Focusing on Customers

Today I had a great conversation with a company that approaches their sales force in a very customer-centric manner. I was impressed with how the organization is crafting teams of people whose focus is to provide resources to their internal customers -- the reps -- in order to help them be more productive. We most often sell to brand teams, but this particular meeting was with an individual in field operations who needs a vacancy program to maintain share in key territories when a rep is out.

We provide insight each day to pharma clients who are talking about customer centricity. I think we offer up some pretty innovative suggestions for building customer-centric brands and franchises. A few pharma companies are thinking even bigger -- moving toward an enterprise-wide customer focus. That means they choose to use the vast amount of intelligence available about their prescriber customers to be more relevant, precise, and effective. I really appreciated talking to a company that is taking this same approach with internal customers. No more alignment by functional areas, but instead by what the customer wants and needs.