Blog 3 of 7 — From Inside-Out to Outside-In: A seven-part thought leadership series on pharma budget optimization · Navigator365™ Benchmark
In the two previous blogs we argued that the problem often isn’t the size of your budget but how it’s allocated and that budgeting on averages is risky. This blog is about the importance of a balanced, integrated mix, while ensuring an impactful share of voice vs your key competitors.
Ask a commercial or medical team whether digital works and you get the same answer: yes, but less well than a rep or MSL. That isn’t wrong – it’s just the wrong question. What happens when you deploy them together?
The prize is real — and it’s about the mix
McKinsey’s analysis of pharma commercial transformations found that analytics-enabled omnichannel models deliver a 5–10% revenue uplift, a 3–5% increase in prescribers and a 10–20% improvement in marketing efficiency with 5–10% higher HCP satisfaction on top1. That efficiency gain is the first blog’s argument in numbers: the same budget, better allocated.
Figure 1. What orchestration is worth1
Those aren’t the returns of adding a channel. They’re the returns of orchestrating the mix around the physician. One plus one isn’t two. It’s almost three.
Why the mix wins
Across Health analysed 95 Navigator365 Benchmark studies – 5,002 respondents, 19 therapeutic areas2 – asking what makes a brand the NPS leader in its market. Brands leading on both rep and omnichannel have an 85% chance of it. Brands leading on rep only: 62%.
Figure 2. Rep leadership gets you most of the way. Omnichannel closes the gap.2
Another Benchmark study in two European markets clearly illustrates the importance of orchestrating the full mix: in one country, the brand led on customer experience, NPS and market share; in the other market, leaning on a narrow set of channels at lower frequency, it trailed on all three. Same product, same company.
Enter the competitor lens
One thing physician preference can’t tell you is how much is enough. Competitors set that bar.
So the Benchmark reads your mix against the brands you actually compete with, on two questions: volume of execution, and quality of it. They come apart more often than you’d expect, and call for opposite fixes — strong share of voice but poorly received is a quality problem, and more frequency makes it worse; well received but barely present is the opposite: the execution works, there just isn’t enough of it. Share of voice (built from reach, frequency and impact, not spend), customer experience and content each read that way: against the same competitor set, at brand average and cut by segment.
Underneath that sits the channel-level view, across more than 40 channels spanning commercial, medical, access, paid and earned. The Benchmark’s performance maps plot each of them on reach and on the impact customers attribute to it — for your brand and for your competitors, and again cut by segment. That is a direct read on which channels your customers actually see and appreciate, and where the competition is. It also covers the earned and access channels that carry no media spend and so never show up as a budget line at all.
What this means for your budget planning
Setting next year’s omnichannel priorities therefore takes two inputs, not one: what your customers actually want, and how your engagement efforts perform against the competition. Investing in channels you already run based on purely internal metrics, or buying into a new approach because it looks promising, isn’t a plan without that evidence — it is a guess with a budget attached. The Maturometer 2025 shows why that matters: digital now absorbs 31% of the marketing budget, yet satisfaction with it stays low³. More spend on its own has not closed that gap; external evidence has to come into the planning, and the Benchmark supplies exactly that — the customer and the competitor lens.
The next blog takes the other side of the coin: where digital replaces the rep, and where it doesn’t. In the meantime, join our upcoming webinar how to shape your pharma budget for maximum business impact, where we’ll discuss how leading pharma organisations use customer and competitive evidence to optimise investments, prioritise channels, and strengthen stakeholder buy-in.
The Navigator365™ Benchmark 4D model gives you all relevant data and recommendations around HCP channel affinity as well as your omnichannel share of voice (commercial, medical and peer-to-peer), and the quality of your execution vs the competition. Before this season’s numbers get locked in, find out where you can optimise in an evidence-based way — talk to an Across expert to learn more.
References
1. “Demystifying the omnichannel commercial model for pharma companies in Asia”, McKinsey & Company, 2022.
2. Navigator365™ Benchmark, 95 studies across 19 therapeutic areas (n=5,002), Across Health, data on file.
3. Across Health Maturometer 2025