The Sales Performance Management application (SPM) is designed to help drugmakers analyse sales performance, providing data on everything from detailing and market positioning to the impact of physician programs and co-pay schemes.
HP Solutions, part of IT giant Hewlett-Packard, said the system had been developed to better monitor the performance of sales teams, particularly given the recent trend for pharma firms to cut in-house capacity in favour of outsourced capacity.
Company founder, Hal Petrimoulx suggested that: “To date, most companies have focused their reporting on ‘what is happening.’ What sales forces need is to understand why things are happening and what can they do about it.
“Based on my extensive experience working with pharmaceutical companies, we’ve developed an approach that enables identification of what activities drive sales success at a local market level.”
Rapid roll out is key
Symphony, whose role in the partnership was to develop a product incorporating HP’s analytics engine, believes the speed with which SPM can be implemented is one of its key advantages over other systems, as general manager Bob Merold explained.
“A great idea isn’t of much value if it takes you over a year to implement; most companies say new solutions are taking them at least that long to deploy these days,” adding that SPM can be rolled out for field sales in as little as 12 weeks.