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Precision Sales ForceIMS Health and SAS partner to offer sales force effectiveness consultingIMS Health is the world's leading provider of market intelligence to the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. With 2005 revenues of $1.8 billion and more than 50 years of industry experience, IMS offers products and consulting services that are integral to clients' day-to-day operations, including segmentation and portfolio optimization capabilities, launch and brand management solutions, and sales force effectiveness innovations. 
Check out this video to learn more about IMS Health and its successes with SAS.View Video (Runtime: 4 mins, 32 secs)You have questions; our customers have answers. Check out this video Q & A. 
Chris Nickum Global Practice Leader for Sales and Account Management IMS Health View Video (Requires Windows Media Player 6.4.7 or higher or RealPlayer 6 or higher ) Asked by its global clients to help them solve sales force optimization challenges, IMS chose SAS Enterprise BI Server to power its Precision Sales Force offerings. The client results are impressive. "People trust SAS for its world-class analytical capability, and they trust IMS as having the most comprehensive information, as well as the best consulting assets, both locally and globally. It's a very powerful combination," says Hossam Sadek, IMS Vice President for Sales Force Effectiveness in the Americas. "Customers can pick other companies with good analytical skills or good consulting skills, but they don't have that complete continuum of information, analytics and consulting, and they're not able to do it on a global basis," Sadek says.
Easing clients' business pressures
Through Precision Sales Force engagements with IMS, clients are able to truly understand what drives the behavior of their customers (e.g., physicians), via segmentation. By gaining understanding of doctors' responses to different types of promotion, IMS can tailor its messages and better utilize its resources based on physicians' preferences. "They can be much more nimble and react to changes in the marketplace," Sadek says. IMS clients are using recommendations created by IMS consultants who use the Sales Force Effectiveness Precision Suite as their toolkit. Hundreds of IMS employees use the Precision Suite to support consulting engagements with clients. Historically, engagements of this type would require long lead times. Changes in clients' budgets, business strategies, etc., could not be integrated without significant rework and time. Now, if a client learns about a budget cut, IMS consultants can update their recommendations based on this new constraint in real time, while the client is still on site. For IMS, a critical feature of the SAS platform is the ability to store, manipulate and analyze vast quantities of data and do it in a distributed computing environment. "Not only have we generated efficiencies for our clients, we have also generated quite a few efficiencies internally," says Chris Nickum, Global Practice Leader for Sales Force Effectiveness." We run high-yield, high-end analytics on huge volumes of data across 20 countries. When we speak to clients, they are impressed with our global capabilities and scope of our offerings." By leveraging the power of SAS and combining it with IMS' global expertise in sales force effectiveness and information assets, IMS offers its clients analytic capabilities that meet the real-time demands of the industry. Through precise scenario planning, IMS can model the optimal approach given a variety of constraints prevalent in the pharmaceutical industry today, including budget cuts. This scenario-based approach by IMS provides a powerful look into the future and addresses the top issue facing pharmaceutical CEOs today: uncertainty about what lies ahead in a rapidly changing industry. "We can constantly refresh our segmentation, promotion response, optimizations and call plans, and that is an important change in an industry that used to do strategic planning once a year," Nickum says, referring to a quarterly update process by some clients who have switched to IMS.
Global selling presents different challenges
"SAS gives us a world-class platform. When we're asked by a major client to help improve their sales force effectiveness in 17 countries, we don't have to reinvent the wheel," says Nev Skelton, Vice President for Sales Force Effectiveness in Europe, Middle East and Asia. "The SAS Enterprise BI Server platform is a real enabler to not only the analytics, but also to our ability to roll our methodology consistently throughout the world." IMS believes its partnership with SAS enables a high level of service by leveraging the power of SAS. It is providing more sophisticated customer segmentation, promotion response, resource optimization and call planning consulting. "We can help companies find the most effective way to get answers on what's working, what's not working and how different market factors are affecting their campaigns," Nickum says. When IMS talks to clients, it highlights the role of SAS in its consulting offering. SAS is globally recognized as the industry leader in analytics, the de facto standard for clinical data analysis, the FDA standard for electronic submissions and the choice of 100 percent of the FORTUNE 500 pharmaceutical companies. "Clients already trust SAS to help them develop products, and they trust us to help them market those products. The two companies together provide exceptional synergy," Nickum says. Copyright © SAS Institute Inc. All Rights Reserved. |
IMS Health
Challenge:
Pharmaceutical clients need to optimize their sales force resources and effectiveness as industry pressures force them to focus on profitability as well as revenue growth.
Solution:
IMS' Precision Sales Force Powered by SAS Enterprise BI Server provides speed, high-end analytics and an iterative, client-centric consulting engagement model that helps IMS Health deliver superior consulting services.
Benefits:
IMS Health's clients understand who their customers are, what promotion vehicles they respond to and how to optimize their scarce sales resources. "People trust SAS for its world-class analytic capability, and they trust IMS as having the most comprehensive information, as well as the best consulting assets, both locally and globally. It's a very powerful combination." Read More:
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