Over the past three years, the pharmaceutical industry has been going through radical changes. In no domain have these changes been more strongly felt than in sales management. Sales forces in developed countries are becoming smaller, more flexible, and more strongly oriented towards key account management. We have felt a strong need on the part of our customers to reflect these changes in our sales management courses, and for the last several months we’ve been reviewing and revising our courses for both senior sales managers and line managers.
These changes affect not only the content, but the underlying simulations used in the courses, and they are the result of our experience across the industry, both in terms of training and with respect to the underlying changes happening in pharmaceutical companies.
The Senior Sales Management Course
The Senior Sales Management Course has been designed to examine the decisions made by people who run sales forces. These include questions of sizing, structure, segmentation, systems and issues surrounding human resources. The underlying types of decisions to be made remain, but the “right answers”, and the methods used to determine them have changed. In the case of sizing, for instance, while it is still crucial to understand the question of how customers respond to frequency, and then use this to determine optimal sales force size, the underlying “frequency paradigm” has shifted. In a key account management environment, for instance, it’s not as simple as dividing x by y to get z. Now, questions of “account servicing capacity” enter into play, as does the basic question of how frequency fits into key account management systems. All of these questions are considered in the new course.
Beyond sales force size, the underlying structures that are available, and even the entire question of the sales force model to be employed, must be addressed. The industry has moved away from massively mirrored structures to a more relationship-oriented approach, and this can not be put together the same way. Then there is the question of systems, as ETMS and CRM give way to closed-loop marketing approaches.
Segmentation, too, has changed as individual prescribers are increasingly viewed through the lens of the greater healthcare environment in which they work. What’s more, legislation throughout Europe is evolving, changing available data and modifying the tools and promotional approaches that can be employed. All of these things affect how customers are targeted and how segmentation is determined.
While the above elements are now being addressed in the conceptual content of the SSM course, the simulation itself has also evolved. Much greater emphasis is being placed on incentive and compensation systems, while the participants must also decide what kind of sales model to employ and whether to adopt a key account management structure. It’s not a straightforward decision, as the different products in the mix do not respond the same way to the various approaches.
On the whole, the new SSM course allows participants to consider all of these new issues and discuss them with expert facilitators as well as their peers, affording a glimpse into the pharmaceutical sales force of the coming years.
The Regional Planning Course
First line managers (FLM’s) have always been the key drivers of sales force effectiveness, and the focal point of any change initiative. Since the entire sales force is changing, FLM’s must forcibly be at the center of that change, and so we have revised the core course that addresses them, the Regional Planning Course.
As with the Senior Sales Management Course, the Regional Planning Course has changed to reflect the new role asked of FLMs. Notably, many companies are pushing strategic decisions into the field as smaller, more sophisticated sales forces are being asked to deal with regional differences in market conditions. FLMs must therefore understand the basics of segmentation and targeting and be able to determine or at least apply national strategies locally.
The new Regional Planning Course considers these issues and how they affect local strategy, as FLMs make decisions about how much to concentrate their reps’ efforts, and how to approach different target groups.
The biggest changes in the course are in the simulation itself, which is now far more flexible to accommodate different companies and their different sales force strategies. For in-company courses, the simulation can now be configured to allow far greater decision-making scope to participants: in certain configurations, they can adjust the allocation of their reps across different bricks, redraw local territory alignment, hire and fire reps, and decide on sales quotas. While not all companies plan on asking FLMs to make these kinds of decisions, many are considering doing so, and the new simulation will allow their FLMs to practice in a risk-free, simulated environment.
Even for companies that are retaining a more traditional management approach, the new simulation has far greater flexibility to incorporate different key performance indicators, and it has a more thorough debrief module, allowing fuller in-depth feedback to participants.
As the industry changes, IMS changes with it. These two courses have long been the core of our sales management training, and their new formats reflect the changes in the industry so that we can better accompany our clients through the evolution that is taking place.
Autumn Curriculum
The new versions of respectively the Senior Sales Management Course and the Regional Planning Course are available as open courses this Autumn:
Senior Sales Management:
• 29 September – 1 October in London (English)
• 22-24 October in Paris (English)
Regional Planning:
• 20-21 October in London (English)
For more information about the courses visit: www.imshealth.com/learningsolutions or contact Tina Mathiesen
