​Driving sales through data insight and affordable sales intelligence at Thornton and Ross

Founded in 1922, Thornton & Ross develops and manufactures over-the-counter pharmacy brands with an increasing presence in branded prescription products, particularly in dermatology. They are one of the largest OTC pharmaceutical manufacturers in the UK and export to over 80 countries worldwide.

The company has grown organically with brands such as Zoflora®and Covonia® which have become household names and also through the acquisition of brands such as Setlers®, Radian B® Metanium®and Flexitol®.

Following acquisition by the STADA group Thornton & Ross merged with Genus Pharmaceuticals and now also markets a range of well known branded products including Cetraben® emollients and Movelat® topical pain relief in addition to a range of generic medicines. The business continues to grow year on year in the UK and in International markets through innovation and acquisition.

The company values reflect their roots as a family owned business, by combining the highest professional standards with traditional levels of care. The approach taken is to combine good, responsive customer service and quality products, in a working environment that encourages innovation.

Tahola was introduced to Thornton & Ross over 4 years ago and as an organisation share many of the same values across our business, so it was a natural progression to develop the partnership in the way we did, by offering a consultative approach to help meet their business objective.

Thornton & Ross soon realised that by gaining a greater understating of their data, it could revolutionise how they attained greater customer responsiveness and insights. So on that basis wanted to provide their sales teams with a greater level of detail, not only into their own data, but also into practice level prescribing data, which consists of a list of all medicines, dressings and appliances that are prescribed by all practices in England, including GP practices, each month.

When we began our discussions with Thornton & Ross, they were ceasing to use a solution that had historically given them a Business Intelligence capability, but could not provide the level of detail and insight that they now required. Therefore, together we started to explore the provision of a sales reporting application using QlikView as the underlying solution, which would give them easy access to the key information and correlations they were looking for in their own data and the practice level prescribing data.

One of the key objectives for Thornton & Ross was to increase the quality of sales leads and improve their competitor analysis. This was achieved by improving accuracy of their sales data through the use of the sales reporting applications that we developed. This, in turn helped to improve prospecting accuracy, territory planning and consequently increase their overall win rates.

Tahola built two applications around the NHS prescribing data that would be used by the various sales teams in their account strategy planning. The applications are now helping the sales teams gain powerful insights to develop winning strategies. Thornton & Ross know, that insightful data is the secret to good decision making and enables the right commercial decisions to be made with confidence at the right time, knowing that the data being presented is accurate, complete and up to date.

Mark Carlile, IT Director at Thornton & Ross commented “Since implementing the applications developed by Tahola, we have seen a significant improvement in the overall quality of our sales data and the insights that we are now able to provide to our sales teams are invaluable, it has made the sales planning process far more streamlined and has reduced the time and effort previously required to obtain the data”.

For further information please contact:

Leigh Baillie

Marketing & Communications Director

Tahola

Leigh.Baillie@Tahola.com