Healthy Skepticism Library item: 12347

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Publication type: news

Qualitative SFE the next step for 2008
eyeforpharma.com 2008 Jan 9
http://social.eyeforpharma.com/node/1826

Full text:

eyeforpharma editor Lisa Roner recently spoke with Volker Lauterbach, marketing and sales operations manager for Bayer Schering Pharma, to ask him about SFE trends for pharma in 2008. Lauterbach will be speaking at eyeforpharma’s 6th annual Sales Force Effectiveness Europe 2008 congress in Barcelona, April 2-4.

eyeforpharma: What SFE goals has the industry achieved in 2007 and what challenges remain for 2008?

Lauterbach: The industry pretty much has reach and frequency and the whole quantitative thing covered. 2008 will be more about qualitative SFE. This already came through last year as we focused more on the quality of calls versus the quantity of calls, but what we’re struggling with is the assessment of individual customer satisfaction. Not so much in specialty care, but in primary care and so on, it’s quite difficult. We need to drive individual rep effectiveness beyond pure sales numbers. We certainly find individuals that score high on certain attributes – be it social skills or product knowledge or what have –but can we link this back to customer satisfaction and consequently to success in the marketplace? Can we define performance measures or indicators that help us get a handle on these things?

eyeforpharma: What trends and new approaches can we expect in 2008 and what might we leave behind?

Lauterbach: In our organizations and others what you hear is the need for “real key account management.” There are a lot of people now called key account managers, but it’s not really key account management, it’s key account “selling “at best ,and in many cases, it’s not even that. Another thing I think that’s going to come up is advanced key performance indicators.

We also see the number of reps decreasing and that will accelerate.

Leave behinds should include bombarding customers with messages they don’t want to hear, sales forces they don’t want to see and the kinds of deliberately confusing tactics used by some of the companies, with multiple mirrored lines and so on. It may sound outdated, but ‘’One face to the customer’’ may be a concept we have to go back to.

eyeforpharma: What other areas are likely to catch pharma’s attention this year?

Lauterbach: The whole area of social networks will get a lot of attention, I think. What does Facebook mean for us? Will people embrace it? Will doctors download podcasts from pharma? I don’t have a clue. There may be a generational gap; most doctors are not 21 after all. In some countries in Europe we’re still struggling to have an email address for every doctor. But maybe it will be a quantum leap and we’ll skip right over email to social networks.

Another thing we’re thinking about is in-call assessments. It comes a little bit back to customer satisfaction, but not entirely. It’s more in-call message tracking, in-call response by the customer and so on. It’s way beyond anything we’re doing now.

The problem is that marketing departments don’t have a clue what happens during the call. A call never quite goes as marketing scripts it, but when it comes to reporting, the rep basically just ticks boxes on what they covered. You never get the real juicy stuff.

The question is how can we do it? Tablet PCs are a first step in the right direction, but at least here in Europe, we’re not very advanced yet. But this is something that would provide us a lot more insight than we have right now.

As an industry, we’re doing quite poorly considering the number of face-to-face interactions we have with our customers. Amazon probably knows more about me and is more intimate with me than we are with our customers. We aren’t leveraging these points of interaction. Often the only ones intimate with the customer are the reps themselves, and that’s where it stops. We don’t gain further insights from the reps who regard the more detailed customer information they may have as their personal property. How to get this information, and how to use it, are some of the challenges ahead. Simply classifying customers by potential is not going to be enough anymore.