Effective Channel Partner Incentive Planning for the Pharma Industry

Traditionally, the channel partner model generated significant sales in the pharmaceutical industry. However, in today’s digital world, physicians and other medical professionals are already armed with prior research, making it difficult for channel partners to influence them to buy.

In many cases, physician access creates an issue, limiting the number of visits sales representatives can make. Moreover, marketing channels like professional conferences, noted thought leader speeches, and advertising in medical journals influence how sales are made in certain areas. Additionally, physicians sometimes block access to their prescription-writing data, taking a critical source of sales intelligence out of the picture.

To enhance growth in this challenging sales environment, many pharma companies aim

to design fair, structured, and effective partner incentive programs that align with their business goals and motivate partners to sell both simple and complex pharma products.

Let’s delve deeper into effective channel partner incentive planning for the pharmaceutical industry.

Channel Partner Incentives in the Pharma Industry

1. Role-specific incentives

Many companies collaborate with channel partners who are specialists and have deep rooted knowledge to sell products or assist customers with pre-sale homework. 

No matter what the role, it’s essential to provide commensurate incentives to compensate channel partners suitably.

2. Split incentives

Channel chiefs must lay down clear rules for the distribution of sales incentives if more than one channel partner, maybe from different geographies, is involved in a particular sales deal.

The incentive may be split equally, or it may be divided according to each partner’s workload who worked on the deal.

3. Presale incentives

At times, a product’s sales cycle, mostly a novel or an intricate product, goes beyond a year. In such a case, channel partners must be rewarded for interim progress to keep them motivated until sales close.

4. Omnichannel incentives

Customers often use flexible digital channels to engage with suppliers, leaving channel partners out of the final sales process.

When this happens, organizations must reward channel partners with incentives for persuading the buyer in the early stages of the sales funnel. Companies must proactively ask customers how they found out about the product and provide requisite incentives in case it was a channel partner.

Incentive Compensation using Differential Resourcing

Pharmaceutical companies must implement a sales model that deploys channel partners based on regional market conditions. That way, doctors don’t have to waste time on unnecessary product pitches, and channel partners can focus on the most high-value customers.

Unlike linear compensation plans, where channel partners carried the same products in different territories, differential resourcing allows organizations to vary the number of channel partners and the products they sell in a particular region. In other words, it establishes a territory footprint and builds a localized and dynamic channel partner team. 

As a channel partner may carry different products to different doctors or the same product with different priorities, incentives are weighted to match the effort required to sell each product in different geographies.

How can Zaggle help? 

Zaggle Propel, our enterprise channel rewards, incentive, and engagement solution, caters to KPI-driven metric-based reward programs.

Our Metric Based Configurator can enable pharma companies to design and execute a large variety of partner incentive programs through – 

• Defining multiple KPIs, attributes, weightages, and more.
• Creating custom rules for different programs, such as qualification criteria, reward to rupee conversion, participant eligibility, geography, etc.

Our dynamic dashboards report partner performance and measure program success, participation and adoption rates, and end-customer satisfaction. Built-in demographic filters and individual dashboards for partners help recognize milestone achievements.

To know more about our software’s other exciting features, please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our “Propel” experts.