Managing health and beauty retail in the digital era

The drugstore (parapharmacy) market is entering a new era.

Between pharmacies, pure players, marketplaces, and hybrid networks, touchpoints are exploding, and the rules of the game are changing at an unprecedented speed.

What was once a relatively stable channel has become a fragmented, competitive, and shifting ecosystem. Pharmacies are accelerating their digitization (online presence, click & collect, e-reservation), platforms are shaking up habits, and brands are multiplying launches and activations to exist in a saturated environment. Consumers, meanwhile, are comparing and researching more than ever.

In this new landscape, sales, marketing, and trade teams must deal with more interlocutors, more data, more decisions to make… and less room for error.

Decisions must keep pace with the market: prioritizing the right pharmacies, understanding local trends, anticipating stockouts, measuring the impact of in-store promotions, and continuously adapting action plans.

The real question is simple: How do you navigate this (new) playing field without getting lost?

In this article, we will look back at the mutation of the drugstore market, its new challenges, and their impact on the daily lives of sales teams. We will then see how CRM is becoming a central lever to gain visibility, structure management, and ensure compliance and traceability. Finally, we will show how data and AI are already transforming sales performance and how to leverage them right now.

A sector in full mutation: between growth and fragmentation

The French drugstore market exceeds 6 billion euros according to Xerfi (2024), driven by dermo-cosmetics which grew by +14% in 2023 (3B Pharma).

Behind these positive figures lies a much more complex reality: the drugstore market is no longer limited to a single channel or a single type of customer. Indeed, pharmacies, still representing the majority (about 72% of sales, Xerfi), now share the playing field with supermarket drugstores, specialized marketplaces, and health pure players.

This multiplication of channels is deeply transforming sales methods, commercial negotiations, and performance tracking.

Selling to an independent pharmacy, a buying group, or an e-commerce platform means managing different contacts, logic, and paces.

Each channel imposes its own codes:

• specific listing conditions,

• unique logistical constraints,

• regulatory monitoring of interactions,

• multi-level management (pharmacy, buying group, purchasing center, headquarters)

Consumers are changing just as quickly. They expect more transparent brands and products, more personalized offers, and recommendations based on trust. Indeed, trust is becoming as important a choice criterion as price. In a saturated and highly competitive market, brands must prove the reliability of their promises. Reviews, pharmacy advice, and consistency between what is displayed on the shelves and what is said in the laboratory play a decisive role in the buying process.

Moreover, transparency is no longer just about composition: it now encompasses origin, traceability, manufacturing ethics, and brand commitments. Consumers want to understand what they are putting on their skin, why, and with what measurable benefits.

Additionally, personalization is becoming a standard. Buyers are no longer satisfied with generic advice. Instead, they look for recommendations tailored to their purchase history, sensitivities, or routines. According to Harris Interactive, more than one in two consumers prefers an individualized suggestion over a classic promotion. Also according to Harris Interactive, 58% of drugstore buyers expect individualized advice.

For laboratories, these developments create a new requirement: to have a detailed and updated understanding of customer behavior, not only to better meet their expectations but also to build a lasting relationship based on transparency and added value.

According to Harris Interactive (2024), 72% consult multiple sources before choosing a product.

These figures demonstrate that performance is no longer played out solely on the shelves, but in the consistency between data, discourse, and customer experience.

Daily team life: complexity, dispersion, and loss of visibility

The job of a pharmaceutical representative has become a real balancing act, with days combining prospecting, product presentation, order management, logistics follow-up, pharmacy training, and regulatory reporting.

However, in many organizations, these actions are still carried out through a mosaic of disconnected tools such as emails, Excel, shared documents, or internal messaging. This results in scattered information, an accumulation of duplicates, and a loss of field data reliability.

Even when a CRM is in place, the situation is not always better. Faced with complex tools that are poorly adapted to field realities and the daily workload of salespeople, usage becomes partial. Teams focus on the essentials, bypass certain features, or abandon the most time-consuming ones.

Result: the CRM's potential remains largely underutilized.

To highlight these pain points, a study by Nomination (2024) reveals that 40% of CRM users in France do not exploit half of the available features.

In the pharmaceutical sector, this observation is even more true when brands are equipped with standard CRMs that struggle to integrate regulatory traceability (DMOS, Transparence Santé, GDPR) or product accreditation management, which are nevertheless essential to the daily lives of laboratories.

