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Can mobile technology promote effective patient-centric selling excellence?

By Siobhan Ogilvy on Mar 9, 2016

Motivating and incentivizing sales representatives in pharmaceuticals can be challenging, especially when frequent mergers and restructuring can make individuals feel uncertain about their future.  One technique is to organize sales meetings in appealing locations with fun team-building activities on the agenda. And, when the meeting is over the team feels motivated, equipped with new objectives, knowledge and skills to utilize on future calls. However, it may become apparent – via the front-line manager’s feedback from in-the-field, or from discussion during a mid-cycle meeting – that post-meeting motivation can flag, and reps may not recall nor apply most of the new information or skills during clinician calls. 

Having put huge effort into sales meetings and materials, this can be very frustrating for the marketing and medical affairs teams. There is an ethical dilemma with this, too – if reps don’t know the core information, doctors are not going to find out about it from them. This is bad news for the patient and for the company, who end up wasting time and resources. Companies need to be able to identify these gaps quickly, but how? How can companies ensure reps have the knowledge and skills they need?  How can motivation and team engagement be sustained after the meeting? And how can follow-up coaching by sales managers be made more effective?

Using mobile technologies to identify the gaps

New mobile technologies which engage representatives in team competitions while reinforcing core knowledge are becoming more widespread, as they provide a potential way for sales managers and others to deal with these challenges. This growth in utilization is also partly due to the management insights such platforms deliver. An interesting case study on this emerged from a top pharma company in the U.S. As they launched a new oncology drug, 2,000 sales reps assembled for an intensive three-day launch meeting. As they started detailing oncologists and other clinicians, a series of brief scenario-based challenges were pushed to the mobile devices of participating reps to ensure that the key points from the meeting were retained. These were followed by brief explanations designed to refresh and reinforce key learnings from the sales meeting.

After a few weeks it became apparent that a surprising 85% of the sales team were struggling with a particular piece of clinical knowledge – it involved white blood cell count in patients after taking the drug. The company were alarmed and went off to check why this was happening.  They discovered that a paragraph in the launch materials – while factually correct – was written in a misleading way.  The company then arranged a number of urgent webinars and follow-up from sales managers to re-educate the reps on the white blood cell count information. A situation like this could very quickly lead to unwanted consequences for patients, so it is essential to find ways to get these insights into sales team capabilities.  In this way, the follow-up coaching can be targeted in the right way before too much time elapses.  

Can technology help the move to patient centricity selling?

The pharma industry’s move towards patient centricity presents a number of challenges and opportunities.  More often, pharmaceutical sales teams, while having the patient ‘in mind’, are ultimately driven by key performance indicators (KPIs) which are script, sales and market share focused.  But when people are motivated solely by sales and financial rewards in pharmaceuticals, it does not create a culture or sense of purpose where patients’ needs are prioritized.  A recent eyeforpharma whitepaper, "A Patient-Centered Culture by Design" found that a cultural focus on share prices and sales targets can prime sales teams to be more self-serving and less collaborative (ref. Patient-Centered Culture by Design, page 17).

A more patient-centric – but measurable –  way to incentivize customer-facing teams is not through a focus on their numbers and scripts, but through what they know and how they communicate that information to doctors. Do they have the clinical depth of knowledge? Can they employ consultative selling skills while working in partnership with clinicians? By empowering clinicians with the right quality of information, patients will feel the benefits. Knowledge is an unqualified good in this situation. 

The problem is that no matter how intelligent and committed your reps are, or how good your sales meetings and training sessions, gaps in knowledge will remain. This is not a reflection on the quality of medical representatives, but the natural ‘forgetting curve’ of the human brain, where 79% of new information is forgotten in a matter of days, weeks or months. And it can be hard for front-line sales managers and senior management to have the clear insights into what sales teams do know and don’t know and where the gaps are. This means that the chances of complete, or worse, correct information being communicated to doctors becomes more and more uncertain.

A 5% performance improvement from the middle 60% of the sales team yielded over 70% more revenue on average than a similar 5% shift in the top 20% performers.

Mobile reinforcement technologies focused on improving sales capabilities can make a major contribution to optimizing the value of the reps’ interaction with clinicians. They can ensure that the core messages are retained in the long-term, and stay front-of-mind. If you want to ensure the right clinical information is being retained, and to measure the success of this, then these solutions are worth investigating.  Another factor to consider is that some technologies utilize game mechanics that appeal to the natural competitiveness and need for peer recognition of sales reps, so can also contribute to driving a more sustained team engagement and motivation. 

When considering effective KPIs, remember that financial bonuses related to achieving sales and market share targets can only go so far. This approach benefits and motivates only top sales performers while the middle performers – who need the most help – receive the least motivation and engagement in terms of rewards.  It’s tempting to allocate more resources to your most successful representatives, but data shows that focusing only on top performers yields limited returns.

By encouraging greater empathy with a patient’s condition, pharma companies can instill a strong sense of purpose and help to keep reps focused on achieving good compliance.

In contrast, the upside of creating performance gains in the middle of the organization is compelling. A recent CEB study found that a 5% performance improvement from the middle 60% of the sales team yielded over 70% more revenue on average than a similar 5% shift in the top 20% performers. While revenue should not be the sole focus for patient-centric medical sales teams, it still illustrates the importance of employing effective methods to engage, motivate and appeal to the entire team as a way to grow market share.

Using technology in a patient-centric way

By encouraging greater empathy with a patient’s condition, pharma companies can instill a strong sense of purpose and help to keep reps focused on achieving good compliance. Focusing on the realities patients face every day helps them gain a deep understanding of what a particular medical condition means in reality. Poor compliance could cost lives, and if the reps do their job well, they can help patients to engage with the right drug early on and adhere to the right dosage regimen. A series of randomized control trials (RCTs) from Harvard Medical School show that information reinforced via mobile technologies is more likely to be applied on the job, so using technology to reinforce understanding of the patient’s point of view would be a good way to ensure that their needs stay at the forefront of everything the rep does in the field. 

At the same time, some organizations are already taking an approach where medical sales reps no longer have individual sales targets. Instead, they are assessed and rewarded based on technical skills, scientific knowledge, quality of service they deliver to HCPs and their business planning and execution.  To move in this direction, however, follow-up coaching is required on a regular basis.  In some innovative pharma companies, sales managers are in the field for half of their time, observing and coaching medical representatives.  Technology can help here, too. Look for data-driven solutions that can deliver the following:

• Help you clearly and quickly identify key skills or knowledge gaps that may prevent your ‘middle’ reps from selling consultatively;
• Help you reinforce key information on patient experience, clinical data, disease state and compliance to ensure reps are patient-focused, while driving appropriate behavioral changes in the field;
• Support more effective coaching among your sales leadership, and;
•  Employ motivation tactics to drive ongoing team engagement.

It is a difficult but rewarding challenge to increase the patient focus of customer-facing teams in pharmaceuticals.  Investigating new approaches that ensure that the correct clinical knowledge and selling skills are retained and applied by your teams, coupled with tools that will maximize the effectiveness of follow-up coaching in the field, will go a long way to adding real patient-focused value on clinician calls.  These calls can then employ a form of consultative selling where everyone benefits – the patient, the healthcare provider, the individual rep and the company.

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About the author:

Siobhan Ogilvy is Marketing Director EMEA at Qstream, a mobile sales capabilities platform to ensure sales teams are ready to have value-added conversations with healthcare professionals.