Indian pharmaceutical industry is very competitive. There are basically three types of players. The bulk drug manufacturers, who supply the basic raw material to Indian and mostly to overseas clients; Companies primarily focusing on making formulations for predominantly Indian companies. The third group which is the most competitive and challenging is into brand-marketing and sales. Of course there are those, mostly veterans, who are involved in all the three type of business.
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| Hrishikesh Damle |
From the very first day, Atrimed started its business focused on branding and sales of the products. Though the company has a presence in a range products like antibiotics, nutritional supplements and pain medicine, the big emphasis
was on herbal skin care and nutrition products.
The biggest challenge for any company in the branding and marketing segment is creating trust across all participants of business. This is especially significant in country like India where most of the business is carried out on trust rather than rigorous formal agreements.
Trust is also important owing to the nature of business. Ethically and legally, we have no margin of error in quality of medicines. If you look at medical field as a whole, barring few aberrations here and there, the field has been able to reach high standards in six sigma scale. Be it quality control department of a pharmaceutical industry or cardiothoracic surgeon mending the organ, precision is the objective word, nothing less than that would suffice.
Early days of business were a nightmare for us giving us a sinking feeling every time we encounter resistance in the market. But for our team’s resilience and strange (stupid ?) feeling that we would succeed, we should have closed shop quite early. As a practicing doctor and having very little experience in Industry it was daunting to confront challenges which I never expected. If you could notice, self and others consider doctors as a sub species of homo sapiens! Signature authority, very formal environment and selective socialization is inherent in this profession. Every client encountered by a doctor is less knowledgeable and solely depends on the judgments of doctor. In short, there is no question
of mistrust.
Our challenges were multi-fold. One the one hand, we had to creat trust among doctors towards quality and efficacy of of products. On the other hand, attention had to be given in creating trust among distributos that our products would move faster. We also had to demonstare that our network of medical representatives is efficient in helping the distributors collect their dues from the retailers. The last one meant that we make no mistake in employing a good quality and motivated
sales force.
| Snapshot |
| Name: Dr. Hrishikesh Damle Age: 41 Education: MD Experience in business: 8 years Leadership style: Democratic Big learning: Control expense |
| Factsheet |
| Name: Atrimed Domain: Pharmaceuticals Turnover: Private Set up in: 2004 Employees: 220 Headquarters: Bangalore Website: www.atrimed.com |
| Business Model |
| We innovate products, carry on branding exercises and market. |
How can one solve so many variables? There can never be quick fixes for these challenges in pharmaceutical industry where typically supply was more than demand. Does that mean that it is unwise to get into this business? That’s far from the truth as it is one of the fastest growing industries with very healthy ROI. We gambled on the Americal philosophy of market place. As a business principle, we did have unique products but mostly in niche segments with small market size, which did not fetch us desired sales. Though discovery of new molecules take many years asking for millions of dollars, there was lot of scope for improvisation in formulations. We had a very strong and a young formulation team which was raring to go.
We continuosly churned the market for a gap we can exploit. We came across iron syrup market where we could see a very evident gap. Most of the iron syrups were not palatable. Most of them tasted bad with instant rejection from children and women. Established firms were selling the same stuff since they were stuck with the products which they were marketing since many decades. Our formulation team came up with a fabulous iron syrup which tasted like “Gulab jamoon” with deep orange flavor. It was very easy to demonstrate the USP of our product to doctors who were looking for such a product. The product took off immediately and created sense of faith among doctors towards our company. I can still recall the emotional speech made by our zonal manager at a sales meet soon after the launch, where he recalled how he had come close to quitting the job but for this product. He was not alone. All of us were rankled by constant rejections which used to be the order of the day. Finally, our new iron syrup changed all this. The outlook of the doctors towards our company changed, which helped introduction of other products, all of which had certain amount of novelty in the presentation. Very soon we started selling good number of units and for a short period we survived only due to this product.
The best thing to happen was strengthening of my conviction about professional ethics of my colleagues. Contrary to popular belief among sales force that doctors prescribe for the sake of gifts and favors they receive, here
was an example that doctors prescribe a good product if created to their need and presented to them appropriately.
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