamics to drive further budget cuts. How can you identify creative ways to optimize the composition (and costs) of your promotional mix while continuing to support your team?
This is another scenario where a CSO partner can use data and analytics to recommend more dynamic promotion strategies that blend inside sales, customer service, and traditional sales coverage with digital engagement. A CSO can even supplement training support to optimize performance. The most forward-thinking partners are willing to go further with innovative risk-sharing models. With these models, a CSO may help you go beyond preserving SOV and mitigating revenue losses to drive growth with your mature products.
Partner with an established provider
This article outlines just three examples of how CSO solutions can provide flexibility, agility, and creativity to leaders of established brands. Each company and brand bring distinct challenges and opportunities. The core benefit of CSO solutions lies in their ability to address those nuances from the start — and to refine strategies and tactics quickly and effectively as customer, market, economic, and other dynamics shift.
With a CSO track record of nearly three decades, IQVIA is a proven partner and provider of commercial solutions to the pharma and MedTech industries. Combining this experience with our unique strengths in data, analytics, and insights, we help companies maximize the value of established brands.
The editorial staff had no role in this post's creation.