Sales

What will your sales force be doing in 2010 to improve its effectiveness? Ken Liss, National Sales Director for Bayer Healthcare Pharmaceuticals, has a pretty good idea about one approach his reps will be taking.

What will your sales force be doing in 2010 to improve its effectiveness? Ken Liss, National Sales Director for Bayer Healthcare Pharmaceuticals, has a pretty good idea about one approach his reps will be taking.

In his talk SFE 2010: and in-depth look at the near future Liss told attendees at eyeforpharmas recent SFE USA 2008 conference that Bayer is playing to the average reps technology-related interests and strengths.

Liss says the average age of sales reps throughout the industry is 26 and although Bayers average is slightly higher 30 it is an age group that is always online and constantly seeking a challenge. This generation of reps is hard working, but wants instant recognition for successes, he adds.

Learning amidst the noise
According to the Pace Productivity Report, todays reps only spend about 23% of their time selling, allocating the rest to information gathering and data analysis. So, we have to be careful about how were managing and motivating todays sales force, Liss says.

Thats complicated by what he calls a productivity conundrum. With more than one rep per physician, he says, the industry has seen a 25% drop in call productivity over the past 5 years, down a whopping 23% in 2004 alone.

The good news is that our sales staff is very open to training, particularly their initial training, Liss says. But unfortunately, 72% say thats where their training ended.

During its merger with Schering, he says Bayer learned first-hand that organizational noise is a real deterrent to improving sales effectiveness. Amid the normal calls from management to increase sales, share of voice and message recall, we found ourselves trying to cope with a lot of disruption and complexity, Liss explains.

But Liss and his colleagues at Bayer knew they needed to build proficiency, increase engagement and expand the learning experience to improve sales force effectiveness.
Liss team decided that reps openness to technology to help them be more successful and productive was an opportunity not to be missed. With help from Centrix Pharma, Bayer implemented an interactive computer technology called RepRace.

Winning the "rep race"
RepRace is an online, data-driven rep training program that helps engage, motivate and measure rep preparedness and effectiveness. The game poses James Bond-like challenges to reps who answer questions about the best way to approach a sales opportunity.

With realistic, skill driven scenarios, score tallies and high performer calculations the RepRace experience feels more like a competitive video game than the training platform it truly is, says Centrix. In fact, RepRace is so innovative it was recognized by the industry as the best use of interactive media in 2007.

For Bayer, Centrix even created a Ken Liss avatar that was the proverbial top performer and the one for reps to beat in the game. But Centrex says its a lot more than just fun and games. With a different experience each time reps log on, real-life scenarios and unique learning opportunities with every wrong answer, RepRace is a next generation training tool, they say.

The database-centered technology also delivers individual and collective custom tailored reports to management in areas such as rep usage, selling strength, macro-level proficiency and improvement in performance.

To successfully build a training platform like RepRace, Centrix says there must be a clear platform goal, metrics to be measured and a comprehensive vision of the experience desired , and it must incorporate the organizations needs.

Tallying the score
Bayer says after its use of RepRace, effectiveness is up 10% based on market research and it has realized a four to one return on its investment in the first year.

These reps grew up on video games, so for them to gravitate toward this was a no-brainer, says Liss. And they fully understood wed be capturing metrics and know when they were playing.

Initially, reps played as many as 30 times between POAs and even now theyre still playing as many as eight times. And the influence is being clearly felt.
Message recall, Liss says, has dramatically improved. Were seeing the best performance since competitors entered the BETASERON market in 1996 and our product is now ranked number one in efficacy perception, he reports.

Liss credits RepRace with increasing his teams effectiveness. Bayer has seen a 6% increase in quarterly income and Liss top three reps are also the top three high performers on RepRace. They have also seen as much as a 20% improvement in productivity. One rep, for example, has moved up from 58th to 39th in Bayers national ranking in less than a year.

Not surprisingly, Liss says the RepRace experiment will continue at Bayer.

Author: Lisa Roner, editor, eyeforpharma