TargetRx Releases 2007 Pharmaceutical Sales and Marketing Quality Analysis

Analysis Enables Pharmaceutical Companies to Measure and Manage Toward Improved Performance; Boehringer Ingelheim #1 with Primary Care Physicians, Bristol-Myers Squibb #1 with Specialists

Horsham, PA - March 7, 2007 - TargetRx today released the results of its 2007 Sales and Marketing Quality (SMQ) Analysis, the only report to provide pharmaceutical management the ability to measure and manage the impact of their sales and marketing execution on physicians' prescribing behaviors. The product of more than seven years of research and development, the TargetRx 2007 SMQ Analysis offers a paradigm by which companies can measure, monitor and manage the critical components that drive effective sales and marketing that can result in improved market performance.

With shareholders and industry leaders calling for a new commercial model and a transformation of the sales force, pharmaceutical companies are downsizing field forces, re-organizing existing ones and piloting projects in order to find the key to sales and marketing effectiveness. Pharmaceutical executives are realizing that old metrics like share of voice, physician reach and call frequency fail to provide an understanding of how efforts and expenditure translate to the bottom line.

"No one can argue that the pharmaceutical industry has hit a critical juncture, as the CEOs of almost every major pharmaceutical company are calling for change," said Mike Luby, CEO and founder of TargetRx. "The TargetRx 2007 SMQ Analysis measures quality, not quantity, to reveal opportunities for pharmaceutical executives to rethink how their sales forces are engaging with physicians. Our goal with the SMQ Analysis is to provide management with a powerful tool to manage their sales and marketing resources with a more specific focus and produce greater results."

Pharmaceutical Company Performance
The TargetRx 2007 SMQ Analysis assesses the performance of 16 U.S. pharmaceutical sales forces that call on primary care physicians and 18 that call on specialists, benchmarking each company on the extent to which the sales force moves physicians to prescribe its product for appropriate patients. In addition to ranking overall performance, the TargetRx 2007 SMQ Analysis identifies and quantifies performance on the key drivers of physician prescribing, providing pharmaceutical companies with insights into specific aspects of their sales and marketing initiatives.

Created to address the industry's need for actionable sales and marketing quality metrics, the TargetRx 2007 SMQ Analysis uses information from TargetRx's proprietary database (see Methodology section below) to measure the effect of sales force activity - as well as the marketing supporting it - on new prescription market share. The 2007 study, published in the March edition of Pharmaceutical Executive, reports Boehringer Ingelheim ranked first of 16 major firms competing among primary care physicians. Bristol-Myers Squibb topped the list of 18 companies competing among specialists.

Overall Sales and Marketing Quality Ranking, Primary Care Physicians

  Overall Sales and Marketing Quality Ranking, Specialists

Company Rank
Boehringer Ingelheim 1
Novartis 2
Schering-Plough 3
Abbott Laboratories 4
Novo Nordisk 5
Eli Lilly 6
Johnson & Johnson 7
Sanofi-Aventis 8
GlaxoSmithKline 9
Takeda 10
Merck 11
Pfizer 12
Bristol-Myers Squibb 13
Wyeth 14
AstraZeneca 15
Forest Pharmaceuticals 16
 
Company Rank
Bristol-Myers Squibb 1
Abbott Laboratories 2
Novartis 3
Amgen 4
Boehringer Ingelheim 5
AstraZeneca 6
Roche 7
Pfizer 8
GlaxoSmithKline 9
Eli Lilly 10
Sanofi-Aventis 11
Schering-Plough 12
Wyeth 13
Johnson & Johnson 14
Novo Nordisk 15
Forest Pharmaceuticals 16
Takeda 17
Merck 18


The TargetRx 2007 SMQ Analysis proves that sales and marketing quality can be measured and actively managed," said Luby. "With a clear understanding of the drivers behind sales and marketing quality, the SMQ analysis provides a unifying set of metrics for sales, marketing and senior management to assess performance, make changes and ultimately impact success."

SMQ Analysis Methodology
The data for the TargetRx 2007 SMQ Analysis, including all of the rankings presented therein, are from TargetRx's proprietary database. The TargetRx database captures information from physicians on a wide range of topics including promotional activities, product perceptions, interactions with patients and managed care influence. TargetRx has been capturing survey data since early 2000 and conducting analyses to develop predictive models that quantify how these factors influence physicians' prescribing. TargetRx's predictive modeling framework is built on more than 250 million questions posed by TargetRx and answered by more than 70,000 U.S. physicians across approximately 30 therapeutic categories. Data are collected from physicians via survey and are then compared with actual prescribing activity and other behavioral and demographic data to develop proprietary predictive models of physicians' prescribing behavior. The proprietary analytics are based in part on TargetRx's patented Method and System for Analyzing the Effectiveness of Marketing Strategies.

The TargetRx 2007 SMQ Analysis results reflect more than 100,000 physician surveys completed during 2006 relating to physician's interactions with pharmaceutical company sales representatives. Data have been included for more than 100 brands in diverse therapeutic areas. Companies were included if at least two of their brands were tracked in the TargetRx database in 2006. As a result, the SMQ Analysis does not include all brands for each company, but tracked a range of two to 14 brands per company. Primary care physicians are analyzed as one group, and all other specialties have been combined into a single pool to provide relative company performance in their effectiveness with specialists.

For more information about the TargetRx SMQ Analysis, please call 215-444-8900.

TargetRx 2007 SMQ Analysis Web Casts
TargetRx will host two live informational web casts, during which TargetRx executives will review the 2007 SMQ Analysis approach and methodology and respond to questions.

Thursday, March 8 at 2:00 p.m. EST
To register, visit: https://cossprereg.btci.com/prereg/key.process?key=PFPH69BBY

Tuesday, March 13 at 11:00 a.m. EST
To register, visit: https://cossprereg.btci.com/prereg/key.process?key=P3RYNRMKB

About TargetRx

TargetRx provides pharmaceutical and biotech companies with unique insight into the true drivers of product choice and adoption for their brands, helping clients to confidently take the actions that will grow their businesses and help patients. Serving the majority of the top 30 pharmaceutical and biotech companies, TargetRx enables clients to significantly improve the launch of new products and indications, physician segmentation and targeting, creation of professional messaging and materials, and sales and marketing execution and effectiveness. All TargetRx solutions are powered by our AdvantageBuilderSM normative database and validated predictive models, created from capturing in-depth physician attitudes on the "four forces" of prescribing - product, payor, promotion and patient - on new launches, marketing campaigns and physician-rep interactions on over 500 pipeline and inline brands and modeling these attitudes against actual prescribing behavior. For more information, visit www.targetrx.com.

Media Contact:

Joe Ford
Phone: 215-444-8722
jford@targetrx.com