It’s no longer acceptable for a pharmaceutical company to operate according to the mantra that “bigger is better,” based on the concept that the more people engaged in the marketplace, the better the return. At one time, pharmaceutical companies used to look at each other and judge effectiveness based on how big the workforce was, as more volume would undoubtedly lead to enhanced revenue and a more than fruitful rate of return at the bottom line. All this approach resulted in was market saturation and this occurred even as the market was reinventing itself, anyway. Today, much more emphasis must be placed on marketability and the promotion of niche products, with an accompanying rise in demand for specific training, rather than the use of a ‘broad paintbrush’ to accomplish everything. As we come to the stark realisation that sales force effectiveness is far more important than sales force size, we realise that if we don’t take action, such inefficiency could prove highly detrimental.

These days, pharmaceutical sales training falls into two definite categories — education relating to the product itself and technical training in the area of sales and marketing technique, with the emphasis on the latest cutting-edge approaches. The salesperson should not forget that the ultimate goal is to win, but it’s no good accepting a signature on a sales contract at whatever cost. Rather, a new contract value is also reliant on its position in terms of logistical benefit and strategy, quite apart from financial measurements. It’s quite possible that a profitable sale, when viewed narrowly, could be far from as beneficial when all the other factors are taken into consideration.

These days there is not so much difference between success and failure, as margins are so thin and therefore sales force effectiveness is a highly important metric. Experienced consultants should be engaged to help in this facet of pharmaceutical sales training, to increase productivity, cut expenditure and boost morale among the sales force. Motivation is a very delicate subject and is far from just the provision of relevant financial bonuses for the salesperson. Indeed, sometimes financial compensation is not a primary driver and the organisation must be able to determine what really pushes each individual on the sales force. More often than not, a goal must not be infinitely achievable, or the sales person could be subconsciously held back as progress is made.

Sales force effectiveness can have a high impact on not only volume, but thin margins and high costs, so individual performance can have a ‘knock on’ effect in other areas. An organisation can start by assessing its current situation, looking at the metrics used to determine success or otherwise and how these very metrics may, by themselves, be contributory to the problem. Size the sales force correctly, so the territories are adequately serviced and the company’s voice is heard to best effect. Make sure that the salesperson has neither too few, nor too many sales calls scheduled in any one day and cut back on non-productive activities, such as excess travelling, where at all possible.

Whether engaged in detailing or not, every single moment that the salesperson spends with a professional should be optimised and this should be a cornerstone of key account management training.

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.

There is far too much at stake to take a passive approach to the organisation of a company’s sales force, and senior management should ensure that they are well aware of the effectiveness of the operation and are adequately placed to make changes as and when necessary to improve. It is said that the actual cost of a sales call is in the region of $400 or more and as there’s so much at stake, the sales executive must be fully efficient in everything they do, without question.

While it goes without saying that the sales executive should be a highly skilled individual, trained in the intricacies of closing sales, a first-class communicator and people person, if poor methodology is used by the pharmaceutical company, all his or her skills could be wasted. Look at what’s at stake – poor deployment could mean the difference between merely surviving or enjoying the many benefits of the company’s ongoing endeavours.

By leveraging existing assets, a pharmaceutical company can reveal significant potential improvements, “across the board.” It’s amazing how small improvements in significant areas can result in big profit gains. To the untrained eye, the sales force may appear to be effective, but highly skilled pharmaceutical consultants will be able to see how inefficient they really are and can advise the organisation in all the various areas necessary for improvement, helping it to move forward.

There are many different fundamental aspects to sales force effectiveness. For example, optimal sizing of the workforce, optimal allocation of individual efforts and optimal alignment of sales territories, all play the part. The pharmaceutical consulting firm can draw on experience gained from many different case studies over the years, first-hand experience “on the streets” and constant reviews of policies, procedures and the latest technical help. While sales force optimisation was once left as a paper and pencil exercise, these days powerful digital products and software solutions can be used to help set up the entire program. While plans are being incorporated, internal intelligence should be brought in and everything incorporated prior to the actual launch.

Looking back, workload allocation data from previous seasons and historical performance charts can help to reveal the optimum size of the sales force. This historical analysis should be matched to current market conditions, projected into the future and fine tuned according to product roll-out plans and expansion needs.

