Pharmaceutical Executive Europe - April 2008 - (Page 29) Pharmaceutical Executive Europe April 2008 Sales: Incentive Compensation 29 Reward:Better Business Steffen Maennche, Principal Consultant with IMS Health, reveals the business benefits to be gained from diagnosing current incentive plans and puts forward the case for prioritising a thorough review of incentive compensation. T he world of incentive compensation is already a complex one and financial costs, wasted opportunities as well as difficult resourcing issues await the uninformed who fail to design the right model and manage it successfully. In the past, incentive compensation schemes have often been repeated year after year and have been subjected to very little scrutiny by management. In Europe they may actually have been undervalued. Well-designed incentive compensation can, however, show the way forward by offering the essential routemap to guide reps to the right customers, products and markets. Doing nothing about incentive compensation is no longer an option. Incentive compensation review is fast becoming a hot topic — a critical area worthy of management attention. Change characteristics Forces of change that will impact on the high level design of incentive reward schemes are gathering. But the scope and intensity of these changes are unfortunately not universal or uniform in all countries, which further complicates the picture. Partly in response to these changes, a number of sales force innovations are taking place in the industry. These include ● the development of team-based selling and account teams, in part driven by the growing influence of central bodies such as the UK’s NICE and primary care trusts and Germany’s IQWiG and sick funds; ● a growing interest in qualitative measurements of the perceived value of industry to customer interaction, as well as the strength of this relationship;
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