Optimising sales force effectiveness

The ever-changing environment in which pharmaceutical companies promote their products has become increasingly tough over recent. The industry is under increasing pressure to deliver greater productivity from their sales forces. How do you recruit and continue to develop the highest quality sales management group in the industry? NGP asked Pierre De Nayer, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Citobi, Andrej Hudoklin, Head of ADD IT Solutions’ Business Solutions Department, Chris Pepler, SVP of Global BD and Operations for Innovex, and Mike Poulson, President of Wilson Learning Europa.

NGP. How do you build truly customer-centric strategies?
MP. To truly understand and fulfil the needs of customers requires the focus and alignment of the whole organisation – from the way that strategic direction is communicated internally and externally, to the skills and behaviours that the people in your company demonstrate on a daily basis.

The concept of the value chain runs through the whole customer experience in an organisation, includes everyone and is in play 24/7, 365 days a year. It is perhaps the only thing that an organisation can truly rely on today to differentiate itself.

CP. To build customer-centric solutions, we need to think and behave as if we are the customer. We need to demonstrate that we understand the minutae of the commercial challenges they are facing in the marketplace and we also need to understand the culture and decision-making process within the customer company. The human element is also vital: it is essential that we engender a sense of trust with our customers and this only comes through regular, open and honest dialogue with ongoing evidence of how we are performing against their objectives. We need to work with customers to review the commercial solutions open to them and to weigh up the options from the point of view of both cost and return. Then we agree with the customer the relevant performance metrics we will capture and report so we can demonstrate the delivery of our commercial promise.

AH. Since ADD is software vendor, our mission is to bring a set of tools to our customers, which enables them to get a 360-degree view of their clients. If you intend to build a customer-centric system, you should believe that, “Only if a strategy is good for my client, can it be good for my company too!” 

Our approach was to integrate ETMS functions into existing CRM instead of the opposite. CRM allows a broader view of the customer, and is able to grow together with market and customer needs. That way we are able to discover all there is to know about individual customers, including their behavioural patterns, which are gathered using online surveys and then analysed using data mining algorithms.

The integration of business process management (BPM) technology should also be considered, since it allows the control and constant improvement of all processes inside our system. A BPM holistic approach enables you to observe every interaction with a client not as a separate incident, but as a part of a process that includes both sides.

PDN. Building customer-centric strategies is the essence of our job: we strive to break information silos between departments and we embrace all fields of CRM. Lines between marketing and sales and lines between sales force automation (SFA), customer service and support (CSS) and marketing automation (MA) are blurring and the ‘new era’ marketer needs to be aware of this. When we design, develop and implement a CRM tactical campaign, we consider the pharmaceutical company as whole.

NGP. How do you respond to changes in sales management and ensure that you plan for the future?
PDN. Philippe Watts, Global Customer Director at Pfizer, said recently, “Believe me, I am now against share of voice.” And I agree with him: we need to gradually move away from the share-of-voice paradigm. I no longer believe in the ‘one size fits all’ message carefully crafted by strategists in their ivory towers, giving a mission to reps to spread it as widely as possible. Messages will need to be adapted to countries, to segments, to lifecycles and to the needs of physicians. We are entering the era of the one-to-one message, and at Citobi, we are at the forefront of these changes.

CP. At Innovex, we invest time and money in marketplace and product analysis, we review company product portfolios and how these will change over time and we look at the marketplace and how healthcare delivery may change, with its consequent impact on how medicines can be promoted. We follow legislation to ensure we can pre-empt any changes in requirements and we evaluate technology trends to ensure we stay at the forefront of this ever-changing field. For example, we have responded to the shift from primary to secondary care portfolios by investing in sophisticated in-house training programmes to develop high performing primary care sales representatives into secondary ones. The key is spotting a change before it happens so that we are ready with an immediate solution.

MP. The sales management role is one of the most challenging in any organisation. Sales managers have a daily struggle between managing the execution of the company strategies and pressures from above, and the day-to-day challenges of supporting, coaching and developing their sales team.

Sales managers need to recruit and continue to develop the highest quality sales management group in their industry. Even in tough budget times, I would still focus my learning and development budget in the area of first line sales and customer service managers.

NGP. What are high impact KPIs that you have identified for maximising results and motivating the sales force?
MP. At Wilson Learning we have developed a behaviour-based model that will allow salespeople to develop in four principal dimensions for effective sales performance, which in turn will generate the best possible chance of positive business results. These are: knowing customers as a business, and positioning their offering to link it to their customer’s vision and strategy; developing and implementing a strategy that determines the appropriate competitive approach to winning business; the individual capacity to be both a strong strategist and consultant through self-development, relationship skills, and innovation; and product-specific knowledge about characteristics and applications, combined with business acumen.

PDN. We do not use traditional share-of-voice metrics; for example, number of calls, frequency of visit, length of call. When we develop high throughput tactical CRM campaigns, we define KPIs for the campaign itself, and following these carefully can lead to tremendous results. KPIs must be completely aligned with the strategic objective of the brand, but this is so rarely the case. For example, a sales force is asked to promote a patient compliance scheme. It is possible to track the number of physicians proposing that compliance scheme, or even the number of patients per physicians included in that compliance scheme. Imagine now that compliance is one fourth of what it should be and that the programme aims to double compliance, and calculate the potential ROI. At Citobi, we have shown that following such a highly tactical KPI can strongly motivate sales forces and lead to a tremendous increase in sales.

