Salesforce Automation in the UK Pharmaceutical Industry: Why is the Strategic Potential of these Systems Not Being Realised in Practice?

Abstract

This paper investigates the adoption and level of sophistication of salesforce automation (SFA) within the UK pharmaceutical industry. The study is based on a quantitative survey of a sample of sales and marketing managers. This analysis reveals that the systems that have been adopted are being used to provide very little information. The aspirations for the respondents for further data capture and analysis are low and hence their overarching goals of improving customer retention, customer relationships and customer acquisition are unlikely to be achieved. This mismatch between the respondents' data capture and their strategic goals is associated with the further finding that they place more importance on technical barriers to implementing SFA, such as fragmented market and sales information, high cost of development and poor data quality, as compared with the lowered importance placed on organisational barriers. Importantly, the latter barriers have been recognised in the literature as the true barriers to achieving the strategic potential of marketing information. It is argued here that the future promise of sophisticated use of the capabilities of current SFA is thus likely to be compromised, due to the lack of awareness of the criticality of organisational and strategic barriers.