Responsiveness of Physician Prescription Behavior to Salesforce Effort: An Individual Level Analysis

Abstract

Firms in many industries, e.g., pharmaceuticals, spend a significant amount of marketing dollars on salesforce effort. However, there exists very little research examining customer response to salesforce effort at the disaggregate level.

We use data from a pharmaceutical category to examine the response in prescriptions written to salesforce effort (detailing). We use a hierarchical Bayesian count data model that allows us to estimate individual physician-level response parameters.

We find that while detailing has positive impact on prescriptions written, there are diminishing returns to detailing for most physicians in our sample. We use our results to show how detailing reallocation can increase revenues.