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How do you have a meaningful one-on-one conversation with customers engaging on a digital sales aid?

The pipeline is a widely accepted metaphor for the sales process, as it conjures a simple visualization of a salesperson’s work. Pipelines transport goods from one location to another through underground pipe infrastructures. Similarly, effective salespeople transport prospects from the position of “potential customer” to the position of “paying customer” by leading them through a carefully constructed sales process.

Web content is produced, edited and rewritten on an ongoing basis. While this allows for information to be fluidly updated with the newest facts, it also allows false information to exist, published online. When physicians who are potential clients surf the web to learn about pharmaceutical products, floating misinformation can deny pharma reps a sale.

In the information age, attention is our most scarce and precious resource.  We give our finite attention to the information that is available when we need it, where we need it. Wait for the morning paper to land on your doorstep? Forget it, you’ll already be in transit to work thinking about to the e-mails piled up in your inbox. You’ll catch up on the news on a mobile app before the newspaper hits your driveway. You’ve canceled that print newspaper subscription and traded it for a New York Times iPhone app. If a resource isn’t available to us at the time when we’ve scheduled to give it attention, it’s not for us. 

Physicians are no different: they are willing to interact with pharmaceutical reps when they have the attention to give. Before, sales reps waited for hours in a reception room for the tiny window of time when a physician had a moment to focus on their presentation. They’d be allotted a brief moment to quickly make their case, and then they were shooed out of the way. 

Today more than ever, marketers work to accumulate as much knowledge as possible on the habits and preferences of customers in order to improve conversion rates and help speed up the sales cycle. Tracking customer engagement, identifying top-performing campaigns and measuring marketing initiatives has given marketing the ability to deliver personalized offers and targeted messages based on consumer behavior. And while this has become a standard practice for marketing, the need to gather insights and analytics into the content that gets consumed after the sales call has become the next frontier in sales.