Pharma Sales Gets a Health Check – Interview with Peter Deane, Novartis

In order to support its country organizations and elevate standards of sales excellence globally, Novartis has rolled out a diagnostic process to assess performance gaps and develop action plans to address prioritized areas for improvement.



The drive behind this initiative is achieving high standards of Sales Excellence and optimal impact from more than 18,000 Sales Representatives and Managers across the world and the significant investment in associated systems and support functions, says Peter Deane, Head of Global Sales Force Effectiveness, Novartis Pharmaceuticals.

“With all the investment in our Sales Forces, countries need to ensure that they have the right strategy, the right systems, efficient back office support processes and ultimately highly motivated, committed and well-led sales teams”.

The team started by defining a set of common standards with which to increase productivity and effectiveness in Sales, resulting ultimately in the development of the Global Sales Diagnostic tool.

The tool was designed to be globally relevant and was translated into more than 25 languages to enable full implementation with all Sales people. It was piloted successfully in Q1 2012 before the full global rollout began in May 2012. The beauty of the tool is that it is an online application that can be accessed in any location, says Deane. “Through probing questions tailored to the role of the participant, we collect feedback from all levels of a sales organization (from representative to country head) in all countries we operate in and then we compare that to a standard response that we would expect to see. We are essentially doing a health check on the organization.”

Countries have fully embraced the diagnostic concept: As of April 2013, more than 60 countries had rolled out the Diagnostic tool, with more than 10,000 associates completing the survey and providing feedback on opportunities for improvement. With such a wealth of data, Novartis is utilizing this information to understand the entire organization better, put together focused action plans bespoke to each country and determine potential global initiatives.

Listening to the customer

But the actual roles of these sales people are constantly evolving as the needs of the industry change, with more peer to peer interaction and better communication demanded from both physician and patient. Deane reports that Novartis has taken this opportunity to address how its entire organization is run, creating business units and sales teams tailored to particular therapies and disease areas as opposed to running a centralized sales organization. “We run more and more ‘go to market’ workshops where we look at the marketplace and the customer types that we have. While Sales Force Effectiveness can  be perceived as simply looking at the sales rep, at Novartis  we focus  on driving overall commercial effectiveness as many of the customer-facing roles (particularly for our specialty products) are changing quite substantially.”

As an extension to the ‘go to market’ workshops, the Sales Diagnostic tool is being used to ask  both field-based management and head office staff whether they believe that the company is delivering marketing strategies and tools that meet customers’ needs at both a national and local level. One area of focus, according to Deane, is whether field-based associates think that head office personnel spend enough time with their customers. “We can do market research and find out a lot about services, programs and tools and what we think is going to work,” he says, “but if the people that design those tools don’t actually see them in action, they’re missing a significant piece of the puzzle.”

When the feedback from the survey is gathered and categorised accordingly in the diagnostic tool, each country decides what specific challenges and gaps they are going to address.  “From a global perspective, we share examples of what good looks like, but it is up to each country to decide what actions to take”, says Deane.  “From our side there is a global standard for legal and compliance; Countries must assess their local regulations and comply with the global standards when leveraging examples from other countries.”

Sharing best practises

Getting countries to understand what each other are working on and being forthright in sharing their examples is always a challenge. But in terms of best practise sharing, Novartis do engage through a number of different forums, says Deane. “For example, we bring together senior commercial leaders once a year to align on strategy and share examples of what has been working well.  In addition, different franchises and brand teams meet several times in the year with counterparts from different countries. We also bring together Marketing and Sales Operations Heads from the countries three times a year to learn about global solutions and share country experiences.”

The standard framework of the Sales Diagnostic also enables Deane’s team to catalogue and document global tools and country examples. This catalogue is accessible by all country Marketing and Sales Operations Heads and can be referenced when countries are creating their action plans.

While best practice sharing certainly enables local improvement, ultimately, according to Deane, the crucial step is how an organisation looks at their current capabilities. With a comprehensive capability assessment, Novartis can then determine what steps need to be taken to ensure continuous improvement and optimum impact with customers.  “With an organisation as large as Novartis, there’s a lot that could go wrong or could be missed. That’s why having this health check process in place is so important,” he says.