Call planning in European pharmaceutical sales force management

In this paper, a mathematical model for the allocation of sales representatives is presented. The model takes into account some special features of pharmaceutical marketing, such as customer profiling (physicians), sales response functions and multi-product (drug) promotion procedures. The main peculiarity of the model is that it is suitable to those markets (such as European markets) where the detailed information about historical physician prescriptions is not available to pharmaceutical companies. A heuristic procedure has been designed and run to plan nationwide representative calls to more than 46000 physicians. A computational study, based on real data from a major pharmaceutical company, shows the feasibility of this algorithmic approach, resulting in significantly enhanced productivity. Moreover, the algorithm can be also employed as a tool to evaluate costly strategic options concerning sales force sizing and training.