In most situations, pharma consulting is multifaceted and can be of particular value to the pharmaceutical company in terms of establishing time management practices to help augment the newly optimised sales force. Schedules must be optimised as keenly as possible and each individual within the sales force should be trained to ensure that they take advantage of every block of time available, while supervisory staff are able to track, compare and advise accordingly. Once the company can be sure that it has eliminated travel overlaps and balanced its workloads, it can be ready to send out its focused sales team on the road to best effect. The cost of a sales call is only going up, so it only makes sense to rein in these costs as much as possible.

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.

The role of the pharmaceutical sales representative has often been challenged from a public relations perspective. There are some who believe that the pharmaceutical company, through their representative, retains more than the appropriate share of influence over the healthcare practitioner’s decision-making process. From time to time, populist media points out that far more is spent on pharmaceutical marketing than research associated with the development of the products. Nevertheless, pharmaceutical marketing techniques are essential in disseminating the information necessary for the practitioner to make a final deliberation as to whether the product should be prescribed or not. As part of this process, the sales force is critical in promoting the product within the market, efficiently and profitably.

Due to some of the negative public relations, some markets in the United States have imposed restrictions on gift giving, including the dissemination of drug samples by pharmaceutical salespeople. In particular, Partners Healthcare, the largest hospital and physician network in the state of Massachusetts has implemented guidelines, specifically prohibiting their physicians and researchers from accepting gifts or drug samples from pharmaceutical manufacturers. Now, sales representatives must get written permission before they are allowed to interact with the network’s employees and if any drug samples are provided, the samples must be forwarded to a centralised system, so that they are distributed anonymously and for the use of the entire network. The president of the Association of American Medical Colleges determined that these new guidelines represent “a serious and comprehensive step forward in the rapidly evolving arena of medicine and its relationship with industry.”

The policy was originally instigated following an internal review, at which time the network determined that there had been many possible conflicts of interest within the preceding year or two. At that time it was recognised that the relationship between the pharmaceutical company and the health care professional was fundamental to enable scientific advantages and advances to propagate to the patient, but the body did question whether some techniques used could compromise the integrity of the system.

At the heart of this decision-making process was undoubtedly the view that certain healthcare professionals could become biased in favour of the drug samples or gifts given, prescribing or recommended the associated drugs at the expense of others and more often than should have been the case.

The developments in Massachusetts are relatively new and it remains to be seen whether anything along similar lines will be rolled out within any other areas. We can certainly determine from this development that the pharmaceutical marketing industry is once again developing and changing. It is yet another reason why pharmaceutical companies should devote their resources to pharmaceutical consultants, so that the consultant can ensure that the team is up-to-date and ahead of the competitive game. Healthcare legislation is all around us, even as we are all getting used to the importance of new communication methods and as such pharmaceutical sales training is so important. The significance of primary accounts will increase in the market, as there is more reliance on two-way communication and information exchange. Thus key account management training is a critical component of pharmaceutical sales training and the competent pharmaceutical marketing consultant is best positioned to handle it all.

Alan Gillies is the Director of L2L Consulting, an elite pharmaceutical consultancy firm which specialises in Strategy Development and Implementation Excellence for prestigious multi-national organisations.

To determine whether a sales force is truly effective takes a certain amount of skill, quite a lot of information and the ability to accurately determine potential. Essentially, the amount of selling time available, based on a realistic allocation of hours and multiplied by the number of people on the team, can be combined with an assessment of market potential to create a market response matrix. In the past, this was often a time consuming and error-prone process, conducted with a spreadsheet around the table, but there are far more productive ways to approach this issue these days.

It’s essential to align territories correctly if a sales force is to be effective at all. To do this, boundaries must be clearly defined, workload balances correctly determined, travel time minimised and contiguous territories carefully handled. Even though this may sound fairly clear, it’s often not so, and unless the sales executive’s time is protected from waste and fully optimised, the company simply won’t achieve its full potential. Without proper territorial alignment, the sales executive could be faced with having to deal with far too many potential customers. This will undoubtedly result in a net loss in terms of productive time, as the high workload will result in ineffective interaction with individual clients. Conversely, if there are too few customers according to the allocated executive, the potential of the executive can be wasted in this situation and this can be aggravated if some of the people with the best track records are underutilised.

