Best Practices, LLC is a research, consulting and publishing firm that is a world-leader in the field of best practice benchmarking.

Delivering Maximum Brand Impact Via Pharmaceutical Market Analytics
Market analytics functions play a key role in helping pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies make informed decisions, avoid risk, and uncover opportunities for growth. Although market analytics insights can be vital to corporate success, the function’s full value often remains unrealized.

This research examines how to maximize the business value of analytics through optimal structuring, staffing and positioning of analytics activities. Executives can use this information to demonstrate business value and win the recognition and resources needed to achieve and sustain high performance levels.

This research is focused on major topic areas: (1) Hiring for Market Analytics Performance Excellence, (2) Delivering High-Impact Services, (3) Building Effective Relationships with Key Stakeholders, (4) Structuring to Support Healthy Product Growth, and (5) Winning Corporate Recognition and Support.

Building and Sustaining Impactful Competitive Intelligence Organizations
This research is focused on several major topic areas: (1) creating and communicating CI value, (2) optimal structure and alignment, (3) resource levels, (4) key primary and secondary intelligence sources, (5) high impact CI activities, and (6) effective stakeholder relationships. Specific areas of coverage include:

- tactics for increasing CI value and recognition

- current and ideal departmental alignment for maximum effectiveness

- operating budget levels and trends

- average compensation and bonus potential for CI staff by individual job level

- outsourcing for CI activities

- average numbers of company products supported and competitor products tracked

- methods for building trust with internal customers and collaborators

- most effective internal communication approaches

- essential skills, experiences, and attributes for employee success in CI roles

- program performance measurement

Pharmaceutical Sales Training: Turning New Hires into Top Performers
Pharmaceutical Sales Training: Turning New Hires into Top Performers (SM-171) provides a comprehensive look at sales training delivery, content, budgets and trends at leading pharmaceutical companies across the globe. Based on the perspectives of 24 sales training leaders at a diverse group of 19 pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device companies, the report provides benchmarks, executive insights and best practices for such key areas as:

Training content by employment interval

Budget trends and outsourcing of training

Training program effectiveness measures

Projected future content needs

Budget comparisons for training new reps vs. experienced hires

Key qualifications of top sales reps

Cross-Industry Field Sales Force Excellence
As product and service differentiation becomes more difficult to achieve - in the dynamic global marketplace - effective sales channels that guarantee direct access to business-to-business customers are becoming more strategically important to growing and defending market share. At the same time many field sales leaders face growing pressure to reduce field sales investments and to "produce more with less." Faced with increasing resource constraints, sales leaders need to supplement their internal sales force effectiveness measures with external cross-industry efficiency benchmarks to fully assess the performance of their field sales groups and validate their resource allocations.

Best Practices, LLC recognizes that high performing sales groups across industries - irrespective of product or service provided - exhibit common operational practices, strategies and resource utilization levels. This study focused on producing key operational benchmarks and allows sales leaders to better inform their strategic and tactical decision-making. The quantitative benchmark data is supported by selective analyst commentary.

Hiring Top Talent: Best Practices in University Recruiting
The research findings in this report are the culmination of analysis of data collected from

benchmark surveys with 79 companies, as well as analysis of exclusive interviews with university recruiting leaders at nine selected best practices corporations. This report is designed to give Human Resources executives and directors a tool to assess recruiting performance and begin building a strategic path for program improvement in the future.

REPORT STRUCTURE AND ORGANIZATION

Project findings are organized into an executive summary, topical chapters and an appendix.

1) Executive Summary – The executive summary contains a discussion of the background factors that led to the study, a description of the Best Practices, LLC research methodology, a summary of the key project findings and recommendations for identifying and closing performance gaps.

2) Topical Chapters – These chapters provide, by subject, a graphical depiction of survey

responses, discussion of key trends identified from an analysis of the data and write-ups of best practices harvested from in-depth interviews:

Program Management & Organization –Includes sections on Budget, Staffing, Structure, Activities & Events, Hiring Top Talent (including interns and co-ops) and Program Effectiveness.

