30 years on, need new ideas
Hello everyone,
My father set up a pharmaceutical business 30 years back and we’re struggling to side step the ethical market to boost sales. We’ve always believed in honesty and delivering the best products we could make and deliver with bite sized margins.
Acnil and GlySeb soap are our flagships that launched in ’85 and often I’m asked why they aren’t any bigger today. I’m sure a lot of people reading this have come across these soaps before and have even tried them.
Acnil soap 
We have some other promising Herbal, Ayurvedic and Nutriceutical preperations too have immense potential.
Today the pharma market is corrupt as corrupt can be with most doctors blatantly demanding 40% to 60% off each sale. If that shocked you, realize that a lot of companies are successfully doing it and pay the doctors cut in advance. The good doctors today are unwilling to meet anyone these days to avoid a bad name and form an extremely small pool.
At this point we’d like to take off some of our better products and reintroduce them differently. We’re not into scheduled drugs so most of our products can be sold over the counter (OTC) . Only the end user can give a product the credit it is due and so we’d like to convert from a B2B2C to a B2C.
The first step we want to do is get our customers onto a subscription based program
- Pros :
- Helps us know our customers better
- Prevent a doctor from changing the customers choice through his prescription- Doctors usually don’t prescribe the same brand twice.
- Offer them better deals and let us have a better cut per sale
- Fixed, foreseeable revenues
- A chance to sample our other products
- Cons:
- Patients don’t trust anybody but doctors
- Tracing a customer from a prescription or the chemist is hard.
- People don’t like being traced out.
How do we start a subscription business from scratch without annoying prospective customers ?
Feel free to ping me.
cheers.
Anirudh Ashok @ani4may on twitter
anirudh.ashok@markindiacosmed.com