For those in charge of selling medicines have great worries that lie ahead. Of course, automation has played its role in the pharma industry quite well but there still are challenges that the industry needs to fight through. Talking about the challenges, the prominent ones are generally faced by sales professionals who are responsible for expansion of the service, recognition of the brand, and of course a surge in product demand.
Well the challenges of sales are not only restricted to pharma but go much beyond to a number of industries. But the blogpost majorly focuses on the challenges sales representatives face in pharma; so, we will be shedding light on the same.
Let’s have a quick look on pharmaceutical sales prior to discussing the prevailing issues.
- In pharma the buyers for medicines can be doctors, chemist, and hospital pharmacy.
- To generate the demand of orders medical representatives need to play a significant role
- With the element of automation integrated correctly with MR reporting software, sales professionals could make their jobs much easier.
- With this industry specific software medical representative could easily gather the specific requirement from an area.
Now, A Look at the Pharma Sales Teams Challenges
The pharmaceutical market in the past few years have changed drastically in terms of resources utilization with their focus majorly pointed on cost-cutting and improving the demand of their services without actually growing the resources in count. So, the burden totally lies upon the sales representatives to not only improve sales but also get major share of profits for their individual brands.
Being said that it is nothing like human assistance is now being overlooked but yes there is major liking for the use of devices like mobile tools in the industry today. Mobile devices are already being used by health practitioners at work to unlock the power of data collection for future sales strategies.
Also read: Top 10 Pharma Sales Metrics You Should Track
Sales Forecasting for Better Area Coverage
There has been a shift in the business model for today’s MRs. Companies today are moving from generalized sales force (product basket offering to specialist) to a speciality focused structure (specialized product offering). This shift in the model signifies the burden that MRs have as they need to cover large areas. And that is why micro-level attention to each specialist is now being given to address their demands particularly. And this bring MR reporting software in business.
With this reporting system the area manager could easily allocate in advance the territories to the MR which they could effortlessly cover having been furnished with the visiting information already through the software.
Align Sales Forecast with Field Force Efforts
There is nothing better idea than utilizing the effectivity of a MR software to furnish pharma sales target. There is a visit planning template that comprises of information (for MRs), about doctors, brands to be promoted, date of visit, location, timing, and every other minute information that medical representative would require. With support from analytics medical representatives are able to track the amount of field data to forecast the sales in advance.
Restricted Access to Physician
Physicians are being reluctant to visit by pharmaceutical company representatives. And the challenge for these sales professionals is to convince these physicians for the meeting. Here comes the effective role of communication that pharma sales teams can have for convincing the physicians.
Converting Leads into Future Prospects
Reaching to the lead is not all that sales professionals need to do in pharma. The lead must convert into future prospect. And that is possible only when the prospects see the value in the services or the products offered by the medical representatives. Moreover, the representatives need to get ahead of those who are already in the business.
Maintaining Post Sales Relationship
Once the prospect becomes the customers, it gets even harder for pharma sales team representatives to maintain relationships. Maintaining the relationship for them means communicating regularly with medical staff and doctors for keeping an eye on their requirements and fulfilling the same. This task can easily be accomplished by using MR reporting software for pharma companies.
Targeting New Types of Customers
Pharmaceutical sales promotion activities have traditionally targeted physicians. However, recently in many countries the influence of non-physician customers such as patients and payers are increasing. This brings an additional challenge for the sales representatives to add promotional sales efforts towards these new customers.
Final Thoughts
Pharma products hold the most profitable margins and that is why the sales representatives are sometimes given huge targets. And to meet these targets profitably pharma sales teams can utilize the effectivity of pharmacy management software. Therefore, both selling skills and utilizing the software program effectively matters when it is all about overcoming the challenges that sales professionals face in the field sales.
FieldCircle is into transforming how global enterprises manage their field service operations. Our comprehensive and easy-to-use field service management software helps enterprises leverage the power of cloud, enterprise mobility, IoT and data analysis to boost the performance of your sales operations.
