Taking the Guesswork out of Resource Allocation
How to align marketing investments with growth opportunities and potential
Doing More with Less
The Patent Cliff. The R&D drought. The post-blockbuster era. The increasing cost of getting a compound to market. Access restrictions. Mandatory price decreases. The elusive new Pharma business model.
We’ve all read countless doomsday diagnoses and an equal number of prescriptions for returning the pharmaceutical / biotech industry back to health. All seem to point in one direction: As top line growth is slowing down, pharmaceutical and biotech companies have to become more effective at utilizing scarce resources to achieve maximum returns for the business.
A recent Cogent survey showed that “optimizing resource allocation” was the second highest area of concern for pharma executives, ranking a few % points behind the #1 priority of “finding new growth opportunities”.
Facing limited resources, senior executives have to decide where to invest – and more importantly where not to – in order to achieve the highest growth, generate the most profitability, incur the least risk, and avoid erratic variations in cash flows or business volume over multiple business cycles. With numerous options available, there are several factors to consider when allocating resources:
1. Size of the opportunity: What is the business upside the investment can generate? Or what is the downside we can avoid?
2. Hurdles to overcome: How difficult (and costly) is it to change stakeholders’ behaviors to ones that will favorably affect our business?
3. Leverage: To what degree will the investment be able to generate a broad impact on as many customers / stakeholders as possible? Is there a multiplier effect?
4. Timing: How long will it take to generate a positive return on investment? Where is the breakeven point?
5. Risk level: What is the probability of success or failure? What could go wrong and how much could our projections be off if certain results are not achieved? … certain assumptions do not materialize?
6. Sustainable competitive advantage: Will the investments benefit only our business or that of our competitors as well? Can they copy our investments and level the playing field (at a higher cost of doing business)?
More often than not, these questions are only answered at the gut level. Senior executives typically lack any robust analysis that can provide valuable information comparing investment alternatives – leaving them to their experience and instincts to make investment decisions critical for the long-term health of the business.
Pragmatic Solutions: As simple as possible, but not more so than necessary
As margins for error are shrinking, companies have accepted that quantitative business models can be valuable tools to support decision making. Not too long ago, the concept of a “Patient Flow Analysis” was introduced. Most companies have now adopted a systematic analysis of where patients originate and what happens to them as they step through the process of getting informed, deciding to seek professional medical care, getting diagnosed, being prescribed a treatment, filling their prescription, and eventually taking their medication more or less correctly for more or less of the recommended treatment period. The patient flow analysis is an
extremely valuable tool for determining growth potential. It identifies “leaks” in the system and helps quantify the
opportunities to grow the
business. With a little extra work, the patient flow analysis not only tells us how much upside
potential there may be, but also who the key “actors” are whose behaviors make all the difference between realizing or not realizing that upside potential.
Unfortunately, most business analytics stop here: with a growth scenario that seems realistic, but fails to look at the investments necessary to achieve that growth.
In the same way that the patient flow analysis models stakeholder behaviors to quantify top line scenarios, a resource allocation model develops realistic investment scenarios and quantifies bottom line results. For senior executivesresponsible for setting budgets or strategically allocating resources to brand and regional budgets, there is a lack of simple, yet powerful, decision support tools. Yes, there is an abundance of ROI consultants and software that offer sophisticated (i.e., complex and expensive) measurements of marketing program performance – typically looking at cost per impression, cost per click-through, and some sort of conversion rates – but few if any provide the kind of information most useful for strategic resource allocation decisions such as:
• Should we focus on market share growth or market expansion?
• Is the ROI on consumer activation higher than on professional promotion?
• Would we drive more bottom line growth by getting existing patients to stick to their treatments or by switching competitor patients to our products?
• Can we capture more value by defending the market position of an existing product or by going after unrealized growth for another product?
It is these kinds of decisions that can benefit from better information, analytics, and decision frameworks. 27 19 13 5 3 2 1 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 # o f P ati en ts Total Pool of
Sufferers Origination and Diagnosis Medical Treatment Prescribed Access to / Funding of Treatment Fill Rx / get Medication Patient: Lack of disease awareness; poor Diagnostics Phys/Patient: Wait & see; no or
alternative care Pharmacist/ Patient: Switching Adherent to Treatment Regimen Patient: Low compliance; no refill Payor/Insurance: Not on formulary; high co-pays; etc. Share for “Our” Treatment Physician/Payor: Competitor products
The Critical Connection
If the patient flow analysis can show us how much growth potential there is and where we can get it, then we only have to answer how much it will cost to change those behaviors that generate most of the top line growth – or alternatively, how much of that growth potential can be captured with a certain level of investment.
