Client Situation:

Our pharmaceutical company client had a Primary Care Sales Team responsible for the promotion of a product in the decline phase of the product life cycle with only 2 years left on patent.  The product was still making a significant but decreasing (£) contribution to overall sales performance.  The Sales Manager responsible for maximising and extending this profitability commissioned an analysis of current sales call performance for this team.

Our Solution:

We undertook a bespoke analysis of this sales team focussing our assessment on two distinct areas: selling skills (observable behaviours aligned to their sales model and rated under a proven productive questioning framework) and marketing strategy (the extent to which the marketing strategy was being followed against agreed measures).  The collected data was analysed using our unique analysis software and results were graded against a primary care sales team subset of our extensive benchmark data.

Results

The analysis delivered findings that identified overall intervention points, individual development plans and recommendations including: development of incremental goals for customer profiles at different stages of the commitment continuum and of productive questioning skills to achieve owned, active and public customer commitment to them.  We supported these findings by development of targeted workshops and coaching plans which were cascaded through the sales teams by their own Managers.

Targeted skills training and workshops to align product and marketing message to the range of customer profiles, supported by coaching programmes turned a declining product back into a growth product within 9 months of the interventions taking place.