This mismatch of tools often leads to workarounds such as incomplete reporting, unentered data, or partial field feedback, which can lead to decisions being made at headquarters based on obsolete information or sales and marketing actions being disconnected from field reality.

CRM as a catalyst for sales performance

Gaining precision, efficiency, and compliance

A CRM adapted to the pharmaceutical sector profoundly changes the way people work, because it is not just used to record data, but to orchestrate the entire sales value chain.

In the field, representatives gain precision and efficiency. Thanks to dynamic portfolio segmentation, they can identify high-potential pharmacies, plan visits according to regulatory frequency, and prioritize the most strategic points of sale.

According to DecisionBrain (2024), laboratories that automated route planning through their CRM saw a 20% increase in the number of visits per day and a 10% reduction in travel distances.

The CRM also becomes a pillar of compliance, automatically archiving each visit, action, and shared document. All interactions are tracked, materials left at the pharmacy are recorded, and DMOS reports are generated without manual intervention. Thus, in the event of an audit or managerial check, teams can demonstrate their actions at any time, thanks to precise traceability of dates and times.

On the headquarters side, the change is just as structural. Sales departments gain access to a consolidated view of the network, where sell-in / sell-out data, shelf visibility, recommendation rates, and distribution indicators (DN) meet in the same coherent environment. Decisions are no longer based on intuition, but on a precise, unified, and continuously updated reading of the field. According to a client case study documented by Close-Up CRM, a pharmaceutical laboratory that deployed an AI-enhanced CRM for better personalization of exchanges and more precise management of the pharmacy network saw a 15% increase in sales and a 25% increase in healthcare professional satisfaction.

What a CRM brings and what is missing without it

This case demonstrates that CRM is not just software: it is a strategic lever to streamline network relationships, make data reliable, and transform every field action into value for the brand and the laboratory.

From reporting to decision-making: digital management

For a long time, pharmaceutical CRMs were perceived as administrative tools with heavy interfaces, lengthy forms, and unusable data—all of which were obstacles to actual adoption by field teams.

However, the new generation of CRMs, enriched by AI and intelligent dashboards, is changing the game.

Indeed, the most advanced platforms now cross-reference internal data (sales, visits, campaigns) with external sources (IQVIA data, prescription studies) to create a unified view of the market. These predictive systems make it possible to identify high-potential areas, anticipate drops in distribution, and recommend the most profitable actions.

Sales representatives can now visualize the performance of their sector in real time, identify declining pharmacies, and receive action recommendations based on the probability of success.

Artificial intelligence does not replace their expertise but saves them precious time on preparation so they can focus on relationships and impact in the pharmacy. And the results speak for themselves: in several European organizations, the integration of a predictive CRM reduced weekly reporting time by 30% and improved the visit-to-order conversion rate by 18% (IQVIA, 2023).

On the other side, managers benefit from immediate visibility into network coverage and individual performance, allowing them to build action plans based on factual data rather than estimates.

The CRM is therefore no longer just a reporting tool, but a commercial nervous system capable of feeding, guiding, and anticipating strategic decisions.

For laboratories and drugstore brands, this transformation changes everything: we are no longer talking about "filling out a CRM," but about managing a connected, measurable, and intelligent sales ecosystem.

Compliance, traceability, and trust: the pillars of the sector

In a universe as regulated as healthcare, another important point concerns compliance, which is not just a legal requirement but a real competitive advantage.

Every field visit, every pharmacy training session, and every point-of-sale display delivery must be traceable, documented, and justified at any time.

To achieve this, processes must be perfectly framed: standardized visit forms, mandatory fields for products subject to authorization, integrated electronic signatures, automatic tracking of frequencies... all of which guarantee strict compliance with DMOS and Transparence Santé requirements.

This traceability goes far beyond the administrative framework. It protects the laboratory's reputation, secures the relationship with pharmacies, and strengthens the legitimacy of teams in the field. In this perspective, a well-designed CRM becomes a true tool for transparency, capable of reconciling compliance and performance.

As drugstore channels diversify, regulations tighten, and data emerges as a real competitive advantage, CRM becomes essential. It is no longer just one tool among others, but the guarantor of consistency, compliance, and sales performance. When well mastered, it transforms market complexity into a growth opportunity and restores human relationships to their rightful place at the heart of pharmaceutical commerce.