Pre-call prep time is a crucial part of any sales rep’s day, but healthcare sales have seen a renaissance of pre-call planning, and new challenges are being introduced as a result of this evolution.
Problems take shape as the pre-call planning process starts to consume more and more valuable selling time – something pharma sales reps (PSRs) can’t spare.
Today’s article explores the pre-call planning process for healthcare sales, and offers solutions for enhancing the process.
When we look back 10 or 15 years in healthcare sales, the pre-call plan was anecdotal at best, and many had never used them because the information just wasn’t reliable or useful enough to be worth the time. But today things have changed, the digital transformation means real-time and actionable data are a click away, and automation ensures this data is reliable and relevant.
A Look at the Pre-Call Plan
Pre-call planning is one of the activities a PSR participates in as part of their sales call prep time. Prep time can include:
- Territory planning;
- Analysis of personal performance versus expected KPIs;
- Analysis of the territory based on available sales data and reporting tools; and
- Pre-call planning.
During the pre-call planning phase, PSRs must conduct any or all of the following tasks,
- Reviewing notes made by the previous PSR;
- Reviewing the customer profile and their sampling history;
- Reviewing the customer’s recent activity and next call objectives;
- Reviewing the customer’s prescribing trends;
- Creating a sales call strategy; and
- Reviewing and practicing key marketing messages.
As explained by Darryn Severyn, there are five key reasons to conduct pre-call planning:
- No plan = no results.
- You need to set objectives for any sales presentation, as these objectives will guide and focus your efforts. The pre-call plan provides the PSR with an opportunity to organize and think through deliverables before a sales presentation.
- Make the most of your limited face-time.
- Time with HCPs is still declining, and you need to achieve something with each visit. A pre-call plan will ensure you deliver focused engagement.
- Add value to each and every sales call.
- You need to position yourself as a trusted resource for the HCP, and this requires you to add value with each visit, rather than rehashing old details. Pre-call planning ensures you send the right messages during every encounter.
- Prevent or mitigate surprises.
- There will always be that one question that catches you off guard, but chance favours the prepared mind, and pre-call planning gives PSRs an opportunity to plan for any eventuality.
- Accelerate the sales cycle.
- As a PSR, you’re not selling healthcare products, you’re influencing and selling value knowing that the pharma sales cycle never really ends, and instead works in a continuum that lasts as long as the PSRs time in a particular territory (Source: Ladd, 2014). Over time, the pre-call plan helps shape the cycle in your favour.
(List Source: Severyn, 2010)
So, What’s the Problem?
Although all this data is making pre-call planning more accurate, it’s also lengthening the time spent on pre-call planning, and shortening the amount of time available for direct engagement.
Several online interviews, articles from professionals, and information from recruitment agencies now cite the pre-call plan as a major component of effective healthcare sales.
It Takes Time to Find the Right Information,
Jumping back and forth across different systems to review an HCP’s profile takes time. Compiling all the information into data that affects your specific call takes time. Thinking of ways to continue the discussion takes time, and searching for relevant content in order to achieve your desired objectives takes time.
On top of all that, you’ll need to review the content that you’ve found and rehearsing your planned discussion in order to maximize the success of your sales presentation.
And we forgot to mention, during your pre-call plan you’ll also be reviewing competitive prescribing data, new regulations that might affect your territory, related medical information, and anything else you might think you may need for the call.
The Pre-Call Renaissance is stuck in the Foundations of Traditional Processes,
The problem here is that technology has just replaced (not optimized) traditional tactics. Instead of sifting through filing cabinets for information, digital sources are being searched. The process is faster, but not new.
An optimized pre-call process for PSRs is one that enables adaptive interactions with real-time insights.
Recognizing an Adaptive Pre-Call Process
Consider the activities in the pre-call process and the key reasons for conducting a pre-call plan that we mentioned above.
An adaptive pre-call process will look more like the following:
Optimizing Activities in Pre-Call Planning
Searching for Customer Information.
All of the information gathered during pre-call planning comes from different sources.
Call Objectives and Communications Strategy.
If you’re lucky, the last PSR (or you) remembered to leave detailed call notes with clear objectives. However, it’s more than likely that you’ll be creating a fresh set of objectives and searching for marketing material to help you deliver. What you need is a platform that automatically loads a set communications for the target that are geared towards established objectives and previous engagements.
How to Achieve Adaptive Pre-Call Planning
At the root of this issue, we’re looking at a fragmented set of crucial operating platforms being used to achieve valuable objectives in a manner which is not conducive to the rules of engagement found in the healthcare sales process.
