Associate Director, Business Insights and Analytics

Merck Merck · Pharma · PA

Associate Director for Business Insights and Analytics team at Merck, focusing on leading a sub-team to deliver business insights for marketing strategy, customer experience, and engagement. The role involves 80% analytics and 20% stakeholder interaction, requiring expertise in customer segmentation, predictive/prescriptive analytics, and optimizing sales force promotion. It emphasizes translating business needs into analytical plans and communicating insights to stakeholders, with a strong focus on pharmaceutical commercial analytics and data management, including patient claims data. While mentioning GenAI agents as a tool, the core function is analytics and business insights, not AI/ML model development.

What you'd actually do

  1. Lead a team of business analysts, providing guidance on best practices in data analytics, data visualization and storytelling with data.
  2. Engage with BU leaders across the US commercial and DHH organization to prioritize and enhance customer engagement solutions, ultimately delivering on business performance.
  3. Serve as a subject matter expert in customer segmentation, targeting, predictive models & prescriptive analytics and as trusted advisor to inform commercial customer engagement decisions.
  4. Drive the implementation of new analytics methodologies to optimize sales force promotion resource management decisions for the brand and in support of the larger portfolio.
  5. Translate complex business needs and priorities into analytical plans, providing actionable insights and effectively communicating advanced analytics to inform business decisions.

Skills

Required

  • Bachelor’s degree in relevant field (Mathematics, Economics, Computer Science, Statistics, Decision Science, Marketing, Engineering, Public Health, etc.)
  • 5+ years of relevant experience delivering complex analytical projects in the pharmaceutical/biotech/healthcare industry
  • Prior hands-on experience working with healthcare business performance data
  • Understanding of the pharmaceutical commercial analytics and business acumen Expertise
  • Analytics Champion: Application of advanced marketing analytics methods to inform customer engagement experience, sales force effectiveness, predictive model performance and GenAI agents to inform both operational and Marketing decisions.
  • Communication and Storytelling
  • Decision Making and Critical Thinking
  • Emotional Intelligence
  • Networking and Partnerships
  • Complex Data Management: Substantial experience in interpreting complex datasets, particularly patient claims data.

Nice to have

  • MBA, MS, or PhD
  • Prior experience managing and mentoring direct reports
  • Delivers statistical and mathematical models through effective technical skills
  • Develops efficient programming code and software assets that provide advanced analytical functionality.
  • Creates analytical products (product parts) as a part of broader teams
  • Understands the business context, challenge, limitation, constraints and goals to effectively match the capability of the statistical and mathematical and M/L approaches to the business, scientific and operational challenge
  • Ensured advanced analytics support to decision making and business process tasks is understood, adopted and embedded as a part of regular business activities
  • Promotes a collaborative and high performing data driven culture across the company and high-quality delivery standards among fellow data scientists
  • Includes specializations within domains, such as therapeutic area and data assets (e.g., claims, EMR)
  • Sometimes specific roles include incremental skills pertaining to AI and M/L methods, Marketing Effectiveness Measurement, or test vs control and design of experiments.
  • Analyze data using advanced analytical/statistical techniques from various databases/sources (claims data/EMR data and other sources) to optimize and improve therapy area commercial business strategies.
  • Ensure delivery of high-quality, timely, compliant analyses with excellent user experience (keep clients updated on progress).
  • Communicate with other platforms/competencies to understand new trends/methodologies being implemented or considered within the company ecosystem and bring forward new ideas to enhance analytic capabilities.
  • Contribute to innovative experiments, including idea generation, incubation, and experimentation

What the JD emphasized

  • pharmaceutical commercial analytics
  • healthcare business performance data
  • patient claims data