Challenging times lay ahead for the sales departments in the pharma industry. The COVID-19 pandemic will surely not be the first disruption, as recent geopolitical tensions, and economic turmoil show. Agile and adaptive sales enablement is thus a must-have in the coming months and years.
Every month, MedicinMan in partnership with IMS Health, brings our readers the latest industry numbers related to sales and revenues of different companies, brands and therapy areas in the Indian Pharmaceutical Market.
IPM was valued at Rs. 178,219 Cr for MAT Oct’21. The retail sector was valued at Rs. 151,183 Cr for this period contributing 85% to IPM.
IPM Growth for the month of Oct’21 as compared to the month of Oct’20 was 9.7%. This is the lowest monthly growth in the last 8 months after a low growth of 2.6% reported for Feb’21.
Corresponding to low monthly growth, IPM MAT growth also declined slightly after showing a growing trend consistently for the last 7 months from MAT Feb’21. It reported 17.3% for MAT Oct’21 as compared to 17.8% reported for MAT Sept’21.
At 15657.3 Cr, the monthly sale reported for Oct’21 is the 5th highest sale value in the last 12 months.
Pharma companies that used large field forces for multiple divisions, selling the same me-too products to create a resounding Share-of-the-Voice in the market are beginning to Stare-at-the-Diminishing-Returns for investments on traditional sales and marketing strategies, if they can be called strategies at all in the first place.
Most pharma companies and professionals like Black & Yellow cabs, continue to hope against hope, that somehow they will be able to continue to hold on to their businesses and jobs till their shares are sold and EMIs are paid. After that, who cares?
The answer to pharma and healthcare’s challenges will need a combination of profound domain knowledge and experience combined with digital skills to engage Rx customers meaningfully.
2020 has been a challenging year for all industries. For pharma and its HCP customers even more so. All eyes are on the companies developing vaccines and drugs for treatment of COVID-19, while doctors have closed their doors for pharma reps. Long established processes have been disrupted and complex market strategies have been rendered useless. Each pharma no matter big or small, innovative, or generic, had to improvise and come up with contingency plans to save the year. Some have been slower waiting for the old ways to come back, others have been more agile experimenting with digital and expanding boundaries, most are in the middle digitally curious but not risking too much.
Is Pharma’s business model like McDonald’s? Doing things over & over again without innovation?
McDonald’s is famous for its Hamburger University, a training facility at the McDonald’s Corporation global headquarters in Chicago, Illinois. It instructs high-potential restaurant managers in restaurant management.
More than 5,000 students attend Hamburger University each year and over 275,000 people have graduated with a degree in Hamburgerology.
Sound familiar? Pharma’s training has been on similar lines – hire people continuously and put them through the grind of mugging up essentials of drugs for diseases that the particular company sells.
While the McDonald’s model is ideal for its business of replication, it has outlived its utility in healthcare and drug companies are in danger of being reduced to mere suppliers of drugs to new digital platform businesses unless they learn to innovate.