The key is to develop a simplified (but not overly simplistic) framework that connects the top line growth to the investments required to drive this growth. This requires several steps:
• Knowing where patients are lost in the patient flow (and why) leads us directly to the “actors” and behaviors that need to change to get or keep these patients in the system.
• The next step is to understand what motivates or influences these actors – i.e., what barriers keep them from our “desired behaviors” and what would encourage or enable them to take the actions that plug the leaks in the patient flow.
• We then want to understand who the most important decision makers and influencers are that can impact our actors or the factors that shape their behaviors. An influencer mapping exercise can be a valuable tool to find the most efficient/effective way to reach decision makers that the
pharma/biotech company may not have direct access to.
• Finally, we have to conceive of initiatives that will educate stakeholders, remove barriers, or establish incentives that will sway decisions and behaviors.
• It is now easy enough to estimate the resources required for such initiatives and a link back to the patient flow model will help project the “return” on such investments.
The tricky part is determining how much impact these initiatives will have on our key stakeholders and how long such an impact will last (especially if competitors may soon take some counter-measures). We can make educated guesses, but in order to improve the predictive value of the investment models, it is best to establish a few critical measures and create a feedback loop that tracks actual behavior changes of selected stakeholders and links them back to our marketing initiatives.
This is where the “resource allocation Decision” becomes the “resource allocation Process” - not a one-time event but an organizational discipline.
From One-time Analysis to Continuous Improvement
While a one-time assessment can provide an excellent starting point to evaluate whether the current investment allocation makes sense, a continuous process will leverage proven models and frameworks to gather relevant information that will result in more reliable top and bottom line forecasts – thus improving the foundation for making critical business decisions.
Knowing the critical information gaps allows us to conduct targeted market research to fill those gaps. Tracking the impact of specific marketing initiatives teaches us what is working or not. Modeling the ROI, NPV, or other financial metrics can point out when investments have reached the point of diminishing returns.
To implement such a process – to institute the organizational discipline of fact-based decision making – a few important steps must be established and repeated on a regular cycle.
A process that builds on sound
frameworks, integrates robust business models, documents important
assumptions, incorporates customer / market feedback, re-evaluates future scenarios with new inputs, and
establishes fact-based decision-making will improve the business decisions that drive top and bottom line results.
The Cogent Approach
Cogent has developed a very pragmatic solution for strategically allocating and tracking marketing/sales resources aimed at influencing behaviors of the most important customer groups (patients, prescribers, payors).
Cogent brings together the patient flow, key stakeholders, behavioral objectives, barriers & motivators, marketing initiatives’ strategic fit, budget allocation, financial modeling and KPIs to develop realistic future scenarios and provide management the information needed to become more confident about making the best possible investment decisions.
Using Cogent’s analyses to identify the top priority market research needs and develop streamlined
measurement/tracking plans ensures that the maximum learning can be captured efficiently to adjust and fine-tune resource allocation over time. The key to keeping this process pragmatic and affordable is to focus on the right granularity. For senior management, the critical dimensions to evaluate investment options are typically (1) the stakeholder/customer, (2) the desired behavior, (3) the reach or scope of influence of our initiatives. With this simplified (but not simple) framework, measurement and tracking becomes pragmatic and strategic investment decisions will benefit from an improved fact base.
Resource Allocation:
Part of a Continuous Optimization Cycle
Patient Flow Stakeholder Mapping Desired Behaviors Motivators & Barriers Marketing Initiatives Prelim Resource Allocation Investment Modeling Budgeting & Goal Setting Measurement & Tracking Field Execution
Better Information leads to improved business outcomes
Many pharmaceutical and biotech companies have adopted a rigorous, quantifiable approach to analyzing the patient flow to help them identify and quantify growth opportunities. Few companies have applied similar discipline and rigor to resource allocation decisions, including measuring and tracking investment returns. Doing so on a consistent basis with the appropriate tools will ultimately generate several
benefits:
1. It allows an organization to develop their own framework for analyzing what will most impact their top and bottom line results
2. It creates transparency of what decision drivers are facts and which are assumptions 3. It instills organizational discipline to measure critical variables in order to generate better
information for the next round of investment decisions
Models of any kind will not replace experience and sound judgment, but they can offer valuable information that improves an executive’s ability to apply experience and judgment. Maximizing long term business value is complex and requires trade-offs between risk and return, short-term and long-term, growth and predictability, etc. Cogent’s user-friendly decision support tools (including Patient Flow models, Opportunity Assessments, Investment Analysis tools, and Strategic Marketing Resource Planning guides) are designed with Senior Executives and their teams in mind. If utilized effectively, they can help every manager make better informed business decisions and drive business results in a very competitive and resource constrained business environment.
Cogent Consulting can help you establish resource allocation tools and processes that will foster organizational discipline and better align investments with business opportunities. To learn more, contact Cogent Consulting.
