Integrated Sales and Marketing

Situation: A mid-sized biopharma company acquires an FDA-approved brand for the treatment of anemia. The company has little experience in the therapeutic category and no commercialization plan in place. Meanwhile, the brand is struggling with less-than-optimal prescription rates. The company needs a plan to relaunch the brand quickly, and they need additional resources to support it on the market.

Insight: inVentiv's team of strategists conduct a series of analytical and research studies to better understand the current state of the anemia category, the competitive set, and the potential opportunity for the brand. With a clear understanding of the market gaps, the team crafts a commercialization plan to position the brand for maximum success on the market.

Solution: Using the new commercialization plan as a foundation, inVentiv develops an integrated sales and marketing program with the following components:

• One of inVentiv's ad agencies creates advertising and promotional materials to reflect the new positioning of the brand. A new physician-focused Web site is developed as an additional channel for connecting with customers.
• Customer segmentation and targeting strategy is developed to maximize the brand's sales effort. To augment the company's internal sales resources, inVentiv trains and deploys an outsourced sales team.
• In conjunction with the sales program, a sampling program is developed, launched, and managed by inVentiv to support increased trial of the brand.
• inVentiv forms a multidisciplinary team of the key marketing and sales professionals on the account. The team meets regularly as a group with the client to ensure all elements of the program are working in tandem and to modify as needed.

Results: The company records incremental ROI on the program within the first few months as both product awareness and prescription rates among targeted physicians grow.