Pharmaceutical companies are increasingly using variable compensation like incentives and rewards to motivate sales forces and maximize ROI. However, many sales representatives are dissatisfied with current incentive compensation (IC) plans. Properly diagnosing IC plans is important to address issues and continually improve plans. A full diagnosis evaluates the technology used, processes followed, and inherent issues and metrics of the plan itself. This helps ensure plans are fair, aligned with goals, and motivate high performance.

1. http://www.ngpharma.com/currentissue/article.asp?art=275451&issue=285
Incentive Compensation Plan Diagnosis in the Pharmaceutical
Industry
November 2008
As pharmaceutical companies step up their focus on retaining key sales staff, they are
considering ways to leverage variable compensation, such as incentive, reward and recognition
programs, as a strategic tool to maximize ROI in top talent and motivate their sales forces to
support corporate strategies.
Pharmaceutical companies traditionally have attracted and retained high-performing sales staff
through offerings of competitive, total-compensation packages. These packages are usually
comprised of base pay, benefits, bonuses and recognition programs – typically contests and
awards (C&As). However, in recent years companies have balanced this goal with budgetary
constraints by devising variable pay schemes, which account for a larger percentage of
compensation, and offer increasing pay for higher performance. For example, across European
countries, the proportion of variable pay compared to fixed pay varies by a factor of almost
three-fold, thereby influencing the leverage that is achieved from individual bonus schemes in
these countries.
Today in the United States, industry emphasis is shifting from recruitment to retention activities.
The costly effects of voluntary attrition among sales representatives, which results in recruiting
and training costs, lost time in the territory and diminished client relationships, is estimated by
the Hay Group to be $100,000 per individual. It’s now more important than ever that
pharmaceutical companies take steps to ensure that their existing sales force remains productive,
motivated and committed by developing and refining strategic incentive and reward programs.
Furthermore, with an overall decrease in the total number of sales representatives, it’s imperative
that pharmaceutical firms retain their best sales staff through an on-going process of adjusting
variable pay practices. These steps are crucial to enabling the alignment of retention goals with
other critical business objectives.
The three major attributes of an Incentive Compensation (IC) plan are to position the company
for success, align with corporate and/or brand objectives, and to motivate the sales
representatives with a plan that is easy to understand and fair. Today, however, many sales
representatives are displeased with their IC plans. Common themes among sales representatives’
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2. complaints include: the plans are unfair, the plans are too complicated to understand, and it takes
too long to receive the bonus payouts.
Incentive Compensation Plan Structure
There are four major elements to total compensation – base salary, benefits, bonuses and C&As.
In life sciences in the United States, bonuses and C&As account for about 25 percent of base pay.
This percentage increases with higher value and more complex products, i.e. specialty products
and medical devices. Bonuses are usually based on four categories of rewards: sales, activity,
management by objectives (MBOs) and C&As. Contests tend to be ad hoc and short term,
usually less than one year, and used to motivate specific behaviors, such as to increase market
share for a specific patient type, protect against generic erosion, or grow sales volume in
collaboration with a new sales campaign. Contests can be absolute, such as top 10 in the country
or highest in a specific region or state, or variable, such as exceeding a certain performance
threshold. Awards typically recognize long-term behavior. C&As, such as President’s Club or
Consistent Achievers, can take the form of cash; in-kind, such as points, trips, etc.; or pure
recognition. In some cases, awards can be linked to a kicker in the bonus payouts. This can both
increase motivation and retention.
Plan structure involves not only defining the right target pay level but also the right pay mix. In
fact, determining the right pay mix is as important as the pay level. The higher the variable
component of a pay mix, the higher the motivation and revenue growth but also the increased
financial risk to the company. This is because the sales representatives can make much higher
pay with a higher variable component. The optimum mix of fixed and variable pay will be
influenced by the type of product and the market. In the Medical Device industry, sales
representatives sell sophisticated and highly expensive medical products and services, for which
a pay mix with a lower base salary but higher variable component is preferred. This represents a
higher risk/reward to the company. On the other hand, in the pharmaceutical market, a mature
product is not impacted as much by representative performance. Companies in these businesses
prefer a low-risk mix, which has a lower variable component and therefore limits how much a
representative can earn.
Plan Diagnosis
There are four major steps involved in the IC process – diagnosis, design, implement and operate
(Figure 1). There is a clear case for plan diagnosis in the pharmaceutical industry today. This is a
critical step in the continuous improvement process for IC. In plan diagnosis, there are three key
areas that should be analyzed: investigating the technology, understanding the processes, and
evaluating the plan itself.
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3. First, with regards to technology, it is surprising that many pharmaceutical companies are still
using homegrown systems, custom-built applications or spreadsheet-based IC tools. Most of
these applications are slow and inaccurate, do not provide easy visibility to the business rules of
the plan, lack audit trails and version control, do not easily support the complex rules required
for new sales force models, and require significant manual entry and ongoing reprogramming.
Often it takes four to six weeks after receipt of the data to produce IC reports, and at least an
additional 2 weeks for the payouts to be made. These applications create frequent disputes over
sales credits and compensation payouts, which are time-consuming and costly to resolve.
Additionally, they create an atmosphere of distrust within the sales force that results in shadow
accounting, lower morale and higher turnover. Unlike other industries, life sciences companies
are not realizing the full benefits of a world-class enterprise IC application, where business rules
are quickly configured, complex organizational structures and allocation rules are easily
managed, and it only takes a few days to produce IC reports with full access to executive
dashboards.
