Find Your Inner Data and Take Precision Marketing to the Next Level

This article was originally published in Pharmaphorum on May 24, 2022.

Data is the powerhouse of the pharmaceutical sector. It powers drug discovery, clinical trials, and operational performance. But sizeable reservoirs of data remain unseen and untapped to commercial operations, allowing insights, opportunities, and efficiencies to leak away.

Organizations are missing out on the ability to harness their data to energize precision marketing and transform commercial performance.

The pharma industry is adjusting to massive upheaval from the pandemic and markets are emerging from its grip reshaped and alive with competition. Securing advantages and market share is growing tougher.

A recent analysis from PwC urged organizations to strengthen capabilities around digital, data, and analytics to sustain business objectives and enjoy growth. PwC Future of Health 2021 report forecast the importance of professionalizing data management, accessing and managing data ecosystems, and building capabilities to extract value from personal and technical data.

The velocity and volume of data, both structured and unstructured, will only increase, yet research has shown that just 15% of companies have a real-time single-customer view.

These challenges and efficiencies need to be met head-on as companies cannot afford to allow precious customer data, with influence across marketing, sales, and service, to lay unseen gathering cobwebs.

Deeper Insights
Pharma is becoming more adept at deploying data to improve sales and marketing as well as its drug discovery and development programmes. It is imperative, also, that it gets maximum return on its investment in bringing a drug to market, which takes an average ten years and more than $1 billion.

Many organizations are now digger deeper for insights into HCP behavior, habits and trends and using that data to influence their approaches and engagement.

Silicon Valley-based Treasure Data is at the forefront of the ‘deep data’ environment. Its systems can ingest and analyze petabytes of real-time data from multiple sources for customers, to create valuable insights that have driven up to six percent uplift in the first six months for their pharmaceutical customers.

Its evidence shows that capturing large volumes of customer data, unifying it, and putting it to use empowers relationships between field teams and HCPs, and leads to enhanced execution of marketing plans and a direct uplift in sales.

HCP-Pharma relationships and customer engagements were drastically disrupted by the pandemic creating a need to utilize more data from more sources to make connections across multi-channels.

This ask becomes more compelling with organizations only having limited exclusivity for their new therapies so they need to maximize their commercial returns during that period. Utilizing all their data will increase efficiencies and profitability.

“Pharma companies generate lots of data and bring in other data to support their actions but not all of it gets used which is where we come in,” says Thomas Kurian, head of new markets at Treasure Data, which powers some of the largest companies in pharmaceuticals.

“We provide the Customer Data platform, the tools, the applications to conduct precision marketing. From an evidence perspective, some of our clients have used the platform on existing billion-dollar drugs and achieved up to a six percent uplift in sales.”

Single View of HCPs
Treasure Data’s Enterprise Customer Data Platform (CDP) can synchronize with existing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Master Data Management systems and posts impressive evidence of performance: 2 million rows ingested per second, 5 quadrillion rows processed per month, 40 billion profiles activated per month and 100 petabytes of data stored.

This leads to AI-driven insights and predictive modeling, including next best action, lead scoring and website personalisation. In a crowded, changing market, it allows organizations to benefit from a single view of the HCPs they engage with and forge stronger relationships.

“The number one complaint about commercial teams, according to studies of HCPs, is that they don’t add much value in the digital world because the information is readily available online or on the brand’s website,” adds Kurian. “But we can give commercial teams consistent data and analytics that helps the HCP help their patients and that builds more engagement with the brand.

“Available time with HCPs is getting shorter and shorter so having data, analytics and very crisp next-best suggestions driving the engagement is helpful to commercial teams.”

Using relevant data and tailoring it to an HCP’s need has been identified as a core value in multiple studies and is underscored in a blog from Antonio Pregueiro, Ph.D., vice president life science and practice lead at IQVIA, experts in life science analytics and precision marketing. He stated: “Relationships won’t go away, but reps will need to shift their focus from relationship management to more scientific engagement to ensure that detailing adds value to the HCP.”

The ability to connect to any data from any event, any source is a secular theme across pharma as it allows agile decisions to be made, both in planning and in the field, responding to the latest data-driven intelligence.

Treasure Data says its Enterprise CDP can be integrated swiftly and safely, enhancing existing CRMs which, although they play a valuable role in the pharmaceutical organizations, were never intended to cope with the torrents of data now available.

“Essentially, CRMs were built last century and their architecture never envisioned elements like conversational AI from chatbots, mobile and web data, customer service data and all this streaming data. They weren’t built for current digital customer conversations and engagement,” says Kurian. “It means that, although they serve an awesome function, pharma companies are left with lots of engagement data of their own plus data from third parties that is just not being put to use by commercial teams with high precision.

Swift Integration
“It is definitely in an organization’s interests to make the most of all its customer data and CDP is designed to collect every form of data—such as streaming data—that is pertinent to how the customer engages with the brand or the HCP.

“Integration is often swift, organisationally light-touch and comes with maximum interoperability. We don’t typically change the pane of glass that commercial teams are training to engage with on a day-to-day basis. For instance, if sales are using the Veeva CRM system then we enrich it with real-time data. That way there is no retraining or significant change management cost.

“Similarly, we can work with existing contact center systems to bring in the contact center engagement data to help with precise commercial engagement. When an organization adopts new technology there is usually the need to hire a team in and the work takes months or years to get all the data in. But Treasure Data’s ability to ingest petabytes of data from different sources very quickly makes that a superior path to get to execute first use cases and ROI.”

Managing consent, securing data, being regulatory compliant and building customer trust are core components of Treasure Data’s approach to manage data appropriately and safety.

“Security is very important for the pharma industry and for us,” says Kurian. “We offer best-in-class security. Security and privacy are paramount.

“We currently land in serving the marketing function in pharma companies to unify customer data for precision marketing and marketing execution, but we are also expanding to serve enterprises beyond marketing–in sales and customer service.”

Treasure Data enterprise CDP for Marketing’s aim is to provide marketers with access to rich data sets that allow them to create segments based on attributes and behaviors. A marketer can use customer data to define segments and activate personalized engagement content to HCPs at each stage of the funnel, with precision.

“This leads to better performance, better relationships, better prospects and the security that all the data you generate, bring in or acquire is put to the best possible use,” adds Kurian.