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The deployment of the sales force can be broken down into several categories and performance in each category should be used to determine the effectiveness of the force.
Executive training is of primary importance to ensure that the individual is fully up to speed with details on the product, has great personal inter-communication skills and the company should always ensure that it has set up an effective territorial allocation as well.
The sales force may not be as effective as they could be subject to poor designation of individual territories, bad alignment or excessive travel times. While it is true to say that the interaction between the sales executive and the client or potential client is more an art than a science, the creation of the battlefield owes more to planning and technology than to anything else.
A pharmaceutical company must be fully in possession of all the information, the issues and constraints that could stand in its way when it comes to optimising its sales force.
Objectives and goals must be established and must rely on prior history, the interpretation of intelligence and a realistic stand above all else. To gain as much targeted experience, first-hand knowledge and support as possible, the company should engage the services of the pharmaceutical consulting firm for best effect.
Is the overall target realistic and have objectives and goals been fully audited before work is engaged? In addition to a realistic assessment of goals, how realistic is each individual’s potential within the sales force?
Most sales executives in this situation will come with a track record and a prior history should be a good indication of how each individual person may perform. Assuming that the company has employed the services of the best in their field, territory allocation may follow.
Sales force deployment requires those in control to look back into the past. Input from the executives should be a core ingredient of this assessment and a comprehensive time management snapshot should be required of each member.
It is rather difficult to come up with an optimal alignment and subtle changes are often necessary, but remember that even the smallest change can result in a big potential gain, whether in profits or otherwise.
The sales force should always be optimised as it can present a significant cost to the pharmaceutical company. In most cases, pharma consulting suggests how these levels should be set and these considerations are based on experience, prior knowledge and benchmarks, which may then be fine-tuned.
To maximise revenue potential and increase sales, effective sales force allocation is absolutely essential. Traditional approaches may be found to be too costly and may have produced inferior results in other instances.
In the modern pharmaceutical and healthcare industry, competitive pressures are too great to allow for the under-utilisation of resources in this way.
The goal should be to optimise the amount of face-to-face selling time that the sales force executive is able to spend with both existing clients and prospects. Within optimised territorial planning, individual time management skills will be stressed by pharmaceutical consultants and training in this area should be an ongoing process.
By maximising individual time and minimising travel time, administrative burdens and other unproductive interferences, the sales executive will have every opportunity for achieving their goals.
Alan Gillies is the Managing Director of L2L Consulting, specialising in enabling pharmaceutical companies to achieve new heights of productivity and performance, throughout all levels of management and revenue generating activities.
One of the ongoing challenges facing the pharmaceutical company is the attraction, motivation, management and handling of key salespeople. The company itself has a significant reputation in the marketplace and has allocated certain resources to the development of its reputation and the dissemination of its cutting-edge products. Every organisation is, of course, very dynamic and its ongoing success will depend on the correct, but complex interaction of many moving parts, on an ongoing basis. The organisation will have to pay much attention to how its all important clients are handled and this will involve the development of key account management techniques and policies, to ensure successful relationships with implied integrity.
These days, key account management training is so important as the company develops a line of procedural guidelines, disseminated from the highest levels for clarity. However, one of the major challenges facing the company hierarchy is one of communicating to its sales staff through pharmaceutical sales training and in turn ensuring that the level of communication, both outgoing and incoming to and from a client organisation, is perfectly formed.
In truth, a relationship between a supplier and buyer may rise or fall on the strength of communication, which can sometimes be as relatively tenuous as an interpersonal relationship between two people — the key account client contact and the key account manager at the pharmaceutical company end.
When it has been established that an account must retain “key” status, the pharmaceutical company must define the nature of this relationship very clearly and must communicate the appropriate elements of this definition throughout the company through good pharmaceutical sales training. In doing so, these actions and responses are coordinated and consistent. Not all parts of this policy can be automatically rolled out as we have to remember that human foibles can often interject. Never put so much attention on a certain individual at an interface, so that the relationship breaks down if something goes wrong. It is much more preferable to build a variety of different tiers of communication between the company and client organisations, be they informal or formal, thereby negating the effects of catastrophic failure.
The pharmaceutical company would be best served by establishing and implementing regular development, planning and review meetings and exercises, with the clear aim of “over delivering” to satisfy the relationship.
When an important relationship is in the process of development, we should remember that financial considerations are not the only motivators in question and both parties should see the dissemination of confidential information as an important ingredient, going forward. In this respect, it is critical that the pharmaceutical company identifies the all-important receiving role within the client organisation and the individual who fills this role, so that a sharing of information can be facilitated. Without putting too fine a point on it, interpersonal communication and relationships must be very sophisticated, but it is equally important that the focus is not on the particular personality associated with the individual fitting the role. From time to time a “key” individual may leave his or her role and should this happen, ongoing functionality will not be compromised.
Alan Gillies is the CEO of L2L Consulting, a cutting-edge pharma consultancy firm which specialises in optimising productivity and performance within international companies by applying tailored organisational strategies.
