The deployment of the sales force can be broken down into several categories and performance in each category should be used to determine the effectiveness of the force. Executive training is of primary importance to ensure that the individual is fully up to speed with details on the product, has great personal inter-communication skills and the company should always ensure that it has set up an effective territorial allocation as well. It is not possible for a sales force to be truly effective if territories have been badly designated or aligned and travel times exacerbated accordingly. While it is true to say that the interaction between the sales executive and the client or potential client is more an art than a science, the creation of the battlefield owes more to planning and technology than to anything else.
A pharmaceutical company must be fully in possession of all the information, the issues and constraints that could stand in its way when it comes to optimising its sales force. It should have clearly set objectives and goals and these should be established based on prior history, realism and the input of adequate intelligence. The company should not be afraid to seek the services of a pharmaceutical consulting firm to provide first-hand knowledge, targeted experience and to employ the latest information and data to best effect. The goals and objectives should be fully audited to make sure that the target is realistic before any other work is completed. In addition to a realistic assessment of goals, how realistic is each individual’s potential within the sales force? Most sales executives in this situation will come with a track record and a prior history should be a good indication of how each individual person may perform. Once the very best individuals have been selected, territorial allocation should follow.
Sales force deployment requires those in control to look back into the past. Input from the executives should be a core ingredient of this assessment and a comprehensive time management snapshot should be required of each member. Optimal alignment can be a rather subtle exercise and it’s important to remember that relatively small changes can sometimes result in big gains in efficiency and potential profits.
The sales force should always be optimised as it can present a significant cost to the pharmaceutical company. To enable this to happen, pharma consulting can help to reveal benchmarks and to use prior knowledge and experience to fine tune everything accordingly.
Effective sales force allocation is crucial to maximising sales potential and increasing revenue. Traditional approaches may be found to be too costly and may have produced inferior results in other instances. In the modern pharmaceutical and healthcare industry, competitive pressures are too great to allow for the under-utilisation of resources in this way.
At the end of the day, a sales force executive must be able to optimise the amount of face-to-face selling time he or she spends with existing clients and prospects. Within optimised territorial planning, individual time management skills will be stressed by pharmaceutical consultants and training in this area should be an ongoing process. The ultimate goal of the sales executive is to maximise individual time with the client and to minimise administrative burdens, travel time and other unproductive interferences.
Alan Gillies is the CEO of L2L Consulting, a cutting-edge pharma consultancy firm which specialises in optimising productivity and performance within international companies by applying tailored organisational strategies.