Reuters Events | Pharma

Thought leadership and innovation for the Pharmaceutical Industry

Marie Crespo explains that the sustained sales performance required for a customer-led approach can only be achieved by aligning market, talent and sales process.

By Marie Crespo on Mar 14, 2013

The theme for this year’s eyeforpharma Barcelona event is one that has been exercising the pharma industry for quite some time now and, I suspect, continues to cause more than a few sleepless nights amongst senior strategists. How exactly do we ‘put the all-powerful customer at the centre’ in order to ‘revise pharma mindsets, models and structures to seal commercial success’?

Key elements of the answer lie with some of the conference highlights, for instance: ‘Sell outcomes, not medicines: Align with your customer’s end goals to deliver real engagement “beyond the pill”. However, are we really confident that we understand what this means in substance and the direction in which we need to take our organisations in order to deliver such a strategy?

For it to remain more than simply convenient sloganeering, we need to be in a position to apply the strategy and implement it on the ground. Further elements of the solution lie in another aspect of the Barcelona conference: ‘Equip your team with the skillset and tools to thrive: Create best-in-class behaviour, establish skills benchmarks and cultivate digital expertise in your reps.’    

In practice, though, big questions remain for many of us as we seek to devise our customer engagement strategy in detail and create the optimal conditions for it to thrive: what exactly is it that we’re trying to implement and how do we measure our potential to succeed? Inevitably, answering these questions will mean different things in different circumstances, but there is a framework we can follow which may be helpful….

Here at SalesAssessment.com we use a model which we call the ‘three pillars for growth’. In our view, maximum revenue can only be delivered by the sales organisation over the longer term when these three key pillars for growth combine to form a coherent and cohesive strategy for engaging the market.

These three pillars are:

• Structure
  • The sales organisation needs to determine and respond to the requirements of each market segment in terms of the way it engages commercially;  
  • This necessitates structuring the sales organisation to align it with the market effectively, by providing the right mix of sales talent to address each market segment at the appropriate level of relationship;
• Process
  • The sales process needs to be appropriate and optimised for each market segment, and supportive of the way sales talent addresses the market and interacts with customers;
  • For instance, at the extremes, a transactional sales process is likely to look very different from the strategic approach to selling – they have completely different goals, selling styles and focus;
• Talent
  • Organisations should seek to hire, develop and retain high-performing sales talent matched to every specific role within the sales organisation; and
  • Employers should put in place talent based around a thorough understanding of ‘what good looks like’ – it’s the quality notquantity of sales talent that counts in today’s marketplace.

Clearly, understanding market alignment is the immediate priority for any organisation. This means exploring exactly how each market segment wants and needs to be addressed and also what we as commercial organisations are trying to achieve in terms of engagement. Are we selling ‘things’ or are we selling ‘outcomes’ and ‘value’? The two are entirely different. What’s more, they require completely different selling styles. 

Based on the above structure and the interdependence of its three elements, we should remind ourselves that a holistic approach is required: performance is only as strong as each ‘link in the chain’ – what scientists call the ‘law of limiting factors’. This means that, although we can address one or other of the above factors in isolation, if we don’t address all three in an integrated fashion, we won’t achieve the performance improvements we’re looking for.

We should ask ourselves whether our salespeople understand exactly how diverse and complex the market is today, which brings us to the question of sales talent. Are our salespeople capable of selling in the way we want them to, in order for them to address the market and engage effectively?

We should note that an organisation’s sales processes – including compliance issues – need to be linked to and supportive of the talent we employ and aligned with the level and style of relationships they enjoy with the various customer segments: this drives performance. We should question whether our sales processes are facilitating these new selling styles or are they trapped in the past, when all we wanted to do was sell ‘stuff’?

Furthermore, we should understand that optimising our go-to-market strategy certainly cannot be achieved by the sales organisation in isolation. It requires integration and a unified purpose amongst the different functions across an organisation, for instance:

• Alignment of Sales with Marketing in term of understanding how to address individual market segments effectively and identifying where true value lies;
• Sales with Human Resources in terms of reliably recruiting talent capable of interacting with customers at the right level and in the right way to pursue the engagement strategy; and  
• Sales with Operations in terms of providing appropriate support structures for the talent to carry out their roles effectively.

To conclude, it’s worth repeating once again that this strategy – which combines process, talent and structure – is, by definition, holistic. Thus, while there are benefits in addressing process, talent or structure individually, the biggest gains are inevitably made when organisations implement a strategy that recognises the interdependence of the three elements.

Additionally, we should note that such a strategy is responsive to the needs of customers in the marketplace and is, therefore, dynamic – evolution of the market will continue to dictate changes in the structure of the organisation, the talent it employs and the processes which support that talent.

The bad news is that things will continue to change and the rate of change can only accelerate. But we’ve known that for a while, right? The good news is that we now have a framework to address the issues as well as the tools to help us pinpoint exactly where we are and measure exactly what we’ve got to do in order to address those challenges.