The World of Informed Marketers™

A marketer and a sales rep can only be successful if they possess the necessary demographic and psychographic information on the target prospects/customers along with their behaviors and attitudes. An informed marketer needs the right information to win over a customer’s mind and position their brand, while a sales rep needs the right information to win over a HCP’s prescribing behavior or drug/device usage. And so, they both spend a sizable amount of time investigating their area of the market to learn more about the people they want to influence.

It has become a traditional business practice for marketing and sales teams to collect this information separately. Initially, this concept makes sense. These two sides of business collect different types of prospect/customer data. A marketer will assemble webs of accounts, contacts and attitudinal data, while the sales representative focuses on whom the key decision makers are that have the authority to influence or prescribe a particular drug, device or other health care products. What marketers and sales reps don’t know is how mutually relevant the other side’s data could be to their own success.

If a sales representative calls and finds out someone left the targeted company (or an HCP moves to another territory or group practice) and a new contact needs to be followed up with, the marketing team would benefit from having their campaign targets updated so they automatically hit the new contact. If the marketing team got information about the target’s attitude toward their brand and competitors, they could sharpen their marketing message and provide sales reps with new tools to influence the target audience.

Sales and marketing data can be auto-integrated into one platform using Appature Nexus.

Unfortunately, these pieces of marketing and sales data are generally siloed. While they’re usually not explicitly unavailable from one another, it’s difficult to find an effective way to join the overlapping pieces of information together for use by the other side. This is where the power of data synchronization comes in.

Don’t be alarmed – I don’t mean data consolidation. The two realms can continue to use their own desired software to track their customer relationships. However, as often as possible, this contact information needs to be scanned, compiled, normalized and redistributed automatically  for both marketers and sales reps no matter where they access the data. The effects of this work can be staggering:

• The entire business team will have access to the most up-to-date contact data no matter who entered it.
• Marketers will be able to create extremely targeted segments to make sure their advertising dollars are spent on the most influential people in their industry.
• Sales representatives can parse through the likes and dislikes of new contacts via their responses to marketing campaigns, allowing them to build a relationship intelligently and deliberately.
• The history of an individual contact’s relationship with your company will be cataloged, allowing both sides to understand the full extent of each contact’s exposure.

Without this exchange of information, the marketer is never going to know how well a particular message or vehicle worked  and the sales representative is going to have a hard time figuring out which HCPs have renewed interest in the products they sell.

Imagine the power of an informed marketer now has by cataloging and normalizing all information on their HCP audience (and I mean, prescribers, NPs, MAs, educators and even Pharmacists) to determine the sales reps effectiveness, the message effectiveness and what levers actually change behavior.

What do you think about synchronizing your marketing and sales team information? Would this be a beneficial capability for growing your company’s top line sales?

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