Your field force are the face of your organization, they are responsible for creating your brand image in the market with their effective communication, commitment and relationship with your customers. If your field force are not satisfied you cannot build your brand value in spite of spending millions of dollars in marketing and promotion. So the leading organizations are always giving huge importance to field force excellence.
We always have experienced that employees working in restaurants like Café Coffee Day seemingly happier than in MNC Pharma companies. Your field force are not machine that can be driven only by efficient process alone. They require proper motivation, guidance and training to make the process work. Pharma industry is the industry which is facing high attrition rate and the reason behind that is hidden dissatisfaction lies in field force. Here are the top 5 obstacles towards achieving field force excellence:
1. Inability to get information needed in timely manner
Generally we have seen that Pharma industry rapidly hires field representatives and after providing 3-4 days training send them on the field and then the problem starts, field force needs to be updated always but the ground reality is that there is a huge communication gap between top management and field force. Even good information takes its own sweet time to reach the people at the ground level. Quality of information and timely dissemination of information can do wonders towards achieving field force excellence.
2. Huge paper work
Now a day’s paper work has been transformed into spreadsheets but still field force need to invest their lot of time in creating DCR, expense submission, order processing, drafting approval email etc… . According to the research field force spend 50 % of their time in these sales associated tasks. Automation of these tasks can help you to achieve field force excellence.
3. Delays in reimbursement and compensation
Sales job is the lonely job and the prime motivational factor for field force is timely reimbursement of expenses and compensation like salary and incentives. Still most of the Pharma companies are following manual or hybrid practices which is always error prone and consumed more time, cost and efforts. Automation of these tasks can speed up the processing and will also stimulate field force to go for an extra mile and attain field force excellence.
4. Lack of transparent career growth ladder
We all are working towards achieving company and individual goal. Today’s leading organizations are constantly mentoring, guiding and train their employees for ongoing performance improvement. If your policies are not clear, environment is not transparent and does not have any system for performance measurement then in this environment your field force and your employees both could not survive for long.
5.Lack of proper coaching, training and guidance
Medical reps are the only people who meet the entire chain of customers from doctors to distributors and therefore require high level of training and development, emotional resilience and constant motivation. They are frustrated because the people who are supposed to help them are hardly capable of doing so – Front-line Managers, Second-line Managers and others right up to the level of National Sales Managers are incompetent and inefficient in most companies when it comes to coaching and developing the skills of medical reps to handle the real challenges of Indian Pharma market.