Bringing Instant Insights (Not Just Charts) to Sales Planning Meetings
The starting point for most conversations about a candidate drug’s sales potential is a chart of drug sales by segment and time—month/quarter/year, depending on the planning horizon. Digging deeper, you are ‘treated’ to a huge table, or perhaps a bunch of bar charts, tallying the number of afflicted people, those afflicted who have insurance, those with insurance who are good candidates for a specific class of therapy, and so on, leading to an estimate of patients who will receive the firm’s medicine. Although it’s all the right information, visualizing across multiple time periods, multiple market segments, and multiple filters is an eye-crossing challenge. Like the visuals themselves, conversations jump and dart around unsatisfyingly, from “Wait, did we look at healthcare access in the out years?” to “What was the total incidence again?” until the topic is lost.
Having participated in numerous drug development review and sales planning meetings and having interviewed key stakeholders at multiple firms, we understand first-hand how long it can take participants to level-set on a drug’s go-to-market story. Yet without a concise go-to-market narrative, building consensus around how to improve a drug’s future prospects just isn’t possible. We had a hunch that the right visualization could make a big difference in these meetings, and that got us thinking…