David Keane | PharmExec.com
For years,
pharmaceutical sales representatives have been dealing with access challenges
and shrinking availability of prescribers, stemming from a more restrictive
regulatory environment, changing economic conditions and new healthcare
business models. These factors, in turn, have pressured physicians to see more
patients, leaving less time to learn about even potentially life-saving drugs.
Whether it’s with key opinion leaders (KOLs), high prescribers, administrators or
any other decision--makers, yesterday’s sales strategies and tactics are not
only less effective, they’re also highly restricted and regulated.
Regulatory
requirements are creating hurdles for salespeople. Federal and state
regulations, and guidelines from industry associations such as the
Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), set boundaries
for how pharmaceutical sales reps can interact with customers. The “lunch ‘n
learn” meeting between reps and physicians, once a key part of the sales
playbook, has been significantly curtailed, reducing both the frequency and
average time per rep/physician interaction. In addition, the Open Payments
program, created by the Physician Payments Sunshine Act (part of the Affordable
Care Act), requires drug and medical-device manufacturers to report to the
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) every “transfer of value” of
$10 or more to physicians and teaching hospitals. Only 44% of physicians
routinely meet with sales reps and there is even less access to many
specialists. For example, according to a 2016 ZS Associates report on physician
access, just 17% of oncologists are available to sales reps.
Today, the
most successful reps are always prepared to present the right content and
employ best practices at every opportunity, making a greater impact in less
time. Most reps simply aren’t able to achieve this on their own. According to
Kapost, 65% of sales reps report that they cannot find the most impactful
content to send to, let alone find it on the spot when a physician suddenly
gives them two minutes to either present impactful content or become a “no-see”
physician to them.
Reps need
help from sales leadership, marketing, training and their peers to know and
implement best practices in each sales scenario. There is generally even less
time to meet with the busiest and most vital customers, KOLs and high
prescribers. On average, reps aren’t earning more time, as physicians have only
a 38% recall of sales rep activity, the ZS report notes. In the new age of the
“30-second detail,” reps must be armed with guided selling so that they can
give a more targeted, impactful message. When the message and content is more
timely and relevant, detail time increases. When detail time increases, sales increase.
The tech imperative
Due to the
current pharmaceutical sales environment, sales teams must find new and
different ways to engage with their customers and close more deals. In today’s
competitive business climate where growing top-line revenue is a constant
struggle yet sales reps are expected to do more with less, the implementation
of technology solutions has become increasingly critical.
More
recently, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have
emerged to aid in this effort. These technologies have the potential to make a
real difference for pharmaceutical companies when it comes to helping
their sales teams improve productivity, win rates and customer satisfaction. An
AI-based selling solution, for instance, can help pharmaceutical sales reps do
more in the restricted time that they have by serving as a virtual sales
assistant. It can provide relevant content recommendations that guide the
salesperson and the customer down the most effective path to a sale.
Here are
just a few of the ways AI can help drug manufacturers looking to achieve and
sustain a more productive sales team:
1.
Prioritizes pre-call planning. AI
technology can provide the required training and certification materials needed
to make sure that the pharmaceutical sales rep is ready for the meeting in
advance. AI can also make recommendations on what information and content is
going to have the most impact in the meeting, including sharing and
recommending best practices and specific sales collateral to reps. This, in
turn, minimizes the time consumed by the rep looking for and gathering these
materials. By implementing more effective pre-call preparation, sales reps can
maximize their effectiveness in every customer meeting.
For
instance, sales reps can ascertain in advance that a particular doctor is more
interested in making time for reps who have more treatments to discuss.
Recognizing this ahead of time empowers the rep to come armed with details on
all the drugs that would be relevant for this particular physician. AI can also
recommend the most important reprints, detail aids, abstracts, and
leave-behinds for each call with a prescriber as determined by the sales teams’
best practices, marketing, and sales leadership. By optimizing pre-call
planning, more time can be spent meeting with physicians, physician assistants
(PAs), and nurse practitioners.
2. Reduces
administrative tasks. Reducing
time spent on administrative tasks will help maximize the time reps can spend
in the field. One way to do this is by using technology that automates manual
tasks, freeing up reps to cultivate relationships. For instance, technology can
help by automatically logging calls with physicians, nurses, pharmacists and
other key customers into customer relationship management (CRM) systems like
SalesForce or Veeva. In addition, taking advantage of smart forms, which enable
digital data entry and connect to back-end systems, allows reps to complete
them while in the field from their mobile devices. This eliminates
time-consuming paper-based forms—enabling reps to place orders on-site and in
real time versus later when they’re back in the office—and increases overall
productivity. This content, in turn, can be fed into an AI-powered tool to help
inform the self-learning algorithms. The result: automatic content
recommendations provided to sales people based on factors such as where they
are in the sales cycle, their role or what their peers are using—and a
significant reduction in time spent hunting for the right content.
Now, pharmaceutical
sales reps are able to stay in the field longer and call on more customers
since the admin-heavy tasks that have traditionally forced them to spend more
time at their desks, like inputing sales calls into their CRM systems and
emailing a reprint to a physician, are now automated.
3.
Identifies and shares best practices. By measuring every user action and learning from this
process, an AI-powered solution can identify what works and what doesn’t for
engaging prospects and closing deals. From this, AI solutions can make
real-time content recommendations for a sales rep, tailored to where they are
in the sales cycle, and greatly improve their chances for a successful
outcome.
For
instance, if the top 10% of sales people use a particular presentation during
their initial meetings, the system would push that content to other sales
people as they were headed toward their own introductory session with a
prospect. By having a means to better measure and learn from the successes and
failures of other sales people across the team and identify the habits of its
best reps, organizations can improve outcomes by elevating the performance of
the entire sales teams. In other words, AI can become a sales trainer and
mentor that is always by the sales rep’s side.
With
pharmaceutical sales reps typically only meeting to share thoughts and advice
with their peers at quarterly plan of-actions (POAs) or national sales
meetings, which occur one to two times per year, AI technology enables the reps
to share and implement these best practices in real time and potentially
translate to immediate improvements.
4. Enables
real-world, step-by-step guided selling. By taking input data, AI-powered sales enablement
technology helps guide the sales person through the entire sales cycle,
suggesting the best next steps, activities, and assets based on that
information. Acting as a virtual mentor, this technology guides a sales person
and recommends the right content to be successful, while also allowing them to
benefit from the marketing’s expertise. In fact, according to SiriusDecisions,
aligning sales and marketing is proven to deliver 19% more growth.
In addition,
this technology allows sales teams to take advantage of the best reps’
experience and wisdom, while also alerting them to missing information or other
issues that could put a deal in jeopardy. Often called guided selling, this
approach offers a real-world way to help sales people be successful, especially
when they have limited time with the physician. This could include providing a
customized prescriber profile and call history to better prepare sales
reps before engaging with physicians, PAs, and nurse practitioners to sharing
the best practices of the top sales reps in the organization to maximize the
time in front of the physician.
Future ‘rep’ in balance
Leveraging
technology where a machine is taking on manual work typically done by a human
offers significant opportunity to boost efficiencies, improve sales team
preparedness, increase time reps can spend with physicians, KOLs, and other key
decision-makers, and enhance cross-team collaboration. In turn, sales teams can
better prepare for meetings, successfully present to those time-strapped
physicians, more effectively follow-up after meetings, and share best practices
with their colleagues. Ultimately, AI has the potential to help pharmaceutical
sales reps increase their productivity, close deals faster and help drive
revenue.
