Matt
Consultant, Boston Office
Education
MIT, Sloan School of Management
M.B.A., 2006
Activities at Sloan: BioPharma Business Club, MediaTech Club, Operations Management Club
Memories of Sloan: Prof. Danaher's Marketing Models class really opened my eyes to the world of analytical marketing and paved the way for me to come to ZS. He introduced us to a variety of techniques and approaches to answer strategic sales and marketing questions that I now use on a daily basis.
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
B.S.E. in Chemical Engineering, 2000
Hometown
Westwood, MA
ZS Career Path
Consultant, 2006
On the work
"I recently completed a customer segmentation for a large biotech firm. Our client was in a unique position of having two competing drugs in the same market. The challenge was to develop a single segmentation that could apply to the entire product portfolio, could address potential cannibalization, and was simple enough for the sales force to use in the field. We used a combination of qualitative interviews, quantitative market research, and secondary data to segment physicians according to their underlying attitudes toward treatment along with their prescribing behavior. In addition to working to design our survey instrument, I managed our team of associates in analyzing our quantitative research data and in using statistical clustering techniques to come up with meaningful physicians segments that told an intuitive story. I transformed our ideas into a compelling deliverable and even presented our solution to our core client team. They were quite excited with the result and we are now working on tailoring their portfolio messaging for each segment before they roll it out to the field.
"My first ZS project was a sales force optimization for a pharma/biotech client who had recently launched a new product. They wanted to know how to modify their sales force to give them the best chances of success. We were able to help them to scale up their sales force to the appropriate size, modify their sales structure such that they had the appropriate allocation of selling effort across products and selling teams, realign their sales territories to better account for the additional sales potential and workload required by the new product, and identify geographic areas for hiring additional reps. We also interviewed senior sales management, regional managers, and rode with several reps in the field to assess the effectiveness of their sales organization and make recommendations for improvements based on industry best-practices. I played a key role in developing the strategic frameworks, structuring the analysis, brainstorming recommendations, and crafting the presentation content to lead the client through these decisions. We continued to work with the client even through the implementation of the new sales structure and are now assisting them with many of the follow-on initiatives to improve their effectiveness."
On ZS values
Get It Right: "At ZS, it's all about doing high quality work—but that doesn't mean following the same principles and processes each time we do a specific type of project. We focus on constantly reinventing our approach to provide the highest levels of service to our clients. On a recent market research project, our team was struggling to find the best way to present a large amount of data in a holistic fashion that could drive strategic decisions. We couldn't locate a presentation template used in similar studies to our satisfaction, so I designed an entirely new framework to present our story that may now become the firm's standard for similar projects in the future."
On life outside work
"Most of my life outside of work revolves around sports and being active. You'll probably find me running along the Charles River, on one of the local golf courses, or at one of the many ski mountains north of us. I'm also an avid sportfishing enthusiast."
On the Boston office
"The Boston office is great—we have a very collegial and collaborative culture that extends through to the managers and principals in the office. I really like our smaller size. It gives consultants the opportunity to explore and learn about a wide variety of project opportunities."