Speakers/Facilitators

Stewart Adkins, PharmaForensic Limited

Stewart Adkins has been running his own consultancy in the pharmaceutical and healthcare sector since 2006. He has worked on each of the PharmaFutures projects (www.pharmafutures.org), lectures and examines students at CBS-SIMI and has worked with many pharmaceutical companies on various projects.

Prior to 2006 he was a Pharmaceutical Analyst at Lehman Brothers for 23 years and was a regular speaker at pharmaceutical conferences hosted by Management Centre Europe, the International Pharmaceutical Licensing Group, eyeforpharma and many others.  Prior to that he worked for Eli Lilly in the UK as a medical representative, leaving after the withdrawal of blockbuster drug Opren from the market.

Graham Leask, The Sales Consultancy Ltd

Graham worked in the pharmaceutical industry for 20+ years (Lederle, Roche, Astra), his last industry role being Strategic Marketing Director at Astra. Since then he has worked as an academic at Aston University, researching and developing the data analysis and statistical methodologies which he now applies to the pharmaceutical industry. Recently moved to Warwick University he teaches Value-based Strategy but is also a consultant, writer and researcher on strategy in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries.

He is expert in sales force effectiveness and the targeting of sales forces; interested in strategic groups, how firms compete in an industry and how these choices explain performance; specialist in return on investment analysis of marketing and sales activities; building promotional models and developing channel strategies; interested in field force strategy analysis and in separating effects of different sales teams co-marketing a product to a common customer base. Contrary to popular opinion field forces, rather than implementing a common intended strategy as directed, generally implement 6 to 8 different realised strategies. These different strategies alone often explain up to 30% of sales force performance and through migrating from a low performance strategy to a high performance one you can significantly improve sales force productivity. Interested in crafting novel sales force targeting approaches that rapidly build effective differentiation and competitive advantage. Most companies use an externally purchased target list and similar prioritisation techniques. This is a mistake that leads to almost complete overlapping of company target lists, which in turn renders targets ineffective and non productive. Ineffective targets and target wear out is a major cause of promotional wastage and reduces ROI rapidly often leading to negative returns.