What will the sales rep of the future look like?

As the needs of pharma customers change, the skills and qualifications of sales rep will change, too. Lisa Roner takes a look ahead.

Do the fundamentals of selling stay the same, regardless of the internal and external pressures on an industry like pharma? What will the industry’s sales reps look like by 2015?

Polling among eyeforpharma conference delegates, and feedback from panelists at Sales Excellence Australia, suggests that the role of reps will be quite different in pharma organizations in the future. Delegates predicted that pharma will sport fewer reps much more focused on the customer and relationship management. And the audience believed these higher skilled, more specialized reps will be better compensated for their expertise.

Becoming customer-centric

Panelist Ben Manuele, sales director at Actelion, said pharma must work harder at understanding customer needs and how its products fit those needs. Doctors are changing and so too must the industry, he said: “Generally, pharma’s most valuable doctors are in the 35 to 50 age group, but the industry was built on the baby boomers. Today’s iPhone doctors don’t have the same opinions as their parents. They can see through all our tricks and rubbish. They need some genuine interaction and a bit more respect from us for what they do.”

Talk of customer-centricity, however, may be more hype than substance, said Ken MacRitchie, general manager, Australia and New Zealand for Norgine Pharmaceuticals: “If we truly believe customer-centricity is important, then a patent expiry should make no difference to our customers, or therefore, to our organizations. But the bottom line is, that’s being a little idealistic and unrealistic. There will be incremental change – evolutionary change. But as long as the money follows the patent, the basic model will remain the same.”

Klaus Abel, managing director, Australia and New Zealand at Lundbeck, however, predicted differing approaches to delivering customer value. “Things will get more fragmented as we head toward the future because we’re seeing more and more kinds of doctors with different specialties,” he said. “We’re going to have to spend a lot more time understanding our customers in that sense. Today, we take a uniform approach, where a GP is a GP and there are 22,000 of them and we just hound them. But we’re going to have to start building relationships over time. And it’s not something we can do by sitting down and making our annual business plan in September and executing on it the next year. It’s more complex than that, and we’re going to have to organize ourselves in a slightly different way.”

Key Account Management

One approach being broadly considered and implemented by the industry is Key Account Management (KAM). When asked how the KAM model might be applied in primary care, MacRitchie said the strategy could be effective during launch and in defense against generics.

Manuele said one of the advantages of implementing KAM is that it pushes pharmas to develop an understanding of all the forces around a GP: “That’s perhaps something we haven’t done so well in the past – understanding how all those ancillary people impact on a particular customer’s approach and working with all of them to actually add value for that GP.”

KAM, MacRitchie said, can also be helpful in dealing with what he calls “corporate GPs. These groups start to have their own internal formularies for their own internal reasons. And although the whole area is fraught with danger when it comes to code of conduct and business ethics, KAM may end up being helpful for working with these kinds of physician networks.”

The role of technology

Technology also promises to change the way reps interact with physicians in the future, the group concluded. “Technology stands to make a lot of what we’ve done in the past redundant,” said Manuele. “If I’m an ‘iPhone doctor,’ as we’ve termed it, I don’t need a rep to come in and tell me about product features, when I can look up the PI in about 10 seconds and actually get the facts without any kind of skewed information about the product. We have to figure out how to interact with people who get their information in different formats.”

Reps will need more diverse skills and more in-depth expertise, Abel said: “Going forward, we’re probably looking at people that are far more qualified, maybe even with a medical background.”

Manuele agreed, saying that the days of rep robots implementing a few marketing messages are nearly gone: “Tomorrow’s reps will definitely need to be multi-faceted in their ability to impart medical information and understand the disease they’re talking about. They’ll have to understand the diagnostic process and have very upper level business and selling skills. Pharma’s future reps will need more right-brain dominance. We’ll be looking for very creative people who are problem solvers. It’s almost like an inverse. We’ll need the smartest ones out in the field and the rest of us will be supporting them from the inside. We’ll want our best people out talking to customers.”

Retention will become a key issue, Able said: “How can we expect to retain people who are just giving the same three marketing lines over 10 years and bringing lunches and teas? But if we can change the way they interact with the physician, we’ll also be raising the bar on who we get and they will start to feel more appreciated as employees. It’s a circular effect.  If we can get our retention rates up, our customer relations will go up and we’ll start to deliver value, too.”

More autonomy needed

First line managers will play a key role in better retention, Able said: “They are the ones that can mediate the high turnover in the sales force in the short run. And they’ll ensure the actual progression of the field force from being the standard GP rep of today to a more specialized and more competent player in the future.”

Hiring more skilled and competent people will mean giving them more autonomy as well, said Manuele: “They’ll work best in that environment. And that will mean changing the internal structure to support this change out in the field – and that’s a major impediment we’re all grappling with.”

According to conference delegate Richard Ward, sales strategies change each time the brand or marketing strategy does because the pharma industry tends to be marketing driven. “That means we don’t end up with a core sales methodology or culture, and I think that’s where this industry has probably dropped the ball a bit in terms of sales and the way we treat our customers,” he said.  “We need a consistent sales methodology and culture so that we can actually drive that approach to the customer, and then the brand strategy can change around that.”

MacRitchie observed that although the role of reps will evolve a great deal by 2015, customers are likely to change even faster. “And reps will play a pivotal part in meeting customer needs as those change,” concluded Manuele.

These issues are more will be discussed at the Marketing Excellence & Analytics Conference on 27-28^th April in Sydney. For the full agenda and special offers for attending, visit www.eyeforpharma.com/au-marketing.

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