Four Key Changes Affecting Pharma Sales Success—Is Your Sales Team Ready? Or Not?
by Celeste Mosby
Monday, February 22, 2010
Many clients across the pharmaceutical industry are struggling these days to identify what it will take to be successful in a rapidly changing sales environment. Based on my observations of new customer expectations and regulatory guidelines, I’d suggest there are four critical success factors that should be considered when developing a successful sales strategy.
1. Specialized Markets Requiring Focused Training
With the trend toward supporting more highly specialized markets, there will be a need for targeted training. That means a focused effort to bring sales professionals up to speed on these products, their use, and how to most effectively position them with healthcare providers. A deeper understanding of Evidence Based Medicine and important clinical data with outcomes will help sales professionals deliver powerful, sustaining messages.
2. Differentiation
Salespeople need to learn how to leverage customer engagement as a way to differentiate themselves from competitors. This means building stronger relationships characterized by trust. As physicians face increasing demands to achieve measurable improvements in patient outcomes, they need, more than ever before, to see pharma companies’ representatives as credible sources of valued information to help them achieve their goals.
3. Regional Restructuring
To improve customer focus, successful organizations are creating regional business units that are closer to the customer and better able to address the specific patient needs of a particular healthcare provider. The regional structure also allows pharma companies to adapt to regional variations in reimbursement policies and practices.
4. Training that Truly Changes Behaviors and Impacts Performance
The traditional approach to training sales representatives needs to undergo significant changes. To meet the challenges of today’s market, there must be a greater emphasis on the transfer of learning to ensure application of new skills in the field. Sales leaders and the training professionals who support them must create learning journeys and environments that build on extended learning platforms. Such platforms provide a continuous learning experience that includes frequent face-to-face and virtual touch points, classroom sessions, and applicable tools, all delivered as part of an ongoing learning system. Sales managers must be involved at all points along the way, providing the coaching and reinforcement needed to ensure the new tools and learning are having an impact on results.
What kinds of challenges do you see in the new pharmaceutical sales environment? How has your team adapted to change? What barriers have you encountered, and what has worked well in developing an effective strategy? Let us know about your experiences.
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