Sales

Mohammad Hijazi, customer and disease understanding manager at Merck, Sharpe & Dohme in the United Arab Emirates, talks to Lisa Roner about implementing SFE strategies in the Middle Eastern and North African markets.

Mohammad Hijazi, customer and disease understanding manager at Merck, Sharpe & Dohme in the United Arab Emirates, talks to Lisa Roner about implementing SFE strategies in the Middle Eastern and North African markets.

Pharmaceutical companies in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) experience many of the challenges as those in Western marketsincluding everything from increasingly tough regulations on licensing, clinical clients, and government approval to increasing numbers of in-class competitors and marketing techniques. Yet their local sales forces often lack specific programs or policies to meet those challenges, says Mohammad Hijazi, customer and disease understanding manager at Merck, Sharpe & Dohme in the United Arab Emirates. Although companies say they are using key account management (KAM), for instance, theyre more often focusing on the customers that write the most prescriptions.

Also, pharmas have been slow to transfer SFE strategies like Quality Issue Deployment, says Hijazi. Indeed, the notion of embedding the words of the customer into the design, the services, the voice of an organization is still foreign to most in the region. Its essential that this change in order to create a customer-centric sales force, which is as key to SFE in the MENA region as it is in the US and Europe. Hijazi will be speaking at the Sales Force Effectiveness MENA 2010 conference in Cairo, from March 12. To hear a preview of his thoughts, click here.