FiercePharma | By Tracy Staton
Actually, they're de rigueur:
With thousands fewer drug reps on the street these days, and many doctors
turning reps away, companies have had to turn to new ways of promoting their products.
Plus, all those pesky Department of Justice settlements make the old hard sell
seem sketchy.
What's Eli Lilly's version?
According to an interview with Alex Azar, president of the Indianapolis-based
company's U.S. business, it's problem-solving.
As InsuranceNewsNet
reports, Lilly sends its 2,000-plus U.S.
reps into doctors' offices to "broker" solutions to patients'
problems.
They take lists of patient issues and draw on Lilly's resources to
help solve them. Free samples and co-pay coupons, of course, but also helping
ensure supplies of particular meds to a particular patient's pharmacy, or
troubleshooting another patient's uncommon reaction to a Lilly product, by
hooking a doctor up with a Lilly scientist.
The MBA-speak technical term
is "service-profit chain," and in adopting it, Lilly is taking a page
from the playbook of service-oriented companies like Disney and Ritz-Carlton.
(The company even sent reps to Disney World to see the model in action.)
The aim is twofold: First,
give doctors good experiences with Lilly, to promote loyalty--and, not
incidentally, boost script numbers. "The better experience your customer
has, the more likely they are to recommend your drug to the patient," Azar
told InsuranceNewsNet.
Second, boost margins by
fielding fewer sales reps. It's something of a necessity, actually, with Lilly having laid off a big
chunk of its field force over the past several years--and expecting sales to be
stagnant at best for 2014.
Lilly has been experimenting
with the problem-solving sales approach for several years, starting with older
products such as Cymbalta, which went off patent in December, InsuranceNewsNet
notes in its extensive look at the new approach.
The company started cutting
back its Cymbalta sales force early last year, prepping for the day when
generic competition would hit like a sledgehammer. Meanwhile, Lilly figures the
softer sell helped the drug keep growing--significantly--right up until that
day of doom. Some of that growth did depend on price hikes, but FiercePharma
data shows that Lilly managed to generate millions of new scripts as well.
Lilly handed over data on
three of its drugs to InsuranceNewsNet, which found that doctors who
rated their experiences with Lilly reps most highly also wrote 13% more
prescriptions for Lilly products. But territorywide results have been more
mixed; one of the highest-rated regions fell short, prescription-wise. That
shows the difficulty of one pharma company's distinguishing itself from all its
rivals, Azar admitted to InsuranceNewsNet.
"We are beating the
competition on every significant area when it comes to how we are
perceived," he told the publication. "But we have not achieved a
genuinely different experience."
One problem may be that all of
Lilly's competitors are looking to achieve their own new-and-different
relationships with doctors. GlaxoSmithKline's U.S. business has revamped
sales-rep compensation, partly to tie incentive pay to physicians' perceptions
of GSK reps. Other companies have been using the sales-consultant approach,
too. Azar knows this, but he also believes that Lilly can do it better:
"Not every pharma company is making it with the vigor that we are,"
he told InsuranceNewsNet.