Insight story: Time to generate insights!

I began my journey in pharma consulting at ZS in November 2015. Just a month in, I was tasked with an ad-hoc analysis on product (drug) performance. The Senior Associate on the team conducted the initial analysis and shared the data and the draft email with me. Determined to uncover meaningful insights, I spent almost the entire day examining the data in an Excel file (as a new business operations consultant, neither I had access to analytical tools like R or Python nor I knew them). Afterward, I walked the Senior Associate through my findings to confirm them.

Although I suspected she didn't agree with / understand any of my insights, I still shared them with the client via email. It seemed the client didn't give much thought to the findings either. And from then on, during Incentive Compensation (IC) meetings, I would provide insights at the account level, explaining how fluctuations in certain accounts impacted the performance of the representatives. Despite the lack of high interest from clients on these insights, I remained committed to uncovering them, even when not explicitly requested.

Fast forward a decade, and now it takes me less than 15 minutes to look at data and generate insights (provided the team member has all the necessary datasets and files ready). Most of these insights get a lot of attention from the client and often acted upon. For example, in a recent discussion about New Patients vs. TRx weights in the IC plan, I provided a valuable insight: one patient generates seven TRx (with 1,000 new patients and 7,000 TRx over the past 12 months). This supported our recommendation to give more weight to new patients in the IC plan.

Keep generating insights and telling them to the client in natural language. Otherwise, you risk being are no better than Google Search, which simply provide links, as against Copilot, which answers questions in natural language."

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Read past stories like above at https://lnkd.in/d9ijze8r