Gary Colleran, Sales interAction’s lead consultant, talks about the barriers Pharma companies regularly encounter in introducing interventions designed to improve SFE.

Transcript

Existing SFE Key Measures

The typical approach of most companies to improving sales force effectiveness, or sales force effectiveness per se, is to invest time and effort and resource into activities such as targeting, segmentation, development of their campaign materials, campaign messaging.  And invest heavily to make sure that’s as tight as it can be before handing it over to the sales representatives to deliver in front of the healthcare professional.

All of these different developments and bits of investment really hinge on what the representative does in front of the customer.  And if the representative doesn’t conduct the sales call in the most effective way, all of that investment goes to waste.

We try to measure what goes on in the interaction because if we can understand what’s going on in the interaction we can then develop interventions to upskill and change the way the representative behaves in front of the customer to make all of that investment and resource that we’ve put in work as effectively as possible.  So if that interaction between the representative and the healthcare professional isn’t conducted to its maximum, it’ll be a wasted resource

There are a number of measures available.  Typically, the ones used in our industry are validations where we bring the sales representatives into a venue, and then we will sit them down with customers and analyse what they’re doing in terms of the interaction, through to things like detail follow up, training needs analysis.  And at the, sort of, top end would be specialist audits where we go out into the field and measure, very specifically, objective, behavioural-based indicators that are occurring in front of the customer, in front of their own customers.

Some of the measurements that you can conduct do have advantages and disadvantages.  When you conduct a validation, for example, and you bring your sales team off the road, typically, they’ll be conducting their sales calls that have been assessed with a customer they’ve never met before so it will always be a first call.  And they’ll also be assessed, potentially, against a sales model that’s not the one you’re using in your organisation.

As you go down that list that we gave earlier through detail follow up, training needs analysis, to specialist audits, you probably find that specialist audits give you far more robust objective data, because they are conducted in the field with the customer.  And they’re looking for very specific pieces of information and behaviours from the representative that are far more useful when you’re developing interventions going forward.