Medical representatives play a key role in achieving pharmaceutical companies’ business goals. They serve as a vital source of professional information for healthcare professionals, build brand trust through interpersonal communication and expertise, and provide support on all additional questions regarding products and their use.
The evaluation of medical representatives’ promotional effectiveness may use a variety of indicators. Typically, these include pharmacy sales growth and internal activity reports. However, the availability of analytical tools that allow analysing the dynamics of doctors’ mentions of prescriptions (or actual prescriptions), pharmacists’ recommendations, and sales growth in specific territories elevates this process to a higher level — contributing to greater accuracy, objectivity, flexibility in identifying issues, resource optimization, and ultimately achieving better business outcomes.
The corresponding toolkit for analytics of promotional channels is available within the BI solutions of Proxima Research International.
How to measure the impact of promotional activity on prescriptions?
Undoubtedly, sales remain the cornerstone for assessing external service performance. However, to gain a comprehensive picture, several KPIs should be applied.
Since promotional activity usually drives doctors’ prescriptions and pharmacists’ recommendations, an important metric is the number of healthcare professionals’ mentions (doctors, pharmacists, procurement experts) of a particular company’s brand promotion, as well as recall of prescriptions. This indicator can be tracked using the PromoTest tool (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1. Dynamics of promotional activity in Ukraine, Jan 2021 – Jul 2025
With its help, companies can assess visit effectiveness (whether they remain in the memory of healthcare professionals), segment specialists, and evaluate their prescription potential. Thanks to dynamic data, it is possible to track external service performance on a monthly basis and, by calculating the conversion rate, to assess how promotional efforts translate into prescriptions.
Since 2025, our analytical products have been available not only in QlikView but also in Power BI, expanding analysis capabilities through more flexible visualizations and faster data processing.
The analysis of doctors’ and pharmacists’ promotions is presented in PromoTest reports on Power BI.
RxTest enables monitoring of actual prescriptions. This tool helps segment target audiences, develop promotional strategy and tactics by specialty, build patient profiles, and assess the competitive landscape.
Since 2025, the geographical coverage of both PromoTest and RxTest monitoring has been expanded.
A new level of personalized analytics
A new tool designed to help companies evaluate their specific performance indicators is PromoCompas. It is based on the intersection of a company’s medical representatives’ visit data and the PromoTest research sample for a selected period. This tool enables assessment of conversion from visits to prescriptions and comparative evaluation of representatives’ performance across different target audiences versus competitors.
Global trends and their impact on analytics
According to global McKinsey [1], BCG [2] research, an important trend that began during the COVID-19 pandemic and continues today is the decreasing influence of face-to-face (F2F) interactions. More and more healthcare professionals prefer digital communication channels (such as video calls and phone calls) and hybrid promotion models.
This transformation also affects analytics (Fig. 2). The focus is shifting from quantitative indicators (number of visits) to qualitative ones — engagement level and its impact. Although the majority of promotional budgets are still allocated to F2F interactions, the approach to such activities is evolving: it is no longer just about visits but about hybrid, multichannel engagement planning with healthcare professionals. The medical representative increasingly acts as a skilled manager who combines personal visits with digital activities, while analytics evolves toward predictive models that allow assessing and forecasting the impact of promotion on prescriptions.
Fig. 2. Global promotional trends and the evolution of analytics
Professional expertise of medical representatives: why it matters
From healthcare professionals’ perspective, the professionalism of medical representatives is determined by several key factors. First — deep knowledge of products, including their main properties, mechanisms of action, advantages, contraindications, and potential interactions. A high level of professional competence allows representatives to serve as reliable sources of up-to-date medical information. Equally important are communication skills — the ability to build constructive dialogue, find an individual approach to each specialist, and maintain long-term cooperation. Adherence to ethical standards, confidentiality principles, and professional conduct contributes to building trusting, transparent relationships, which are the foundation of lasting loyalty.
Transparency and clarity
Building KPIs based on objective data from reliable sources enhances the transparency of evaluation systems, reduces the stress associated with performance assessment, and strengthens team trust.
Conclusions
One of the main KPI indicators is undoubtedly sales. However, they result from high-quality audience interaction, as well as a thoughtful promotional strategy and tactics. KPIs are closely linked to company business goals — pharmacy sales volume, the number of healthcare professionals’ recalls of promotion/prescriptions, sales share, recall/prescription share, growth rates compared to the previous period, etc. Continuous monitoring is crucial — it allows assessing the impact of each factor on the effectiveness of medical representatives’ work.
Analytical tools PromoTest, RxTest, and PromoCompas by Proxima Research make it possible to build a balanced, transparent, and effective system for evaluating external service performance. These are tools for companies that aim not just to measure results but to understand how they are achieved — and to scale successful solutions.
Analytics of pharmaceutical companies’ promotional activity is the key to effective external service operations.
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Sources:
- McKinsey. Omnichannel engagement in medtech: The time is now. May 19, 2021
- BCG. For Physicians and Pharma, Hybrid Engagement Is the New Normal. April 19, 2023
