Brilliant Ideas On Sales Force Effectiveness And Territorial Behaviour

To determine whether a sales force is truly effective takes a certain amount of skill, quite a lot of information and the ability to accurately determine potential. Essentially, the amount of selling time available, based on a realistic allocation of hours and multiplied by the number of people on the team, can be combined with an assessment of market potential to create a market response matrix. In the past, this was often a time consuming and error-prone process, conducted with a spreadsheet around the table, but there are far more productive ways to approach this issue these days.

For a sales force to be truly effective, territories must be aligned properly at the very beginning. This will involve the definition of boundaries, bearing in mind balanced workloads, compact and contiguous territories and a minimisation of travel time. Even though this may sound fairly clear, it’s often not so, and unless the sales executive’s time is protected from waste and fully optimised, the company simply won’t achieve its full potential. Unless the territory is correctly aligned, a sales executive could find that he or she is faced with the prospect of too many potential customers. Thus with such a high workload, the employee will likely not be able to interact effectively with all those clients, resulting in a loss. Conversely, if there are too few customers according to the allocated executive, the potential of the executive can be wasted in this situation and this can be aggravated if some of the people with the best track records are underutilised.

Without a comprehensive roadmap showing it the way to go, the pharmaceutical company should not deploy its sales force. This can be especially challenging for the business executives as they have so much on their plate to start off with. While sales force effectiveness is obviously on the top of the list, they would do well to engage external assistance from pharmaceutical consultants to help them prioritise. A pharmaceutical consulting firm is fully cognisant of the need for adequate preparation, planning and optimisation of a sales force workload. Building on years of experience, industry insight, education, training and street smarts, pharma consulting will certainly help the parent company to prepare for battle.

There are several criteria to bear in mind relating to the deployment of a company’s sales force, including the auditing of initial objectives and goals, the establishment of current and future strategy, a realistic assessment of constraints, incorporation of available data and extrapolation of resources, both human and otherwise. This is where an honest assessment should be made of the potential, along with the anticipated workload for each individual. Any current deployment of resources should be highly criticised to expose any inequities in territory alignment.

All members of a sales force should have a great track record of productivity. Remember that it’s not up to the sales executive to solicit improvements in territories or necessarily to find new clients. Rather, with help from pharmaceutical consultants, the pharmaceutical company executives must set targets and goals and have created the perfect matrix to enable them to solicit the greatest gains, whether profit or otherwise.

Alan Gillies is the Managing Director of L2L Consulting, specialising in enabling pharmaceutical companies to achieve new heights of productivity and performance, throughout all levels of management and revenue generating activities.