Hiring Top Talent – Discusses best practices for building the talent pool, screening and selecting candidates and managing intern and co-op programs

Building Strong Stakeholder Relationships – Covers effective partnership with line staff, practices for sharing candidates across lines of business, developing alumni as recruiting talent, training line recruiters and maintaining long-term relationships with university hires.

School Selection & Ranking - Illustrates best practices for choosing core recruiting schools.

Technology: Impact & Innovation - Highlights innovative uses of technology in the recruiting process.

3) Appendix – The appendix includes a matrix comparing the features, functionality and feel of

university recruiting websites for 19 top companies and a matrix capturing top three best

practices and lessons learned shared by survey respondents.

HR Resourcing Excellence Series
Global human resources leaders must deliver increasingly complex services while maintaining both high service quality and low costs. This HR Resourcing Excellence Series provides reliable benchmark data for specific HR services to validate your company’s HR investment and service levels relative to other Fortune 500 organizations. Published by Best Practices, LLC, this benchmarking exchange established comprehensive performance and cost benchmarks for HR functions in large organizations through in-depth surveys for six core HR service areas:

Organizational Staffing Services, Costs & Effectiveness

Domestic Mobility Benchmarking Research

Global Mobility Benchmarking Research

Leave of Absence Administration Excellence

Corporate Medical Services Administration Excellence

Workers Compensation Excellence

The comprehensive benchmarking data in this series allows HR executives to compare their current allocations and use the data as a guide to reach optimal efficiencies.

Managing Cross-Functional Teams for Pharmaceutical Product Commercialization Excellence
The most comprehensive resource allocation system and the best econometric model will still produce sub-optimal results if key managers and personnel do not work together across functions, especially during product commercialization. It is proven that process-oriented enterprises achieve superior operating results by continuously fostering collaborative behavior to optimize productivity and efficiency.

Best Practices, LLC gathered valuable best practices and operating tactics that will help executives build and manage strong teams that can excel across functions, units and regions.

Integrating Quality into Business Systems for High Performance
Integrated Quality Systems are critical to an organization’s health and profitable growth and to ensure the value, safety, efficiency and effectiveness of its products and services. For the many companies that operate with some form of regulatory oversight the hurdles for success may seem even higher. Regulated marketplaces require organizations to comply with often rigorous, technical or bureaucratic standards.

To compete successfully in regulated industries, companies must learn to integrate their quality systems into their business operations.

Pharma Sales Force Effectiveness: Increasing Productivity Through Streamlined Internal Communication
Internal communication can make or break the productivity of a direct sales force. If properly used, email and voicemail can quickly disseminate educational, tactical and motivational information. However, when district managers and sales reps find their email and voicemail boxes filled with poorly prioritized or even unnecessary communication, personal productivity and work-life balance suffer.

More than any other industry, sales reps and managers in the pharma industry often experience the highest levels of internal communication. Reps not only work in highly matrixed environments with internal and external copromote partners, they also have to stay abreast of regulatory changes and scientific developments for drugs in and out of the market. Although much of this communication is necessary, reps and managers also experience a significant level of “noise” as colleagues in the field or at corporate send communications that are poorly targeted, redundant or inappropriately timed.

Best Practices, LLC launched this research study exclusively for the pharmaceutical industry to help companies build more effective communication practices in the sales force.

Scientific Publications Strategy: Managing Reputation, Clinical Trial Results and Commercial Relevance
Over the past few years, scientific journals and government regulators have increased the scrutiny and expectations facing pharmaceutical companies looking to publish the results of their clinical trials. While picking and choosing favorable findings may have been acceptable a decade ago it is now considered unethical and potentially illegal. As a result of these changing expectations and regulations, global publications leaders at pharmaceutical companies are carefully building strategy that ethically presents all study findings while still driving brand strength.

This research was launched to determine how leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies are shaping their global publications strategies and plans in order to maintain scientific credibility while also delivering commercially relevant publications that drive brand success. Benchmark participants from 14 leading pharmaceutical companies provided their insights and metrics to identify industry trends and performance standards.