Turning business intelligence managers into business performance leaders

pharmafile | October 26, 2012 | Feature | Business Services, Manufacturing and Production, Medical Communications, Research and Development, Sales and Marketing |  Cello, MSI, business leaders, intelligence 

Never before have business intelligence people played such a leading role in the marketing planning process.

For those who view business intelligence as a back-room, service function, the key word I would emphasise there is ‘leading’. For marketing plans to be effective in a truly commercial sense of robustly delivering a return, the time has come for business intelligence people to assume the role of Business Performance Champion.

For many within our industry, this will seem an anathema. Business intelligence teams have traditionally played a back-seat, reactive role in marketing planning. They are often seen as being there to service marketing, and measuring and tracking the things they are asked to – essentially, in the eyes of marketers at least – mere information gatherers.

But in an increasingly evidence-based profit-driven world, business intelligence needs to be more than that. They need to be smart enough to be proactive and anticipate what marketing teams need, whilst also being prepared to challenge and shape their thinking, based on the evidence they have prepared – and ‘prepared’ does not mean simply handing over an IMS data chart, it means thinking through how the evidence impacts the business and making a case for how the marketing strategy and tactics could be improved.

But above all, business intelligence people tend to be the ones who are best placed to really analyse business performance – and, as we shall see, this is not simply about sales, traditionally the metric of choice for the marketer.

If pharma can tap this excellent existing and internal resource, it can ensure that its marketing planning truly focuses on what is important: the commercial needs of the corporation, and, inextricably linked, the needs of the patient.

Realistically, this is a scenario far removed from what happens currently in most pharma companies. To get to the situation where business intelligence people are fulfilling the role of business performance champions, they need to be able to prepare the evidence into a robust thinking framework which drives effective decision-making by marketers.

To make this work, three things need to happen. First, business intelligence people need to gain a thorough understanding of the whole strategic marketing planning process – in other words they need upskilling.

Secondly, they need to be armed with tools that provide robust thinking frameworks, as business consultants do. In practice this means software which enables them to properly analyse different scenarios, strategies and  resource allocations, using the information they have gathered.

Thirdly, and most fundamentally, comes a cultural challenge: it is necessary to change the mindset of the business intelligence people themselves to that of a performance driver, along with the marketers they are interacting with, and the wider organisation.

However, this longer-term change will only happen through business intelligence teams proving themselves. Rebranding alone in not enough, they have to bring different capabilities to the table.

From number crunchers to marketing process experts

Unfortunately, there is a tendency amongst marketers to regard business intelligence people as number crunchers, and as such they don’t hold much sway in the marketing arena.

Pharma tends to exist in a very two-dimensional world, where marketers do the thinking, and analysts do the numbers.

I accept that this is a generalisation, but marketers tend to come from a sales background, and so are often articulate and persuasive people. By contrast – and again generalising a little – business intelligence people often went into their field precisely because they are most comfortable with numbers and analysis.

This can mean that in a group situation, the dynamic can work against them, with decisions inevitably made on the basis of who sounds most convincing. Because business intelligence people generally don’t know how to build all the elements of a marketing strategy, they can be less credible in challenging marketing teams in a planning discussion – when actually they are the people who arguably have more strength in process, evidence and data, so should be best-placed to do precisely that.

To build a successful marketing strategy requires both science and ‘art’. The ‘art’ is the spark that creative marketers are often so good at, whereas the science is in being able to create a process that seamlessly aligns every element of the marketing plan, and this is very much what the business intelligence skillset brings to the process.

By injecting scientific rigour and proper analysis into that process, the analytical teams should be helping marketers prioritise the SWOT grid and CSFs, so that the challenges which need to be overcome can be identified based on where the opportunities and threats actually hit the patient flow, rather than simply on assumptions.

That way, you can focus the creativity which is also needed – and which is generally what the marketers bring to the party – on creating the solutions which are based around the most important things for driving the business, and where that creativity will give the best returns in true commercial terms.

This kind of structured creativity creates what we call a ‘creativity sandwich’: the science identifies the problem, the creativity comes up with ideas (the sweet jam) to solve that problem, and bring it all together. Then the science tests those ideas to see if they really will solve the problem in a way which will drive business performance and ROI – before taking it to the next layer.

Defining business performance

This all seems obvious, so what is stopping it happening in our industry. Surprisingly, one of the key barriers is a lack of understanding of what business performance actually looks like, which is another reason why it needs championing.

This might be a surprise given that most marketers will have come from a very target-driven sales background, and so you might expect them to be completely focussed on performance. To an extent that is true, but the metrics they are using to measure that performance are often too far removed from the metrics that those responsible for the overall business use.

Put simply, marketers are too focussed on sales, to the exclusion of almost all other measures, including profitability! Pharma talks incessantly about return on investment, but in reality, few marketing planners even have a profit target – they simply have a straight top-line revenue target.

As a consultant, I have gone into pharma marketing teams and shown them where they could be increasing their profit, but as long as they are hitting their sales targets, they are not that interested (and if that is how they are to be judged, why would they be?).

