Three Technology Must-Haves to Improve Sales

Technology & Applications
Three Technology Must-Haves to
Improve Sales Effectiveness and
Boost Win Rates
Executive Summary
To drive sales excellence, sales professionals need to monitor their objectives, access integrated, relevant
information and translate that information into clear actions for building positive behaviors. This
white paper will explore how companies should leverage technology to serve up intuitive, relevant and
actionable insights when, where and how your sales force need them.
Digital Era or Dark Ages?
Every member of your sales force has a smartphone that they’re likely using for a host of day-today activities: posting status updates about a great movie or restaurant on Facebook, sharing photos
through Instagram and streaming music through apps that learn their preferences. When they want to
order takeout, send flowers or even have groceries delivered to their homes, they can do so simply by
swiping and tapping.
Why do they do so much via their smartphones? Because it’s easy. Technology has created an ecosystem
that millions of consumers use to share and access information, track activity and make decisions.
Now, compare those digital consumer experiences to what your sales professionals encounter when
using your company’s sales tools and technologies.
• How does your sales force access its call plans?
• Are plans and reports still delivered via PDFs or Microsoft Excel?
• How well do your reports integrate with the CRM solution or other tools your sales force is using
every day in the field?
• Are reports delivered quickly and in a simple format that provide members of your sales force with
easy access to timely insights about their territory?
• How long does it take members of your sales force to determine his or her progress in meeting
objectives?
• Better still, how easy or difficult is it for your sales force to obtain specific, actionable guidance on
where and how to focus efforts to increase personal performance against objectives?
These questions are pressing. After all, a life sciences company can have the best strategy in the world,
but until it streamlines and modernizes the way it translates that strategy into actionable insights for
the sales force, opportunities will continue to be missed.
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Three Technology Must-Haves to Improve Sales Effectiveness and Boost Win Rates
Good News: No Shortage of Sales Data
Even as companies embrace new digital marketing channels to reach more stakeholders (including
providers, payers, health systems, government and patients), the sales force remains the largest, most
expensive and most effective promotional channel. Every day, your sales force is capturing information
and fueling exponential growth in sales activity data. In fact, when it comes to the sales cycle, there are
very few unknowns. Every action a member of your sales force takes is captured and analyzed, so life
sciences companies can track:
• Call activities completed
• Value of promotional materials left behind
• Samples and/or vouchers left behind
• Time spent in a particular territory
• Sales performance achieved based on effort spent
But the wealth of information doesn’t end with these traditional data points. Through the multitude of
operational service providers that support your sales force, a company can also monitor:
• Miles driven (Fleet Services)
• Value of activities with physicians (Expense Reporting)
• Cost of keeping a member of your sales force in the field (Finance/HR Reporting)
• Time presenting electronic detail (eDetailing Applications)
• Time analyzing information (Business Intelligence and Portals)
Bad News: Your Sales Force Doesn’t
Have Time to Connect the Dots
Life sciences companies typically generate reports and alerts to help
monitor and optimize the utilization of their resources. As a result,
sales professionals are bombarded with emails, text alerts, portal
alerts and even paper reports. To ensure that that your sales force
takes advantage of the services, some companies have implemented
objectives as part of their incentive plan—increasing the amount of
data the sales force must access, analyze and act on.
The irony, of course, is that while these services and the information
they generate are intended to drive better sales performance, they
?
CUSTOMERS
GOALS
SALES
often lead to additional cost and reduced productivity due to the
“information noise” they produce and the lost selling time that
results. We are in an era where mountains of data are available
from myriad data sources and providers. Yet, in many life sciences
companies, on-demand decision-making support is still not widely available to the sales force.
Consider your company’s warehouse of tools, reports, databases and applications to support sales
force effectiveness. Are you bringing these technologies together and serving them up in an intuitive,
relevant and actionable manner? Or, do you expect members of your sales force to do the heavy lifting of
integrating files, analyzing data and translating it into actionable steps?
Three Technology Must-Haves to Improve Sales Effectiveness and Boost Win Rates
3
Truly Business-Driven Analytics
“Business-driven analytics” is an often misused and misunderstood concept. Many organizations
believe that a dashboard with a few key performance indicators and alerts or a list of customers
decreasing or increasing in sales volume constitutes “business-driven analytics.” However, true
business-driven analytics start with a sales objective, then quantify impact on performance and finally
provide recommendations to drive positive change (see Figure 1).
Figure 1.
Objective
Performance
Recommendations
to drive change
Your sales force’s objectives can be shaped by data from many sources:
• Physician Targeting and Segmentation
• Resource Optimization
• Payer Influence
• Patient Treatment Journey
Most companies are already engaging in one or all of these studies. However, most continue to struggle
to implement the insights in the field by tying all of this underlying data to sales objectives and sales
performance. In most cases, the hurdle is not business related but rather stems from technology
shortcomings and the high cost of the multiple, siloed systems that support operation of sales forces. In
some cases, information may be available in a data warehouse but is challenging to extract and present.
With the vast quantities of highly granular data available to life sciences companies—and the right
technology platform—it is now possible to tie objectives to specific customers and track performance
against those goals. Sales analytics should therefore be able to pinpoint the customer who is affecting
sales performance as well as provide timely insights to reps to inform their decision-making.
Intuitive. Relevant. Actionable.
The time has come and the technology is available to empower your sales force to own the brand
strategy. The best way to do this is by putting the right information in their hands at the crucial
decision-making moment: whom to see, what to present and how to present to help physicians best
treat their patients with the right therapy.
For a truly informed and empowered sales force, companies need to employ mobile devices and move
from the “dark ages” to the “digital era” with rich, integrated information that delivers real-time,
actionable insights.