Platforms in question:
Pharma CRM – may have valuable call data about previous PSR engagement.
Marketing Automation – may have important information about how the HCP engaged with the company website.
Intranet or Cloud – may have valuable marketing material that would support the sales presentation.
E-mail – the most likely source for marketing material. Sellers often reach out to other sellers for digital content.
Other Internal Sources – prescribing patterns, new research and clinical trials, new product information, call guides, etc.
Other External Sources – news about disease states, competitor products, regulations, etc.
Note that each of these might have valuable information, meaning your time and effort spent searching these sources might provide you with the information you need for your next sales presentation.
The solution is a technology platform that integrates all of this information into ONE environment, and that automatically filters all databases for what matters most.
Adaptive Pre-Call Planning with Pharma Sales Enablement
(For more information visit: pharma sales enablement)
Let’s examine how with Severyn’s five reasons for pre-call planning:
1. No plan = no results
Pharma sales enablement integrates the above databases, and automates data updates while filtering content based on the target persona.
With traditional pre-call planning you’re creating a plan with objectives for the call. However, with pharma sales enablement, there are always objectives set for the target. Any PSR can take over the call from another PSR.
2. Make the most of limited face-time
Pharma sales enablement supports this by automatically populating the right content for the target in question, and creating suggested content fields that enable the PSR to jump between topics quickly with a tablet or other mobile device, rather than searching on Windows or online.
More importantly, pharma sales enablement unlocks a digital sales process, meaning the PSRs can continuously engage HCPs and patients through a variety of digital formats and focus the in-person discussion to the topics that truly matter (more on this in our next post).
3. Add value to each sales call
Only 11% of HCPs find in-person presentations valuable, and 75% have stated that they distrust information from the pharma industry. Why? A lack of value.
Pre-call planning should ensure strong value-based discussions, but it hasn’t been making much of a dent. This is a place where pharma sales enablement truly shines, as the integrated platform pushes content information to marketing teams and actually influences the content being created by marketers.
If you’re pre-planning with bad content, you’ll still have bad discussions. HCPs want end-to-end evidence and patient-centricity. Adding value means making sure the entire value chain recognizes the needs of the end-user.
4. Mitigate Surprises
You want to avoid being caught in a moment where a surprise question leaves you scrambling for answers and promising a response by email when you get home.
Being adaptive in the moment can help you to mitigate surprises. Pharma sales enablement lets PSRs customize the search and sorting of their entire content library, everything can be easily found and each seller can customize their search to what works for them. If the answer can’t be conveyed in the time allotted for the call, PSRs can send the relevant content pieces via a secure email in the moment, and then monitor the content consumption later.
5. Accelerate the Sales Cycle
You shouldn’t wait for the next sales presentation to progress the customer journey. Pre-call planning might help you achieve objectives for each call, but pharma sales enablement helps move buyers through the journey. PSRs must always be aware of, and make investments towards the objectives of each target.
A Summary of Adaptive Pre-Call Planning
It can be difficult to recognize the difference without experiencing adaptive sales enablement.
If you take a step back, and look at these outcomes as a whole, you’ll see there is no pre-call planning, just continuous planning. As noted by Lyndsay Ladd, the healthcare sales process is continuum that never ends.
You’re objective should be to become a “trusted advisor” for HCPs, and that means always being ready to answer the call, not planning for a ‘major event’ every time you meet (Source: Morton, 2015).
A Case for Success
Here’s a great article from PM360 that compares a traditional process from the year 2000 to an adaptive process in 2015. It’s worth noting that the 2015 process makes no mention of an extensive pre-call plan. Once the PSR has an idea of their territory plan, everything else is adaptive and all relevant information is easily accessible. The PSR in the article understood the engagement from her targets and she was able to respond appropriately, while driving to a potential in-person opportunity, she adjusted to delays on the road and engaged through digital channels with relevant information that was immediately available.
Busier HCPs, tighter sales and marketing budgets, and increasingly complex products and regulations make it incredibly crucial for PSRs to be adaptive and continuous throughout all interactions.
This is exactly the kind of solution we put in place for Urgo Laboratoires, and it saved their sales team “2 hours per rep per day”, while allowing them to “optimize the ‘dead time’ in a sales rep’s day.” Download the case study below to learn more.
If you’re looking to transform your pre-call planning process into adaptive real-time planning, request a demo below and let our sales specialists show you just how easy the digital transformation can be.
