“Strategy is to determine STP from the perspective of 3C”
Strategy is to decide the place, the opponent, and the method to “win without fail, never lose”.
It is intended to gain a competitive advantage over competitors by effectively investing limited management resources.
Places, opponents, and methods are markets/customers, competition, and your company, segmentation, targeting, and positioning.
The correct strategy eliminates the waste of management resources.
If the strategy is not correct, the expected results cannot be obtained, and even if the number of measures is increased, it will not work and management resources will be wasted.
If you use order data and matrix analysis, you can achieve results with limited management resources.
“Marketing process and synchronization with customer behavior change phase and its pitfalls”
Information provision activities of MRs are diverse and are carried out through multiple channels.
Offline interviews, email, web interviews, telephone calls, web lectures, offline lectures, briefing sessions, etc.
Then, are these activities selected and executed according to the marketing process and customer behavior change phase?
The marketing process, which is becoming more digital, and the customer behavior change phase are linked processes.
There are several effective information channels as a “means” for the purpose of raising the awareness and interest of potential customers, stimulating their desires and cultivating them into prospective customers, selecting customers with a high probability of receiving orders from prospective customers .
Sales representatives tend to focus much of their activity around customers who are already engaged.
In addition to visiting directly, sending emails and providing information via the Web, management resources are wasted more than necessary.
If sales representatives are responsible for everything, the force will be dispersed, so it is necessary to appropriately select information provision channels according to the marketing process and customer behavior change phase.
For loyal customers whose share value has already reached a stable target value, it is necessary to allocate the sales representatives own activities to the “strengthening” frame, so it is not necessarily linked to the marketing process and the customer’s behavior change phase.
It stems from the fact that the pharmaceutical business is targeted marketing with a mix of various customer types.
In the customer behavior change phase, if there is a competing product in the same class, it is possible that the competitor’s product has already been selected due to poor progress with your own product, so always remember the 3C perspective.
Using the matrix analysis method, you can grasp the customer phase from the perspective of 3C and track the changes.
In sales activities that rely on the experience and intuition of conventional sales representatives, it is difficult to track the amount of work and processes involved, so it is inevitably dependent on the individual.
Against this background, SFA and CRM are being introduced to manage sales activities and customer information, and increase engagement by supporting sales representatives.
However, we often hear that the introduction of SFA/CRM has not produced the expected sales impact.
The biggest issue is that information input does not progress because it is difficult to obtain the understanding of sales representatives.
SFA/CRM is a tool that contributes to operational efficiency and profit expansion, but input information is the foundation.
The main reasons why it is difficult to gain the understanding of the sales department are: (1) the amount of input is a burden, (2) they do not feel the need to input information, (3) they do not feel the reward for inputting, and (4) other sales representatives input information is not helpful, etc.
In other words, the original purpose and benefits are not clear.
Therefore, measures such as understanding the merits of SFA/CRM, improving IT literacy, and considering mutual operation methods will not solve the root cause.
Reinforcement of tracking, on the contrary, creates a backlash, and may lead to superficial information or, in extreme cases, making a false report.
In order to get sales representatives to understand the merits of SFA/CRM, no matter how much you explain SFA/CRM as a “means”, it will not be a solution.
In order to make the “means” work, it is essential to clarify the “strategy”, which is the higher level concept, and the “purpose” in the first place.
By using the matrix analysis method, it is possible to clarify the “purpose” and its “strategy” for each customer and visually track the results of their activities.
Sequel “The pharmaceutical business begins and ends with targeting”
In the pharmaceutical business, target marketing involves a mixture of customers who have a intention to prescription and those who do not.
It is necessary to capture even those customers who do not intend to prescribe at the present moment, it in order to expand the market .
Similar to extracting customers with a high probability of receiving orders as in the consumer goods business, it is not possible to give priority only to customers with a high prescription intention according to the innovator theory.
Considering the size of the market, we must prioritize the investment of limited management resources.
Then, what about the high and low prescribing intentions for competing products among customers with a high prescribing intention and a large market size?Some customers will have a higher priority than your own product, while others will prefer your product.
In other words, we need three axes: intention to prescribe, market size, and competitive advantage in drug selection.
The matrix analysis method can classify customers into 12 frames according to these three axes from order data.
”Strategy does not have to be disruptive innovation.”
A “strategy” is something that can be decided from a long-term perspective, not something that can be changed at dawn or dusk.
Or, as some would say,
Under the fast-changing business environment, “strategy” is unnecessary and should be agile.
Which one is correct?
The absolute condition in the strategic plan is to “win without fail, never lose”.
To do that, you need to decide where, with whom, and how you will fight.
In other words, “strategy” means clarifying where your company’s competitive advantage lies and making appropriate decisions on where to direct your management resources.
Strategy as an optimal solution needs to be determined relatively by identifying external environmental factors that affect the company through macro environment represented by PEST analysis and micro analysis of market/customers and competition.
As a matter of course, if the market environment or competitive environment changes, it will be necessary to change the strategy.
Decision makers are required to articulate a set of strategy that can be applied as circumstances change and evolve.
Strategy does not have to be disruptive innovation.
All you have to do is read the changes in the environment and switch in the right direction flexibly and agilely.
When you modify your strategy, you should always try to give instructions according to your own logic.
The matrix analysis method is a powerful tool for quick and flexible decision-making by reading market changes most sensitively because it uses order data.
Moving faster than your competition creates a competitive advantage.
Do you sometimes lose track of what you were discussing in the first place when the discussion progressed from the particulars?
It misses the “purpose”.
Since discussions start from the details, that is, the “means,” it is common for the “means” themselves to be the “purpose” .
If the “means” itself is difficult to implement, we may have to think of another “means” to achieve the “purpose”, but the discussion may stop saying “I can’t do that”.
Strategic planning should always be designed around three concepts.
There are three things: the goal to be achieved, the direction to achieve it, and the means to achieve it.
We often see cases where only “sales target” and “behavior target” are set.
It is a setting such as “achieve the sales target of 10 million yen by visiting customers 100 times”.
Although there is a “correlation” between the number of visits and sales, there is no “causal relationship”.
It is essential to set the “number of acquired cases” that has a causal relationship with “sales”, such as “achieve the sales target of 10 million yen by conducting 100 interviews and acquiring 50 new cases”.
Since the matrix analysis uses ordered data, tracking based on causal relationships is possible.