4
Three Technology Must-Haves to Improve Sales Effectiveness and Boost Win Rates
When considering how to evolve your ecosystem of tools, reports, databases and applications, you
should ensure your technology tools and output are:
• Intuitive—giving your sales force clear, easy-to-digest information.
• Relevant—making the right information available when members of your sales force need to make
decisions and take action.
• Actionable—ensuring that information is timely enough for sales force to act immediately.
Keep it Intuitive
Ideally, every objective placed on members of your sales force will be accompanied by a mechanism
for monitoring progress against that goal. Objectives should be mechanisms for influencing—not
“policing”—reps’ behavior. To that end, objectives should be tied to and presented with sales
performance metrics. Keep it simple by linking objectives to the behaviors that need to be achieved:
• Making the calls that achieve desired market share
• Engaging the right physician influencers
• Distributing samples and/or vouchers to those physicians with patients who will benefit from using
the drug, thereby increasing the number of new patients on a particular therapy
Aligning objectives to sales performance will provide the members of your sales force with feedback on
how their efforts are affecting results. It also will help them take action on negative results by grouping
outlier physicians, accounts and payers that require more or different attention.
Make it Relevant
Technology might be at the heart of the problem, but technology alone is not the solution. Rather,
technology is the enabler of the solution. In moving from the dark ages to the digital era, life sciences
companies can take business intelligence far beyond basic reporting and deliver this kind of relevant
narrative to sales reps (see Figure 2):
• You have an objective to deliver 450 targeted calls this quarter.
• You delivered only 300 calls to date, which have not positively influenced your product’s market
share this quarter.
• The problem may be in the following areas of your territory since your product market share is well
below your territory average:
• In the area you are planning to target now, you have 10 physicians you called on with no change
in behavior.
• These physicians are prescribing therapies that are not on formulary with a particular payer.
• Make sure to leave vouchers and make the physician aware of the patient assistance program.
Three Technology Must-Haves to Improve Sales Effectiveness and Boost Win Rates
5
Figure 2.
STRATEGY
CUSTOMERS
With whom
should I be
investing my
time?
When
should I
follow up?
If something
has changed,
what is it?
What materials
should I
present to
support the
change?
GOALS
SALES
The perfect combination of technology and data will help your sales force course-correct before it’s too
late.
Sales professionals need relevant information at the decision-making moment. They should not have to
mine through myriad systems or reports and link information together. Make it simple and intuitive to
get relevant answers to these kinds of questions:
• With whom should I be investing my time?
• When should I follow up—on the regular schedule or immediately because something has changed?
• If something has changed, what is it—payer influence, provider influence or patient dynamics?
• What materials should I present to support or counter the change?
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Three Technology Must-Haves to Improve Sales Effectiveness and Boost Win Rates
Ensure it’s Actionable
Simple and relevant insights presented via powerful and innovative technology are valuable only when
they are timely and actionable. Sales performance data is the most valuable information your sales force
can have to make informed decisions. However, such data updates very slowly since speed of delivery
depends on multiple factors:
• Time to capture (physician, payer or patient)
• Time to process by data provider — cleansing, linking and aggregating
• Time to re-process based on technology — processing, linking and distributing
• Time to interpret — downloading and reviewing
Critical business information can take 15 to 30+ days before it’s consumed by your sales force. However,
it will not be actionable if not made available when, where and how a member of your sales force needs
the information to make a decision.
Information technology teams are working to close the speed gap from data availability to information
distribution. Even so, information may not be actionable since your sales force is the final consumer
of the information—and not all sales professionals are the same. Their varying skill in interacting
with applications and consuming information can eclipse any technological investment to achieve
sales performance. Something as simple as forgetting to open an email or download a file; giving up in
frustration over multiple log-ins; and even having to boot up a laptop (rather than being able to get all
the information on a smart device) can lead a sales professional to walk into a call without the intuitive,
relevant and actionable insights needed to deliver against his or her sales objectives.
Give Reps News They Can Use
Let’s not contribute to information noise by giving sales professionals faster devices and applications
that promise larger data bandwidth and superior visualization—yet still require them to “connect the
dots” to make a decision. Instead, let’s provide our sales force with relevant, actionable information
that is linked to objectives that drive business strategy. Make it relevant to the business need of their
clients—and serve it up when and where sales professionals need it, whether that’s immediately after
data refresh, in the car before a call or in the coffee shop during a coaching session. Most important,
ensure that the information is actionable at first viewing—not after many clicks, swipes or pinches.
For your sales force, getting streamlined, integrated information should be as easy as posting a tweet,
checking a bank account or ordering merchandise. With that support, your team will optimize call
quality and achieve higher sales performance.
Three Technology Must-Haves to Improve Sales Effectiveness and Boost Win Rates
7
Author
Sal Paolozza
Director, Nexxus Performance
IMS Health Technology & Applications
IMS Health U.S.
One IMS Drive, Plymouth Meeting, PA, 19462, USA
info@imshealth.com
www.imshealth.com
About IMS Health
IMS Health is a leading global information and technology services company providing clients in the healthcare
industry with comprehensive solutions to measure and improve their performance. End-to-end proprietary
applications and configurable solutions connect 10+ petabytes of complex healthcare data through the IMS OneTM
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costs and outcomes. The company’s 15,000 employees blend global consistency and local market knowledge across
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As a global leader in protecting individual patient privacy, IMS Health uses anonymous healthcare data to deliver
critical, real-world disease and treatment insights. These insights help biotech and pharmaceutical companies,
medical researchers, government agencies, payers and other healthcare stakeholders to identify unmet treatment
needs and understand the effectiveness and value of pharmaceutical products in improving overall health outcomes.
Additional information is available at www.imshealth.com
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