Second, regarding processes, few pharmaceutical companies have actually documented their
standard operating procedures (SOPs). Performing a diagnostic on the end-to-end IC process
(Figure 2) will clearly identify areas of inefficiencies and time delays. Each individual process is
highly complex, often involving manual tasks, e-mail communications and spreadsheet
consolidations. Companies rarely have a full audit trail and documentation for all of their IC
materials, quality control checks, plan checks and associated approvals. Few companies use
automated workflow tools to manage the communications, transfer documents and track
authorizations. Enterprise IC software has built-in workflows tools and can integrate with
standard business process management applications. The area that may be best managed is the
quality controls associated with performance data and report production. Personnel information
and eligibility data is the most fragmented because changes to staffing do not get entered into the
central human resources (HR) repository quickly enough, resulting in an HR system of record
that’s not up-to-date, resulting in information needing to be gathered and then consolidated from
multiple sources.
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4. Third, with regards to evaluating the plan itself, the diagnostic evaluation of IC plans focuses on
three areas: inherent issues, plan metrics, and plan bias. This plan diagnostic evaluation follows a
methodology, which results in the evaluation of underlying issues and the identification of
alternatives to improve the plan design (Figure 3).
Plan Diagnostic Evaluation – Inherent Issues
When IC plans are developed there are various inherent issues associated with the business that
are often overlooked. This results in poor plan design.
Products grow at different rates depending on their position in the product life cycle. For
example, analyzing one company’s product portfolio revealed that for one product in its early
life cycle those territories with higher market share grew faster than territories with lower market
share, while two other products that were later in their life cycle grew with the opposite
dynamics. However, the company had not realized these differences so quotas had previously
been set independent of the territories’ starting market shares. To correct this, quotas had to be
modified based on each territory’s initial market share, or a market share/market share change
matrix-based plan adopted. In the later case, the bonus amounts were scaled based on the
products’ dynamics.
Evaluating performance by geography can identify inherent issues due to variations in local
prescribing regulations. However, these are rarely considered when setting quotas. For example,
one case showed that territories in the Western United States consistently under-performed,
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5. while territories in the Eastern United States were consistent high performers. After modifying
the quotas to take into consideration the local managed care restrictions, this bias was eliminated.
Plan Diagnostic Evaluation – Plan Metrics
Companies define their plan metrics during plan design, but rarely do they evaluate them during
the year or at the end of the years whether the predefined metrics were actually achieved. Key
payout metrics are: target payout, average payout, lowest payout, highest payout, percent with no
payout, payout at 90th percentile, pay to 10th percentile, and median achievement. This is a
critical aspect of plan diagnosis because it provides valuable input to plan design changes –
either mid-year or for the following year. Also, most companies have defined corporate
performance characteristics that should be followed, such as distribution of achievements and
associated payouts.
For example, one company’s diagnostic found that only seven of 69 territories were actually
achieving target numbers and receiving bonus payouts. As a result, the company revaluated both
its corporate sales forecasts and its overall plan design to ensure better quota accuracy and a
more appropriate distribution of achievements.
Plan Diagnostic Evaluation – Plan Bias
When designing IC plans there are two conflicting characteristics – easy to understand verses
plan fairness. Performing a plan diagnostic helps to identify any bias in plan design. The
information can then be used to reduce plan design bias for the following year.
Typical biases involve historic sales, market potential, market share and growth rates. For
example, if a plan diagnostic shows that there is little correlation between territory size and
achievement against goal, the plan is fair because there is no bias between starting sales volume
and percent achievement. However, if a plan diagnostic shows that bonuses are biased to large
territories, the plan is unfair because there is a clear advantage to high sales volume territories.
Another plan diagnostic evaluated the correlation of market share to plan achievement. Despite a
five-fold variation in market share, the plan had been well designed and showed no bias due to
market share, as each territory had a similar opportunity to achieve (Figure 4).
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6. Summary
Efficient and consistently accurate execution of the IC deliverables are required for the long-term
success of any compensation plan. Without this, the IC plan will be undermined by a lack of trust
at all levels of the corporation. Best-in-class compensation provides regular, consistent and
accurate reporting at a reasonable cost, with the flexibility to swiftly adapt to changing strategies
and tactics. Field sales staff should have rapid access to IC plan reports and executives should be
able to access dashboards to easily evaluate performance.
The average lifecycle of a pharmaceutical compensation plan is three years. Many companies
consider their plans to be discrete initiatives that either morph or remain stagnant from year to
year. Most firms keep the basic structure of their programs consistent from year to year, however
they review their plans and make adjustments on an annual basis to meet organizational and
company objectives. This represents a process of continual improvement rather than periodic
upheaval.
Plan diagnosis is a critical step in the continual evolution required to ensure good plan design.
Most companies understand qualitatively the impact of poor plan design, but few recognize the
major financial ramifications, including increased turnover, reduced moral, lost selling time, lost
competitive advantage, increased administration, and failure to achieve corporate objectives. By
performing routine plan diagnostics, a company can rapidly identify any underlying issues with
their plan design and take proactive steps to resolve them and create fairer plans.
Stephen Fox
Global Practice Leader
Sales Performance Center of Excellence
IMS Health
Tel: +1-610-238-4292
sfox@us.imshealth.com
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