To provide maximum value to their internal clients, pharmaceutical and biotech companies must continue to innovate. In order to enhance business impact and reduce redundancy, savvy Market Research leaders must determine the right mix of internal staff, external personnel, and automated reporting.
In the changing pharmaceutical landscape, Market Research groups are faced with the challenge of regularly generating a significant number of secondary reports while also continuing to provide more strategic insights. Burdened with headcount constraints and new products to support, executives can potentially gain critical efficiencies through the shrewd use of outsourced personnel and system automation.
To identify strategies, solutions, and the transition process Market Research groups are undergoing in the near future, Best Practices, LLC, a world leader in biopharmaceutical benchmarking and best practice research, performed this research to help pharma and biotech executives and managers create more efficient groups and processes.
Key Findings
Most Companies Use Outsourced MR Personnel, But Not Systematically: Overall, 73% of surveyed companies use outsourced personnel for some type of market research. However, the labor outsourcing models used in the industry vary widely between companies – and few organizations use multiple external personnel for any given market research function.
External Personnel Hired 1 at a Time, Not En Masse: For any particular market research function (secondary analytics, report preparation, etc.), benchmarked companies mainly contract just a single FTE or contractor. At both Midcaps and Large Pharmas, many interviewed executives reported being short on bandwidth internally, and contract long-term external labor to fill this need.
Loss of Strategic Insight Is a Common Outsourcing Worry: Study partners suggested several, often-articulated pitfalls associated with outsourcing market research work. The most commonly cited pitfall was “loss of strategic insight.” Not surprisingly, respondents who voiced this concerned tended to work in market research groups that outsourced primary, rather than secondary.
Use of Automation in Market Research on the Rise: A majority (63%) of market research groups have succeeded in automating some facet of their function, usually in the outputting of secondary data and reports.