Affiliate Silver Bullet Review

The deployment of the sales force can be broken down into several categories and performance in each category should be used to determine the effectiveness of the force. Executive training is of primary importance to ensure that the individual is fully up to speed with details on the product, has great personal inter-communication skills and the company should always ensure that it has set up an effective territorial allocation as well. It is not possible for a sales force to be truly effective if territories have been badly designated or aligned and travel times exacerbated accordingly. A sales executive must call on all his or her artistic skills to ensure that the interaction between the executive and the client is as effective as possible, but the “battlefield” needs to be established through technology and planning, first of all.

A pharmaceutical company must be fully in possession of all the information, the issues and constraints that could stand in its way when it comes to optimising its sales force. It should have clearly set objectives and goals and these should be established based on prior history, realism and the input of adequate intelligence. To gain as much targeted experience, first-hand knowledge and support as possible, the company should engage the services of the pharmaceutical consulting firm for best effect. Is the overall target realistic and have objectives and goals been fully audited before work is engaged? While on the subject of being realistic, the potential of each individual within the sales force must be understood. Most sales executives in this situation will come with a track record and a prior history should be a good indication of how each individual person may perform. Once the very best individuals have been selected, territorial allocation should follow.

Sales force deployment requires those in control to look back into the past. Executives should be counselled as this assessment is being compiled and each should be required to contribute time management snapshots. It is rather difficult to come up with an optimal alignment and subtle changes are often necessary, but remember that even the smallest change can result in a big potential gain, whether in profits or otherwise.

The sales force should always be optimised as it can present a significant cost to the pharmaceutical company. In most cases, pharma consulting suggests how these levels should be set and these considerations are based on experience, prior knowledge and benchmarks, which may then be fine-tuned.

Effective sales force allocation is crucial to maximising sales potential and increasing revenue. Traditional ways of approaching this might simply be too costly and also may not produce the intended results reliably. The pressures evident in the modern pharmaceutical and healthcare industry are just too substantial to allow an organisation to overlook the underutilisation of its resources.

At the end of the day, a sales force executive must be able to optimise the amount of face-to-face selling time he or she spends with existing clients and prospects. Individual time management skills are very important within an optimised territorial area and pharmaceutical consultants stress that training in this area must be an intensive ongoing process. The ultimate goal of the sales executive is to maximise individual time with the client and to minimise administrative burdens, travel time and other unproductive interferences.

Alan Gillies is the Director of L2L Consulting, an elite pharmaceutical consultancy firm which specialises in Strategy Development and Implementation Excellence for prestigious multi-national organisations.

Pharmaceutical companies understand how tough life can be. Just think how many different bosses they have to answer to, some of whom have very little to do with a bottom-line result. It is not enough trying to focus on the generation and development of good relationships with top clients, but they also have to work out how to assess key account management while dealing with the difficult demands of regulators, auditors and others.

The pharmaceutical company must understand that key account management tactics are very important, while also requiring a dynamic approach, flexible positions and creativity. The key account sometimes has several different points of communication within the pharmaceutical company and this can lead to a certain amount of confusion if not handled correctly. However, it is also true to say that these individual “points” could view the key account from different perspectives, depending upon the job level and/or driving force.

Invariably, pharma consulting tells us that the front-line sales executive may or may not be motivated by revenue levels and there is danger that he or she may not have the ultimate interests of the employer, the company, at heart. It may not be very obvious and certainly not “cut and dried” but if it is not recognised, the overall relationship between the two companies can be significantly affected.

Key accounts provide a level of cash flow-based stability to a pharmaceutical company that is difficult to replicate. The designation of “key” account should not, however, be given lightly, regardless of the potential. It should never be decided based on scale alone, and many other factors must be taken into consideration. In certain circumstances, a high-volume account could net low returns at the bottom line, due to higher than average maintenance costs or very narrow margins.

A well-known metric is applied in most business situations, telling us that 80% of the value is often supplied by only 20% of the clients. Insofar as this is true, a potential “key” account should be categorised and understood before an approach is determined. It is perfectly feasible to have several different layers of key account management, and middle management and those who interact with clients on a regular basis must be properly trained in a variety of ways to handle each level.

There are several ways to look at whether a client qualifies as a key account or not including total volume of sales, percentage allocation of profits, the rate at which the company is growing compared to average and by comparison to others across the board.

The pharmaceutical consulting firm will be the first to tell the company that no two clients are alike and furthermore that no two key accounts can be treated the same, either. In most cases, pharmaceutical consultants have seen how to handle these different levels of accounts successfully and can help to tutor the company’s various staffing elements accordingly. A critical “mission” statement should be determined for each and every one of the pharmaceutical company’s clients, detailing the terms of the relationship accurately. There should be no “stock” description, but as each key account is of elevated importance to the company’s existence, all staff members must be trained to recognise the difference between “apples and oranges.”

Alan Gillies is the CEO of L2L Consulting, a cutting-edge pharma consultancy firm which specialises in optimising productivity and performance within international companies by applying tailored organisational strategies.