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4 Fantastic Guidelines to Realign Your Sales Force with the Changing Pharma Landscape

The Pharma landscape is changing fast. Patient health outcomes are occupying a prominent place in reimbursement models rather than the treatment procedures. 85% of Health Care Provider (HCP) payments are tied to patient outcomes in 2016 and this will be raised to 90% by 2018, a Press Release by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) revealed. Now, instead of doctors, Integrated Delivery Networks (IDNs) are playing a key role in defining treatment protocols.

Digital interactions are gradually replacing reps’ direct sales interactions with doctors. According to research by Accenture, nearly one in four direct sales interactions targeting doctors have been replaced with digital interactions. In this context, is it not wise to realign your pharma sales teams to the changes that are coming in?

Here are four ways to realign your sales force with the changing pharmaceutical sector. Let’s have a look.

1. Address the need for a wider buying unit

Doctors are no longer decision makers to finalize specific treatment procedures or prescribe medicines. So, pharma sales reps meeting doctors alone may not boost sales. As IDNs come into the picture, your sales teams need to address the influencers, decision makers. and buyers in the broader network. Instead of listing the features of a medicine or drug, your sales teams need to add value by explaining how patient health will be improved by the prescribed medicine. This will lead to sales.

Mobile learning helps your pharma reps to do that effectively by equipping them with the necessary features, benefits, and specialties of the medicine when needed, even on the move. Pharma sales reps will be empowered when information is handy.

2. Enhance the skills of sales reps

Meeting the needs of IDN stakeholders, doctors, and patients simultaneously is a challenge for the new age pharma sales force. For this, you need to enhance their understanding of prospects’ needs and challenges holistically. They need to be empowered with technology to enhance their sales conversations with prospective stakeholders in the IDNs. You also need to provide comprehensive training to your pharma sales reps on IDN strategies, reimbursement models, and patient health outcomes.

Online learning and mobile learning can effectively deliver this pharma sales training. You can provide the IDN treatment protocols, guidelines, reimbursement models, rules and regulations in e-learning modules, so that pharma reps can enhance their understanding and skills. By this, their sales conversations will be enriched and more fruitful.

3. Concentrate on B2B sales skills

You need to emphasize more on B2B sales skills. Position your sales resources to manage dealings with channel partners, institutions, and distributors to increase sales. Equip them with agile selling, which is dealing with the entire network. Account selling will also aid reps in this changing pharma environment. In account selling, reps get in touch with specific institutions periodically and specialize in selling resources to a particular segment (Ex: Cardio, neuro, renal, etc.).

Your pharma reps are best equipped if they have specialized e-learning or m-learning modules on specific segments. This will improve their knowledge of the particular domain and enhance selling skills and sales conversations.

4. Optimize sales interactions with digital devices

You can use digital devices to optimize your pharma sales teams’ conversations with doctors and stakeholders in IDNs. Sales representatives can add value to the conversations with digital devices and which offer as performance support during the conversations.

iPads and mobile devices play a key role in fulfilling the task of enhancing sales interactions. You can place all the required information at the finger tips of your sales force during conversations with prospects and speedup the sales process. Digital devices also take your reps’ sales interactions to the next level and improve the prospect’s experience. 

In the rapidly changing pharma landscape, getting comprehensive understanding of doctors and other stakeholders is important for fruitful sales. Realigning pharma sales teams by enhancing their B2B selling skills and empowering them with digital devices make them to win the sales deals is the need of the day.

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