Without a comprehensive roadmap showing it the way to go, the pharmaceutical company should not deploy its sales force. This is all well and good, but the business executive at the top level has so much on his or her plate anyway and this can be a great challenge. While sales force effectiveness is obviously on the top of the list, they would do well to engage external assistance from pharmaceutical consultants to help them prioritise. A pharmaceutical consulting firm is fully cognisant of the need for adequate preparation, planning and optimisation of a sales force workload. Invariably, pharma consulting draws on many years of experience, training, education, industry knowledge and front line “street smarts,” enabling the company to be ready to do battle from day one.

A company’s sales force should not be deployed unless a number of criteria have been met, including strategic alignment, both current and future, goal and objective auditing, data incorporation and resource deployment, human and otherwise. This is where an honest assessment should be made of the potential, along with the anticipated workload for each individual. Any current deployment of resources should be highly criticised to expose any inequities in territory alignment.

In an ideal world, members of the sales force should each have a excellent and very productive track record. The sales executive isn’t responsible for territorial alignment or necessarily to seek out new clients within. It’s up to the pharmaceutical company executives, in concert with pharmaceutical consultants, to set adequate goals and to make sure that they have laid out the matrix to take into account maximum potential gain.

Alan Gillies is the Director of L2L Consulting, an elite pharmaceutical consultancy firm which specialises in Strategy Development and Implementation Excellence for prestigious multi-national organisations.

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. It is not possible for a sales force to be truly effective if territories have been badly designated or aligned and travel times exacerbated accordingly. 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. The goals and objectives should be fully audited to make sure that the target is realistic before any other work is completed. In addition to a realistic assessment of goals, how realistic is each individual’s potential within the sales force? An analysis should be made of each sales executive’s track record and prior history, to assess how each may perform in the field. 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. Executives should be counselled as this assessment is being compiled and each should be required to contribute time management snapshots. Optimal alignment can be a rather subtle exercise and it’s important to remember that relatively small changes can sometimes result in big gains in efficiency and potential profits.

The sales force should always be optimised as it can present a significant cost to the pharmaceutical company. To enable this to happen, pharma consulting can help to reveal benchmarks and to use prior knowledge and experience to fine tune everything accordingly.

To maximise revenue potential and increase sales, effective sales force allocation is absolutely essential. Traditional ways of approaching this might simply be too costly and also may not produce the intended results reliably. In the modern pharmaceutical and healthcare industry, competitive pressures are too great to allow for the under-utilisation of resources in this way.

At the end of the day, a sales force executive must be able to optimise the amount of face-to-face selling time he or she spends with existing clients and prospects. Individual time management skills are very important within an optimised territorial area and pharmaceutical consultants stress that training in this area must be an intensive 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 Director of L2L Consulting, an elite pharmaceutical consultancy firm which specialises in Strategy Development and Implementation Excellence for prestigious multi-national organisations.

The pharmaceutical company is constantly trying to make sure that it has the right sales people at its disposal and must pay a lot of attention to how it attracts, motivates, handles and manages them. After all, the company has built a great position for itself in the market and has put a lot of effort into developing its product line and polishing its reputation. 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.

Much will hinge on the success of key account management training and an organisation may be stringent in the development of policies and procedures and very clear at the senior level about its objectives. This element is so important that much attention should be given to communication with sales staff through pharmaceutical sales training, with the result that further communication, two-way, between the company and its client is always fruitful.

So important is the level of communication, that relationships between the buyer and seller can hinge entirely on this element, as tenuous as it might be when based on interpersonal and effective relationships between two key people — the client representative and the key account manager at the pharma company.

As soon as a pharmaceutical company knows that a certain account is “key,” pharmaceutical sales training kicks in to ensure that the details of this relationship are perfectly disseminated and communicated throughout the company to all of those who are impacted. 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. It must be recognised that there is potential for a breakdown of relationship if too much emphasis is placed on a particular individual at the interface level. Rather, it should be necessary to build a network of channels between the company and its clients, both formal and informal if needed, so that the risk of catastrophic failure is minimised.

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.

The primary motivators behind the ongoing establishment of a relationship are seldom restricted to finance alone, and it is likely that the sharing of pertinent and confidential information between both parties could be key to the ongoing relationship. 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. In this way, should one “key” individual be removed or depart for whatever reason, ongoing function may be retained.

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.

