Indian Pharma industry is one of the complex industry having 10,500 registered manufacturing units and 3000 companies that market nearly a 100,000 branded generics.
The top 10 Pharma companies employ between 3000 to 6000 reps in field sales. Hence, the top 10 Pharma companies having more than 50000 field force who meet doctors every day. If we add the field force of medical devices, diagnostics, disposables and surgical companies the approximate number would cross one million people. That is close to one field sales person per doctor.
Here are some of the common challenges faced by field force:
1. Many companies with similar products and to counter the competition many companies have more than one division to sell the similar products under different brand names. The result: one company 10 divisions, each of which does not know what other is doing!
2. The plethora of companies and their divisions and PCDs create a situation of ever-increasing supply without any meaningful demand generation activities. The same doctors are being chased by 10 to 20 companies – this only increases the doctor’s power to demand benefits other than the ones provided by the product and its features.
3. Now a days doctors, specialists are mainly focusing on their earnings and working in 3 to 4 locations in different clinics and hospitals. The selection criteria for selecting the doctor depends on his ability to pull patients so window time for field force to meet the doctor is constantly shrinking.
4. The doctors spent crores of rupees in gaining qualifications and skills so more focused on getting return on investment quickly. Hence don’t prefer to meet field force offering common solutions. They better-off refer an online drug index for names and comparative prices of various generic brands and their RX information in brief.
5. Indian Pharma industry is facing high attrition rates between 30% to 40% and still most of the companies are not taking it seriously. The biggest lacking area is lack of constant training and mentorship by front line managers.
Pharma marketers come up with strategies to take the above factors into account, field force people will continue to struggle with decreasing window time and increasing number of disinterested doctors.