Gary Colleran explains how the idea for Advance™ was borne out of a previous client's need for a solution to ineffective sales force interventions.

Transcript

The Advance™ Concept

The idea for Advance™ originally came from a question from one of my customers when they asked: If we’ve got a new selling model that we wanted to introduce to the company, how would we make it stick, how would we ensure that the managers don't come on the launch programme, spend two days and then put the manual on the shelf and never go back to it, so that all their behaviours drifted back to where they’d originally come from?  And that’s what originally triggered me to investigate, well, how do we solve that problem?  What is the way to actually make that change in behaviour stick for a company?

The initial development of the Advance™ idea took two distinct routes.  One was we had to identify a pharmaceutical company who were innovative, willing to engage in taking an approach that hadn’t been tried before, that we could partner with to investigate building Advance™ deploying it, and actually trying to realise some of the results it could provide.  And that we certainly did and they’re still partners with us to this day and we still have the system out there and running.

The other was to have a supplier who we could guarantee the quality, the expertise, the technological know-how to build Advance™ as it is such a complicated system.  And we certainly did that as well.  We went to a company that has a wealth of experience in television, interactive platforms, and works with government and a number of big organisations.  So we know that… we’re very, very confident about the quality and the security about the software we’ve had built and how it might operate.

So Advance™ works by using an online platform which the first line sales manager logs onto every month and they have to actually assess a real call taken with real representatives and real GPs.  They assess that call online and then what they’ve done is they’re given instant feedback on how they’ve done compared to the model answer that would exist, using the sales model and the sales model behaviours.

So what we’re doing is we’re up-skilling that first line sales manager, but also monitoring carefully their capability set and their observational skills.  From that we can then ask them to score every call they see in the field and log that onto a database.  And that gives us a real time measure of what’s going on in the field in terms of implementation of their selling model, their marketing campaign, their strategy.

Advance™ differs from other systems in that I have seen systems in pharmaceutical companies where the manager can log the performance of the sales representative.  But without that calibration element that measure is always suspect, because I could show that same sales call to four or five different managers and they would all assess it very, very differently.  Which means the data we’re collecting from the different managers, it makes it very difficult to draw accurate conclusions from.

And what we do is we eliminate that variation by using the calibration system, and that calibration means that our data is reliable, it’s robust, it’s objective.  Whereas, potentially, other systems that are out there, although it collects data, the data they have could be deemed as corrupt; it’s incomplete.

Advance™ Demo

Please contact us to find out more about Advance™ and Appraise or to request a free demonstration to discuss your needs.

UK Patent Pending.  Patent Application Number: 1102439.9