Some people would say that it can be very difficult to determine the ideal amount of time needed to close a sale, due to so many external influences, but a sales executive should be primed to move the prospect on to the next stage in any effective procedure. In this way, a sale would not necessarily be appropriate, but a “yes” or “no” decision should be revealed, rather than a “maybe.” The time of both parties in this conversation is very valuable and the executive should pay particular attention to the tone and subtle responses from the prospect in order to make a decision, as to whether time would be better spent elsewhere. Effective implementation requires a sales executive to be on top of time management, including the valuable potential time spent with prospects up front. Many advocate that the time spent with a potential prospect face-to-face is the most valuable of any sales executive’s day, requiring that all “non effective” time spent on administration and other issues be contained, but remember that not all of the prospect’s time can bring a “result.”

Outdated sales tactics have no place in the modern healthcare and pharmaceutical arena. So much is at stake here, as the professional healthcare provider needs to cut to the chase and be in possession of all the appropriate facts. Sales people who are at the top of the game realise that they need to build customer relationships first and foremost and always over deliver, rather than trying to focus on closing sales according to textbook concepts or the analysis of a prospect’s personality. Getting to know the customer’s specific needs and worries is a good way of approaching the issue, and using brainpower to devise ways to overcome the client’s issues is a much better use of valued resources. If you think of how much time it takes to build a rapport and trust with a client, risking this should be avoided at all cost. Remember that we exist in a competitive world and other organisations are ready to pounce, so the interests of a particular client should be the subject of honest and open discussions and relationship building, rather than “spinning.”

While sales may indeed be the ultimate objective, sales executives need to spend time carefully investigating how the company could help the professional – in detail, all while not actually pitching the product. Always ask the right questions and spend as much time as necessary considering what these questions should be. Get the professional to open up and provide information upon which to base the next pertinent question, and through a process of problem solving such as this, the company will be many steps closer to that important sale and to improving the effective implementation ratio.

At present, pharmaceutical consultants understand how important the implementation ratio is and how much the parent company invests in the cost of its sales team. Generally, pharmaceutical consulting firms can help to elevate these ratios by taking time to train the sales force in the dedicated and specific techniques required to succeed. Invariably, pharma consulting will eke out the potential and allow a company’s senior executives to focus on the areas where they should be paying particular attention.

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.

It can be a tough life for pharmaceutical companies sometimes. Just think how many different bosses they have to answer to, some of whom have very little to do with a bottom-line result. It is not enough trying to focus on the generation and development of good relationships with top clients, but they also have to work out how to assess key account management while dealing with the difficult demands of regulators, auditors and others.

The pharmaceutical company must understand that key account management tactics are very important, while also requiring a dynamic approach, flexible positions and creativity. There are several layers of communication within a pharmaceutical company responsible for dealing with the key account and this must be clearly delineated or confusion will result. If not careful, individual points of contact will assess the key account in a different light, depending on their position within the company and their personal motivation.

Most pharma consulting experts advise us that a sales executive on the front line, if he or she is motivated by revenues, could not ultimately have the best interests of the client or the company in focus. It may not be very obvious and certainly not “cut and dried” but if it is not recognised, the overall relationship between the two companies can be significantly affected.

Key accounts provide a level of cash flow-based stability to a pharmaceutical company that is difficult to replicate. The designation of “key” account should not, however, be given lightly, regardless of the potential. While the scale of the potential business is important, a number of other critical factors must be applied. It is possible that a high-volume could result in a low bottom-line return, due to the cost of servicing the needs of the client and razor thin margins.

Typically in most organisations, 20% of the clients represent 80% of the value and this business metric is well-established. Insofar as this is true, a potential “key” account should be categorised and understood before an approach is determined. A number of different layers of key account management could exist within a typical organisation and all tiers of management, especially those who regularly interact with clients, must receive correct training in the techniques required to handle every level and type of account.

Many different ways exist to segment and categorise a client, when it comes to the designation of key account status and these include the company’s growth rate, its percentage allocation of profits, total annual sales and peer-to-peer comparison.

The pharmaceutical consulting firm will be the first to tell the company that no two clients are alike and furthermore that no two key accounts can be treated the same, either. Generally, pharmaceutical consultants know how to deal with various levels of accounts and can be very helpful in imparting this level of knowledge to the company’s various staffing points. A critical “mission” statement should be determined for each and every one of the pharmaceutical company’s clients, detailing the terms of the relationship accurately. There should be no “stock” description, but as each key account is of elevated importance to the company’s existence, all staff members must be trained to recognise the difference between “apples and oranges.”

Alan Gillies is the Director of L2L Consulting, an elite pharmaceutical consultancy firm which specialises in Strategy Development and Implementation Excellence for prestigious multi-national organisations.