Zarzia Consulting S.r.o

The market has thrown new challenges at the pharmaceutical companies. During the last years, customers and channel partners have consolidated, power buyers have emerged, product parity is increasing due to patent expires, and price competition is galore. Whereas these additional difficulties might present a case of basic survival to the least prepared of the companies, they also present an opportunity for companies who develop and execute the best go-to-market strategies, and have learnt how to optimize on-market costs.

Additionally, due to the current crisis situation, all type of pharma companies- from the ones manufacturing generics to those commercializing the most innovative or complex pharmaceuticals-, are paying more attention than ever to their customers and the effectiveness of their commercial operations. Companies who in the past focused primarily on improving productivity minimizing costs and positioning their product superiority are now finding difficult to achieve growth through market driven strategies that focus on customer intimacy, value-based selling and highly effective selling organizations.

Among others, pharmaceutical executives are facing, more and more often the merger of integrate sales, service and marketing organizations after an acquisition, or find themselves fighting price and margin erosion due to generitization of products; or even more often, they are finding that their historical customers do not have any prescription power any more. Pharmaceutical managers are forced to defining win-win solutions to market supply chain and retailers price wars, they need to assess channel optimization, to enhance the effectiveness of the commercial team, to improving the management of the Key Accounts, determining optimal field force sizing and effort allocation tactics, designing territories to obtain the most efficient and effective sales, or profiling, defining, segmenting, valuing and targeting customers or accounts

Beyond these tactical challenges, there are also strategic tasks to cover, like uncovering synergies among products, portfolios, geographies or business units, creating implementable go-to-market strategies upon product launch or market expansion, or defining full plans for performance measurement, compensation, coaching, information and tools, and leveraging available information and facts to support sales and marketing decisions

Zarzia consultants have ample experience working with companies developing implementable strategies and tactics to improve commercial and marketing effectiveness. Our approach is based upon a long term understanding of the market dynamics. Additionally, we have monitored during the last 15 years different companies strategies, sometimes successful, sometimes less, within different pharmaceutical companies.

Strategy

Product commercialization

Sometimes products make it to the market - even to late stages on their life cycle- without the bare business basics. We help our clients preparing product commercialization dossiers, at any time during the product's life stage, including market landscape, estimation of product sales forecasting and commercial potential, as well as commercialization strategies and implementation, interaction with new portfolio comers or commercial support minimums, so there are no surprises. Some of the typical projects for commercialized products are:

Assess and prioritize potential new indications
Develop strategies to maximize value late in the product life cycle.
Help implement life cycle management strategies
Develop or improve brand planning and other commercial processes
Prepare alternative product management models - like licensings, JV or brand sales

Design or improve commercial sub-functions within established companies
Design and develop commerical organizations from the ground up for emerging companies

Launch excellence

In order to provide your new product with the best opportunity to succeed, we help you by creating pre-launch diagnostics, to assess the company, product and market’s readiness, as well as support cross-function, project management, and creation of project plans, milestones, KPIs and time management for the successful timely launch. The projects usually involve:

Audit of product dossier readiness - including forecasting, investment, commercial proposition, commercial penetration rate and speed, benchmark, cannibalization scenarios, and risk analyses among other dimmensions
Audit of company readiness - among other tasks, responsiblities, timelines, fairness of workloads, cross-functional communication channels, milestones reliability, KPIs and others
Audit of market readiness - with ad hoc market research, pre-marketing initiatives assessment, investment workload, KOL mapping, formal & informal networks and market access process definition
Creation of gap analyses and realistic plans for optimizing the window of opportunity for product launch

Growth acceleration

If your products are close to patent expiry, or when market share growth stagnates, or if barriers to growth are not known, not obvious, or seem unbereable, we support you with audits to undertstand and diagnose the causes of poor commercial performance and create tailored-made actions for turnaround.

A typical project for growth acceleration would involve one or more of the following stages;

Diagnose the causes of poor commercial performance and help turn around underperforming brands
Develop powerful strategies and brand plans for in-line products
Inform new strategic decisions through competitive gaming and scenario planning
Develop and help implement programs for succeeding in complex or challenging markets

Portfolio Management

The pharmaceutical business model evolution has been accelerating during the last years, due to the large amount of blockbusters undergoing patent expire, and the dryness of the last years companies' pipelines. With morphing product portfolios, the need for reassesment of investment, or alternative commercialization strategies is a must. Companies undertake with us projects that help proactively handling, or defensively preparing for the change on the revenue lines.

Assess pipeline and portfolio gaps
Identify and prioritize therapeutic areas and disease state targets
Formulate portfolio strategies and outline how to leverage BD to meet them

Identify in- or out-licensing opportunities that meet strategic criteria
Screen in-/ out-licensing opportunities
Validate selection of in-/ out-licensing candidates
Assess the potential commercial value in different risk-sharing scenarios for of in-/ out-licensing candidates
Formulate offers and alternatives models for commercial return maximization
Real option management for products on patent expiration stage (ex-ante & ex-post)

Operations

Commercial Organization Excellence
The pharma sector is unique in the sense that most of the investment for product promotion are on the hands of the sales force - hence, the management of the largest costs have the additional complexity of people's management - one of the most difficult challenges to overcome by any organization or seasoned manager. We help you improving the efficiency and effectiveness both quantitatively and qualitatively, in an objective, unpassionated manner, through...

Audits of commercial operations effectiveness (quantitative), with recommendation for low hanging fruit improvements
Optimization of size, structure and allocation of resources in commercial operations
Creation or improvement of profiling, segmentation and targeting for product or company portfolio
Territorial design and alignment of potential
Audit or creation of fair, implementable and objectively quantifiable incentive compensation plans
Creation of goal setting plans with actionable KPI trackings
Improvement of CRM systems and knowledge value extraction
Coaching and learning programs tailored-made for the company
Creation of ad-hoc induction trainings to the function

Detailed areas of expertise

Within the pharmaceutical sector, you can count on us to support you on the following areas of expertise, yet, if you want to know how the knowledge on other sectors' areas could help you considering alternative business models, please do not hesitate to contact us.