Developing IQVIA’s positions on key trends in the pharma and life sciences industries, with a focus on EMEA.
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Developing IQVIA’s positions on key trends in the pharma and life sciences industries, with a focus on EMEA.
Learn more
Developing IQVIA’s positions on key trends in the pharma and life sciences industries, with a focus on EMEA.
Learn more
Developing IQVIA’s positions on key trends in the pharma and life sciences industries, with a focus on EMEA.
Learn more
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"Aligning legislative requirements, payer expectations regarding pricing and evidence, and meeting patients’ needs is now crucial for successful launches.
Learn moreMost pharma and biotech companies introduce new field sales incentive compensation plans (IC) at the start of each fiscal year, typically January 1 for companies following a calendar-year cycle. Experienced incentive compensation leaders know that a last-minute rush to establish their next annual IC plan often coincides with the holiday season. Being prepared for it, and hopefully minimizing stress, begins with good planning.
With your organization’s next IC plan design cycle likely just around the corner, here are five key planning suggestions from IQVIA’s IC design experts to help your internal team expedite the process.
Stepping back to consider the big picture is the first step to plan design success. One way to start is answering the question: How does your company prefer to motivate its salespeople? This is a broad question, but fortunately, breaking it down doesn’t have to be that difficult. Look to your current incentive plans for some guidance. For example, are your plans designed exclusively to reward individual performance, or are there team-based components? How much more do (and should) top performers earn than average performers? Has your organization historically been open to conducting sales incentive contests?
How many different people in your organization, outside of the salespeople themselves, weigh in on your sales incentive plans? Sales incentive plans have cross-functional impact, which makes a plan design project a great way to build your and your team’s visibility and reputation within the organization. Bringing all these stakeholders together early in the plan design project, and continuing to engage them throughout, is crucial for success. It’s easy to identify some of these stakeholders: sales leaders, brand leaders, HR… but also consider Legal, Compliance, Finance, or IT.
One tip for your first meeting with this core team of stakeholders: Bring up your company’s IC design philosophy and work to gain alignment on it.
The start of a new year often brings with it organizational change, and your sales teams are no exception. What major planned changes need to be factored into next year’s incentive plan designs? You may already know about things like product launches or creation of new sales teams. However, there are changes that can “fly below the radar” but have significant impacts. For example, a sales leader may be thinking about measuring their team members’ performance in a new way that requires using a new source of data. What will it take to acquire this data, assess its fitness for use as a component in an incentive plan, and build it into your company’s data warehouse or other systems?
What will be your organization’s “ask” for this year’s IC plan designs? For example, how many teams and roles will be included? Will there be contests or sales performance incentive funds (SPIF)s? Is there a President’s Club or Circle of Excellence award program? Clear documentation of what needs to be done can help you anticipate resource needs and priorities. When changes to the scope arise, documentation showing a before-and-after comparison will help you advocate for changes to timing and resource needs.
Designing good incentive plans relies on people who can think both strategically and analytically. Those people are often in high demand within your organization, being asked to “jump in” on multiple projects while being responsible for important deliverables (like payouts!). Do you and your team have the bandwidth to meet your existing priorities while also taking on several months of IC plan design work? You may realize it makes sense to partner with an external vendor.
IQVIA’s IC practice has completed IC plan design projects for hundreds of companies, and our IC experts have years of experience designing and administering a wide variety of IC plans supporting retail, specialty, and rare disease products across numerous therapeutic areas. Our combination of unparalleled data assets and IC expertise provides our customers unique value and perspective on IC design and administration.
For additional information and support regarding your company’s field sales incentive plan, contact IQVIA to schedule a personalized discovery session with one of our IC experts today. We'll review your current plan and design processes to show you how to get the most out of this year’s IC planning cycle.
Optimize the performance of your sales engine with IQVIA’s Incentive Compensation Center of Excellence.
IQVIA's Incentive 360 enables commercial organizations to embrace incentive compensation and its accelerated evolution in the promotional environment, driven by agile plan design, advanced insights, integrated Next Best actions, and field team motivational tools.
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