CP. Key performance indicators will vary between projects, depending on the nature of the product and where it is in the sales lifecycle. In general, KPIs will be an amalgam of quantitative measures such as calls on target doctors, days on territory and sales data, together with more subjective qualitative measures such as individual representatives’ performance against a range of competencies such as planning, negotiation and communication skills.

NGP. What role do incentives play in optimising sales force effectiveness (SFE)?
CP. Clearly incentives can be an important element in motivating sales representatives; however, they need to be matched to the behaviours and metrics that will dictate sales force effectiveness for that sales team as well as complying with codes of conduct in the individual country. In an SFE model, for example, incentives should be based on achieving optimal coverage or frequency on target doctors and not simply on call rates. If targets are set and measured transparently, the vast majority of sales representatives are motivated by achieving or exceeding them, be they related to the amount or value of what they sell or number of target health professionals seen. To then reward success with financial incentives is vital; however, it is also important to remember the value of recognition both individually by managers and amongst their peers.

PDN. I strongly believe that incentives per se have a limited role to play in sales force effectiveness, unless you are working in Central and Eastern European countries where you can build, for the moment, strong incentives schemes. In Western European countries, trade unions prohibit you from going too far down the route of providing incentives. This doesn’t mean, however, that no incentives are necessary.
What I believe is that the metrics for evaluation of the sales rep’s performance will change. We will move away from the traditional share-of-voice to more results-oriented metrics. Current SFA business processes and tools allow pharma companies to produce results-oriented metrics to evaluate the performance of sales reps, so that links with incentives will become increasingly possible.

MP. It is as clear today as it was 25 years ago that incentives play a significant role in motivation and therefore effectiveness of sales teams. However, what is often forgotten is the power of intangible as well as tangible reward and recognition. The organisations that set goals and standards for sales and service and reward often for their performance are the ones where I see real success.

NGP. How have advances in technology supported SFE initiatives?
AH. We strongly believe that business intelligence with data mining is going to have a major impact on SFE, since it brings totally new approaches and ideas to the segmentation and targeting process. Instead of ‘shooting blanks’, this allows the sales force to target the right groups of clients with the right messages.

Even if the sales process later reveals that targeting some groups of clients was not successful, pinpoint targeting using behavioural patterns and data mining algorithms can produce good results in each cycle of the marketing campaign. Since the data mining algorithms are able to learn and incorporate new information and knowledge, with each new cycle the segmentation of clients can be done with greater and greater precision.

Every cycle gathers new knowledge and if we are able to process this information with the right tools, the results can be stunning. SFE could also get a major boost from integrating workflow (BPM) technology into sales and marketing process procedures. With BPM you can optimise your internal processes and data flow, since it allows you to learn from past mistakes, find weak spots and bottlenecks and thus continuously improves the sales and marketing process.

MP. The amount of information available to organisations and the way it is organised and utilised is both a tremendous challenge and a huge opportunity. We have many organisations that have invested in SFA and CRM systems coming to us and saying ‘this investment is not working’ because the sales trams don’t have skills to, or time to, use it effectively.

As I said before, any organisation that has invested well in the skills of its salespeople and leaders will have a huge head start in using any tools or methodologies available; however, the market or the technology can change.

If you look at technology from a learning and development perspective only, there are also challenges and opportunities. If your belief is that training, or a training session alone, is capable of building high performance sales trams, you may think that technology can deliver that training in a much quicker and more cost effective way.

However, if you believe, as I do, that there is much more to lasting human performance improvement than just pure training classes, then there are many ways to integrate technology developments into a successful ‘blended’ approach to learning and development.

CP. I believe that SFE has been driven to a large part by better access to data, and technology has enabled this access. We can now access and interrogate data on prescribers in real time, allowing much more dynamic planning. In addition, sales representatives can rapidly and easily communicate with their managers and headquarters and so it is possible to see sales representative activity and forestall any issues that may be developing. We have developed a number of tools which can drive SFE, including Innovex Insight – a coaching tool that pulls together the inputs from a first-line manager and links that to the outputs in terms of activity and sales.

PDN. Technology has evolved considerably in the past few years, but the most recent advances still need to pass the practical test examination. Tablet PCs, for example, are not delivering as much as they should simply because of the fragility of the material. On the pure SFA side, the tools available are more and more powerful, more user friendly and more suited to the needs of sales reps. Everything is now possible on the technology side; only small additional improvements will be needed. The challenge is no longer a technology challenge. Pharma companies need to review their strategies and their business processes before going down the most advanced SFE route. Change management, not technology, will become key.

With eight years of expertise in CRM and BI business, Andrej Hudoklin is running ADD IT Solutions’ Business Solutions Department, including the complete live cycle of products, from planning and development up to the point of sale and implementation.

Chris Pepler is currently SVP Global BD and Operations for Innovex. In this role Chris works alongside customers developing innovative commercial solutions to meet their specific challenges. Pepler has been with Innovex for 10 years, initially with the UK organisation, prior to moving into his current global role.

Pierre De Nayer is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Citobi. He started his career by founding and managing a biotech company, after which he joined Procter & Gamble pharmaceuticals, where he was key account manager and responsible for KOL management. He left P&G in 1997 to join McKinsey, where he developed a strong expertise in CRM and in the pharmaceutical industry.

Mike Poulson is President of Wilson Learning Europa. His focus has been on the growth of the business across EMEA, alongside a significant leadership role in the development and execution of Wilson Learning’s strategic shift towards Human Performance Improvement and Globalisation.