Sales is a number game. Many organizations just want to achieve the numbers by hook or crook. But this style of working will not work in long run. Your sales force are the credibility creators of your organization. Any successful brand is a brand because they are not just achieving numbers but also maintain credibility in the market. Today’s global, digital, 24/7 fast paced market its very challenging task to maintain brand credibility. By hook and crook methodology you cannot achieve that. Hence successful organizations design effective sales process and coach their sales force to efficiently follow that. For them “What” does not matter, “How” matters.
Dr. Philip Kotler defines marketing as “the science and art of exploring, creating, and delivering value to satisfy the needs of a target market at a profit. Marketing identifies unfulfilled needs and desires. It defines, measures and quantifies the size of the identified market and the profit potential. It pinpoints which segments the company is capable of serving best and it designs and promotes the appropriate products and services.”
Let’s keep it simpler marketing is the art of finding the right customer segment which suits your product or service. Your all the marketing efforts will go into vain if you have not targeted to the right customer segment. Effective market segmentation and targeting and positioning is the key behind the success of any brand. There are four different ways to consider segmenting a market:
Present pharmaceutical market is very dynamic driven by highly informed customers expecting to get the best product at a fair price. Globalization, androidization and digitization has opened new communication channels, speed up learning and their decision-making processes. Deep understanding of the decision making triggers is very important for getting customers approval. And for understanding decision making triggers you need to study your customers and do effective segmentation and targeting. Hence contact management software is in trend.
Segmentation identifies unique sets of customers who possess similarities relevant to a products value proposition. Similarities like motivation, behavior, potential and other influences. Effective segmentation is very important to marketers to develop and implement successful marketing strategies.
Unfortunately, many segmentation efforts fail to deliver the market insights necessary to formulate sales and marketing strategy due to the many reasons like:
We generally use words like leader and manager without having any clear idea about that. These people are responsible for managing the team and get the job done effectively on time but we found that everyone having their own style of managing team. In every organization there are various team leaders and its common that only few of them are exceptional, enthusiastic and give priority to the people development rather than giving priority to the numbers.
This is especially true when it comes to field sales managers in Indian Pharma. Indian Pharma industry is one of the industry where attrition rate is above 30 % and the reason behind this is lack of good front line sales managers. The front line sales managers are the bridge between mid-level managers and sales force, pressed with dual targets individual and team target.
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!