You need a specific type of skill, a great deal of information and an ability to calculate potential to find out whether a sales force is truly effective, or not. A market response matrix can be composed when you assess market potential and calculate the amount of selling time available, determined by realistic hourly allocation according to the number of people on the team. 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.
For a sales force to be truly effective, territories must be aligned properly at the very beginning. To do this, boundaries must be clearly defined, workload balances correctly determined, travel time minimised and contiguous territories carefully handled. It may sound straightforward, but unless every hour of a sales executive’s time is optimised and not allowed to waste, the company can never hope to achieve its ultimate potential. Unless the territory is correctly aligned, a sales executive could find that he or she is faced with the prospect of too many potential customers. Thus with such a high workload, the employee will likely not be able to interact effectively with all those clients, resulting in a loss. 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.
Before a sales force should be deployed, the pharmaceutical company must ensure that it has a comprehensive roadmap to success. This can be especially challenging for the business executives as they have so much on their plate to start off with. It goes without saying that the business chiefs are interested in sales force effectiveness, but they should get help from pharmaceutical consultants to help them prioritise effectively. 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. Each individual must be honestly assessed to see where he or she should fit into the entire picture, given the anticipated workload. 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.