Count yourself lucky if you are a marketer or sales professional that is tasked with marketing and selling in the pharmaceutical marketplace. These professionals face extremely tough and unique challenges that many markets do not face. Some of these challenges include:
- Highly regulated selling environment where they have to spell out the side effects of their products
- Competing with patients and other reps so they can carve out 10 minutes of face time to capture interest and build relationships
- Reaching patients, physicians, pharmacists and other healthcare providers to influence
- Generic drugs that set new pricing model once you have invested money to build a brand
There does not seem to be enough hours in the day to accomplish these goals. Working harder and smarter is a reality that these reps face everyday to survive. What’s more is that the intensity of all of these factors are increasing. There is a tremendous amount of innovation that is happening in this marketplace in order to meet these challenges and win. It is imperative that pharmaceutical companies do these things to stay ahead of the curve and recoup the massive research and development, marketing and sales costs. Here are some key examples:
- Leveraging Mobile Technology – Pharma companies are leveraging mobile technology to present interactive presentations on tablets and smartphones. These presentations are designed to be highly interactive and make products jump off the screen. The information that is captured on each slide is gathered and can shape the presentations’ path moving forward. All of this data is pushed back to the CRM to help create profiles for future customer segmentation.
- Leverage Customer Information – Pharma reps make multiple calls over time in order to build trusting relationships and increase brand loyalty. It is of paramount importance that the information and approach evolves over time. Every piece of information is captured real-time and fed back into the customer profile. Closed loop marketing exists to take all of this information and aid the rep by suggesting paths of communication.
- Exploit Multi-Channel – Customer may not be available for a face-to-face meeting. Pharma sales reps are using multi-channel communication strategies to reach their customers more effectively. They are using their tablets to share information with their customers through secure email, remote co-browsing, personalized web portals, social media and other channels. This enables them to reach customers more efficiently and cost-effectively than before. It has also shown that this increases the effectiveness of the message since it is being received at the right time across the right channel. Best yet is that all of these interactions are recorded in the same place which gives a holistic view of your customer interactions regardless of the medium.
- Time to Market – Adaptive Sales Enablement allows you to upload your marketing content within seconds. You can push out presentations, brochures, videos, promotions to your sales team regardless of where they are working immediately. You can expire information so that it is not accessible. End of a promotion? No problem- expire it on the date that it ends in advance. Your sales team is not wasting time looking for the right information, checking that it is completely up to date. This is especially important in highly regulated markets.
These are some of the ways that pharmaceutical sales organizations are innovating the way they approach customers. The end result is that the strategies are making these companies more successful and increasing customer engagement. This may sound complex, but it is not. Technologies exist today. Whether you are a small start-up with 5 reps or a global leader with 20,000 reps, the approach is the same. Mobile Sales Enablement is easy to implement and is entirely scalable.
Take advantage of this amazing technology and make your sales team successful.
Google+ Jeff Scullion
