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Thought leadership and innovation for the Pharmaceutical Industry

The next evolution of the sales rep is into a business person

By Steven Rosen on Oct 27, 2011

The Oxford English Dictionary defines acumen as "the ability to make good judgments and quick decisions.”

Our definition of business acumen is ability to make critical business decisions (targeting and strategic resource allocation) to achieve sales objectives.

There are many challenges involved in developing strong business acumen in your sales force.

Building strong business acumen requires a multi-dimensional approach that involves training people and creating processes that can facilitate your people.

The key is to start by aligning your processes to support the critical thinking required to help your sales force achieve its sales objectives.

Your sales reps are giving annual sales quotas by product and their incentive plans all have a strong weighting towards dollar achievement.

Your organization purchases third party data to effectively track dollar sales by product and by FSA/territory and let them know how they are doing versus objective.

Sales reps are given a range of the number of physicians they should target (reach) and a range of times each physician should be seen (frequency) in a year.

The sales reps must decide which physicians, specialists, pharmacies and hospitals in their territory will be called upon.

To help your reps make better strategic decisions, arm them with customer actionable information (dollar sales, growth and sales potential by physician). 

Reps are also asked to allocate their resources to their territory in the best way to meet their objectives.

There is great third party data that is acquired to help the sales reps decide which doctors are the best to target.

This data is delivered in scripts yet the sales reps quotas are in dollars.

Your sales reps need to be able to answer the following questions when developing their business plan: “Where is my new business is going to come from?” “Which physicians represent the best opportunity to achieve my objectives?” “How should I effectively allocate my resources to achieve my objective?”

Design of business planning templates requires customization at each level.

The need to be ability to easily make changes and update those changes across districts and regions.

Business planning is usually a top-down and bottom-up process.

Your business planning templates need to be able to support and integrate across marketing-sales management and sales representative.

Templates need to capture analysis and be able to capture key strategic decisions at each level of the planning process.

Professional pharmaceutical sales representatives have gone through immense change or the last number of years.

They have been asked to evolve from a traditional detailer to an actual sales person.

They have been asked to move the sales along and not just provide product features and benefits.

The next evolution of the sales rep is to a business person.

As decision making is moving closer to the customer, sales reps need to make strategic decisions with limited resources.

To many, this is not what they signed up for.

The key to making business planning work is creating greater accountability for the sales force.

Senior sales leaders need to set up a quarterly review process to ensure that sales managers are effectively executing their area/district plans.

In turn, sales managers need to be taking their sales people through the same process.

The purpose of this is to ensure that sales people/managers have done what they said they were going to do, that there have been learnings on what worked and what didn’t work.

Every company may have their definition of business acumen.

It is incumbent on the sales leader to generate buy in from the management team and the sales force on his vision of business acumen and the new pharmaceutical sales force.

Business acumen is not an event; it is a strategic direction a company decides to go.

Although a company may adapt many of its processes and train its sales people, it is in the hands of leadership to direct and guide not only the sales organization but support departments as well.  

The need for greater alignment in the new era of customer focused business models requires it.

With fewer resources, sales leaders need to become more strategic in how they grow their business.

Many have chosen to move in a more business- and customer-focused direction.

The challenge is how to do it. The reality is that it requires a multi-faceted approach.

Sales leaders need to align the entire organization, adapt business planning processes, information systems and train sales people and their mangers.

Steven Rosen is executive sales coach with Star Results.

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