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Driving performance through data-powered segmentation and targeting

In an ever-competitive biopharmaceutical industry, commercial teams face stiff competition for their customers’ time and attention. Adopting a data-powered segmentation and targeting strategy can help commercial teams better understand their target audience, get the right product to the right audience and transform the way they engage with customers.

Laying the groundwork for an effective segmentation and targeting strategy is important, especially when it comes to understanding healthcare professionals (HCPs), how they behave, and what they need. However, conventional segmentation and targeting models are often reliant on surveys and limited sales data. Lacking crucial accurate information about the HCP universe, demographics and behaviours.

We recently held a webinar with key clients to explain what a data-powered segmentation and targeting strategy is, and how this can effectively help commercial teams achieve excellence.


Challenges facing current systems and models
Traditionally, pharmaceutical organizations’ sales, medical and marketing functions operate independently. This can slow down working processes and prevent teams from having a holistic, 360 view of the customer. Many segmentation and targeting models also lack coordinated experiences across functions.

To adapt to changing customer expectations and industry trends, organizations can benefit from cloud platforms like Veeva. These platforms can provide targeted data and insights from a single source, helping teams personalize customer engagements and improve sales performance.


What a data-powered segmentation and targeting strategy entails
At Veeva, we have built a system to ensure accurate and effective segmentation and targeting, having datasets pre-connected on the backend. This means that we can find a list of targeted HCPs quickly, by querying the HCP features from the dataset based on a set of preferences.

Figure 1 shows an example of when we filter doctors according to a set preference:
  1. Those who work in tertiary hospitals in the Gangnam area in Korea
  2. Those who specialize in cardiovascular disease
  3. Those who have a regional scientific reach
  4. Those who are attending a congress in the next six months
  5. Those with high digital affinity
  6. And finally, doctors whom our clients are currently not engaged with
Effective segmentation and targeting requires high quality data as the foundation. This includes having comprehensive coverage of doctors in the market and a variety of data fields to segment.

Built on a high quality database, a multi-faceted approach can be taken to understand HCPs’ potential. This includes reviewing the data holistically, considering aspects such as HCP and healthcare organization (HCO) attributes, KOL scientific activities, HCP engagement information, channel affinity, and patient and prescription insights.

Leveraging a data system that can execute accurate targeting with accurate queries is also critical. Considering the specific type of HCP clients want to target, based on their specialization, presence of their scientific reach, congresses they attend and level of digital affinity, an efficient data system can select corresponding HCP features from the data set, and crawl through the data to find the right doctors to target.

Our approach of data-powered segmentation and targeting empowers sales and marketing teams to make better decisions through an ecosystem of expert-certified content and insights. Through this, companies can realize the principles of enabling personalization through data and creating a unique omnichannel proposition for customers.

Veeva has recently supported a top biopharmaceutical company in rolling out segmentation targeting and engagement strategy tools in six markets across Asia-Pacific, using comprehensive data sets. With Veeva data, we identified high potential doctors for the sales team to target, of which, over 60% are new and untapped targets for the company. 97% of Veeva’s recommendations of doctors to target eventually were adopted by the sales team, which translated to 20 times the return on investment for the company.



Veeva’s data vision and how it helps companies achieve commercial excellence
At Veeva, our data vision aims to provide the common data architecture needed for commercial excellence – connecting sales, medical, and marketing with access to high-quality data through a single platform. Together, our data solutions provide insights from the industry’s most comprehensive up-to-date and integrated customer reference data, empowering customers with the latest updates on KOLs’ scientific activities, and enabling valuable HCP engagement across the channel mix.

By leveraging data and insights to power effective segmentation and targeting strategies, Veeva’s solutions are an example of how data can effectively help pharmaceutical businesses drive commercial excellence by offering a one-stop experience from data to execution.

To meet the customer needs of today in the pharmaceutical sector, it is important for organizations to be data-driven, capitalize on customer insights, implement effective segmentation and targeting strategies and constantly innovate to drive commercial success and growth.

To learn more about Veeva’s solutions, approach on segmentation and targeting, and HCP engagement strategies, please contact us at lin.du@veeva.com or shafi.hussain@veeva.com.