Blog 1 of 7 — From Inside-Out to Outside-In: A seven-part thought leadership series on pharma budget optimization · Navigator365™ Benchmark
Every year, somewhere between May and November, the same ritual begins. Brand teams build next year’s plan, and the discussion quickly narrows to a single number: how much budget do we get?
It’s an understandable question. It’s just rarely the right one.
Because most commercial teams in pharma don’t lose value because their budget is too small. They lose value because the budget they do have is misallocated, divided by habit, by last year plus a few percent, by a rule of thumb no one really defends anymore.
The classic model has hit a wall a long time ago
For decades the logic was simple: more reps, more calls, more market share. Reach and frequency were the game, and you turned them up as far as they’d go. This approach has now clearly had its best days. While still widely appreciated, rep access has been deteriorating as a long-term trend and, conversely, around 50% of HCP touchpoints with pharma are now digital.
From proving digital’s worth to allocating across the mix
There’s a reason this shift feels urgent now. For years, the central commercial question was simpler: does digital even earn its place alongside the rep? That’s the question the Across Health Navigator365 Core was built to answer, and it answered it decisively, proving the value of digital within the overall channel mix at a time when many brands still treated it as an afterthought.
COVID then settled the debate for good. It’s no longer “is digital worth it?” but “how do we allocate across the whole mix, given our competition, our product’s lifecycle stage, the customer types and segments we serve, and the budget we have?”
That’s a harder question, and a different one. Proving a channel’s worth is a yes/no verdict; allocating across channels is a continuous, contingent optimisation that shifts with every brand, market and quarter. It’s precisely the question Navigator365 Benchmark is built to answer, the logical step up from Navigator365 Core, for a market that has already accepted the premise Core set out to prove.
Why most teams leave this on the table
If the prize is this large, why doesn’t the industry simply take it?
Because allocation in practice still largely runs on heuristics. The “percentage-of-sales” rule – spend a fixed percentage of revenue on promotion – or “last year’s budget +/- X%” etc remain the norm. Such rules that are comfortable and defensible, but by definition blind to where the next euro yields the most.
The result: budget flows to where it flowed last year. To the channels we’re used to measuring. To the segments that happen to shout loudest for attention. Not to where the Voice of Customer data says the impact is.
We see the cost of this constantly in Benchmark work. In one study, a specialist brand was outspending its main rival on field activity yet losing share. The activity metrics looked healthy: more calls, more reach. The leak only became visible once we measured customer experience against competitors: the brand was strong precisely where it was already winning, and blank in the segments it needed to convert. No amount of extra spend on the same pattern would have closed that gap.
The question you should be asking instead
The real question for this budget season, then, isn’t “how much do we get?”. It’s:
Where is our current effort leaking value — and where would the same euro deliver more?
That’s a diagnostic question, not an accounting one. It requires knowing how your channels perform relative to the competition, how your customer experience and brand attributes relate to your market share, and which segments are structurally under- or over-served. In short, it requires treating your budget as something you diagnose rather than something you divide.
The size of the prize
Case studies from several sources confirm the potential gains:
Across the rest of this series we build this diagnosis step by step. Your budget is probably large enough. The question is whether it ends up in the right place. That’s the core of what this series is about. The biggest untapped lever in your commercial budget may very well not be its size, but the intelligence with which you allocate it.
The next-gen Navigator365 Benchmark doesn’t hand you another dashboard, it follows the 4D logic and takes you from Data to Diagnosis and Decision, with Deaveraging as a running lens. The rich data (brand-level channel, content and CX performance coupled with brand attributes, ATU, Rx intent & NPS) is only the first layer. The value sits in what comes on top: AI-supported analyses that surface the diagnosis – where your effort is leaking value relative to your competitors – and translates it into a decision: where the same euro delivers more. That’s what internal KPIs can’t give you. Budget season is your one window to redirect the flow before it sets.
Talk to an Across Health expert about where you can get more customer impact with your budget.
This blog is part 1 of a seven-part series on pharma budget optimisation, anchored to the Navigator365 Benchmark 4D diagnostic model (Data · Diagnosis · Decision – Deaveraged)
References:
- Demystifying the omnichannel commercial model for pharma companies in Asia, McKinsey & Company, 2022. https://www.mckinsey.com/jp/en/our-insights/demystifying-the-omnichannel-commercial-model-for-pharma-companies-in-asia
- Field, S. et al., Marketing Measurement Done Right, Boston Consulting Group, 2019. https://www.bcg.com/publications/2019/marketing-measurement-done-right
- Step-by-Step Omnichannel Deployment Strategy in Life Sciences (infographic), IQVIA, 2024. https://www.iqvia.com/-/media/iqvia/pdfs/us/infographic/2024/iqvia-omnichannel-deployment-strategy-in-life-sciences-infographic-2024.pdf