In a time when pharma chief executives are constantly talking about profitability for shareholders, surely improving the returns on your assets is an obvious step that should come before the need for hatchets. Yet this is not what we see in companies facing patent cliffs; the words profit and ROI continue to be completely absent from their brand plans, but they will ‘reorganise’ almost annually!

If you think this blindness to ROI thinking isn’t true, consider this: how many marketers would be happy to achieve the same sales with lower costs (the other key way of increasing business performance)?

Most would simply see this as reducing their budget for next year, and would resist it. Not unreasonably, marketers respond far better to terms such as ‘accelerated growth’, with the implication of increased sales, than to ‘increased profitability’.

However, where this falls down is that if marketers are already ‘on target for sales’, what incentive do they have to ‘accelerate growth’ when nobody is counting ROI – acceleration just ups their target for next year! Something is very wrong with this picture; pharma has to change.

This is a major cultural shift that needs to happen within our industry, and I believe it can be driven to a large extent by business intelligence managers, who with their more analytical minds and their grasp on figures, can more easily learn to be profit-centred.

This has to happen, because the only way that we are going to be able to fund the future drugs that we need to survive, is to become more profit-focussed. It should be a no-brainer, but sadly it is quite a radical thought for the pharma industry, which has in the past been cushioned from thinking about profits by an exponentially growing revenue stream.

Well that stream has run dry, and we have to do things differently now. If there are cuts to  health system budgets across the world, how can it possibly be that pharma is defending its prices as necessary, while at the same time not even adequately measuring the profitability of what they are doing?

So budget cuts are inevitable, which is why the marketing planning process needs people who are focussed on business performance and who bring a scientific rigour to understanding where profitable sales are coming from, because you don’t want to be cutting the thing that is actually improving your business’s performance, particularly when its people’s jobs that are on the line.

A simply smart service?

So if the need for business performance champions to be part of the marketing planning process is pressing, what needs to happen for that to be translated into reality? And given that multi-functional planning teams are already commonplace in the industry, how can pharma focus their minds on what really matters, to make the marketing planning process more effective?

Although it is accepted practice for those teams to include not just marketers and business intelligence people, but representatives of other disciplines as well, it is less accepted that all members of that team get behind a common brand plan which they understand every element of – it still tends to be that each part carries out its own ‘function’ within the team.

And those teams are almost always led by marketers, who aren’t necessarily applying the level of analytical rigour required. This is not to say that the fault lies entirely at the door of the marketers. Too often the analytical side is not strategic enough, quite happy to simply be used as a ‘service’ for the marketers: we need some research, let’s hive it off, because we don’t want to/don’t have the tools to/don’t understand that bit of it.

If business intelligence teams are happy to accept that role, it becomes ingrained. Instead, we need for those people to question more and test more, directing and guiding the marketers rather than simply being an on-call service for them. Part of this is about having the depth of insight into the patient flow to be able to understand the way decisions are being taken.

The planning process will be much more integrated where there is an interface which allows all participants to have access to all the information at the same time, making the process as seamless and smooth as possible.

So planning teams need to have shared simulation tools with which they can simulate the business challenges, work together as a team to overcome them (combining the scientific rigour with the creativity and ideas generation), and then develops strategies which have robustness behind them, which are properly tested, and, crucially, which are meaningful in terms of how they grow business performance.

Having these simulation and planning tools online allows all members of the planning team to share information together in real time, contribute together, and enabling our business performance champions to signpost marketers where to look. This ability to work cohesively in a ‘simply smart’ way is crucial to the success of a planning process which will be performance-focused.

A cultural change

Once you have raised levels of understanding and skills amongst business intelligence managers, and given them – and the whole planning team – the tools to do the job, the final piece in the jigsaw is creating an organisational structure and culture within which business performance can be championed.

A key part of this is incentivising people to take a longer-term view of what makes sense for the organisation, rather than a short-term, revenue-based perspective. That means giving individuals and teams profit or return on investment goals which are longer range.

As an outside consultant, when I go into companies I can quickly see the correlation between how well people are genuinely working together, and the business performance.

If I go to look at the performance of a brand, and there are only marketers in the room – or if the business intelligence people have been invited but are unresponsive and don’t really participate – then I know there is going to be a lack of robustness about where the real problems are, and there is probably going to be a lack of analytical rigour in how the plan is built, and where the business growth is going to come from.

We need a culture change where marketers and business intelligence people work as true partners on business performance. For as long as most of them come from sales backgrounds, marketers will always be short-term revenue-driven (and companies do need this element); so it is up to business intelligence managers to assume the role of business performance champions to steer the ambitions and creativity of the team to align with what the business needs in the longer term.

They must be able to prepare the evidence into a framework that drives effective decision-making. This kind of understanding will not come overnight; it requires having the decision support tools and training in place to turn them into those business performance champions.

Training is best done on their actual brand plans using simulation tools to enable the team to see how to achieve immediate uplift, while embedding the necessary skills and tools to create the business performance champions for the future.

Alex Blyth is managing director of CELLO Business Sciences. Email: ablyth@BusinessSciences.com