Sales Marketing » Marketing Pharma Sales Strategy Colorado

Training has always been an integral part of a strong Pharmaceutical company. More so to the company's field force or sales force. Since pharma sales force will be responsible to turn solid marketing ideas into flowing revenue, training becomes even more important.

But unfortunately, Pharma Companies face big dilemma when come to training the sales force.

Here's the dilemma: What if we trained them and they leave, and what if we do not train them and they stay?

I'll go with the 'train-but-leave' Pharma sales rep and I'll share with you my argument for that in this article.

Pharmaceutical Companies experience one of the highest turnover-rate for their sales force. Even though Pharma Industry offers high basic salary and attractive perks, they are not enough to keep Sales Reps forever. They will leave eventually, and the reasons for that are many, which include:

. Better job offer
. Dissatisfaction with overall working condition: managers, peers, workload, etc.
. Personal reasons e.g. marriage, parenting, move to new areas, further study.

In short, leaving a company is natural.

Now training comes into the picture.

A new sales rep will at least get a basic training after joining the company. Generally, the basic training covers basic foundation for products training, sales and marketing, and personal role or administration.

The goal for this basic training is to prepare the Pharma rep to do the job right, and instill a good 'come-to-work' behavior.

If we run a simple survey to a new Pharma rep to know the reason for choosing the job, 9 out of 10 people will say because of the money. And this is a very important piece of information as you shall see later.

It is not a secret that a good Pharma Company offers high incentive payout to motivate its sales force. One company I used to work for had the salary to incentive ratio of 40:60. It simply means that total incentive annually is higher than the total annual salary.

But there's a catch...

To earn maximum incentive, a Pharma rep has to achieve, typically, more than 100% of the allocated budget. Usually it comes within the range of 115 to 120% of the total budget. Some companies even put a 'cap' to this figure, and after the cap, the incentive payout is 'flat'. No matter how big the extra figure is, the payout will only be that much (the capped figure).

And to qualify for maximum incentive takes more than basic foundation training.

I have made a remark previously that many new Pharma sales reps are motivated by money. This will work for the company because now, all the company had to do is to train these highly motivated sales force with some extra skills.

It could be as simple as grooming skills.

With an added skills and competencies, the sales force is directly empowered to produce more results and perform better. For the company, that means more revenue into the profit column of the Profit and Loss Statement.

Money somehow had the power to cause dependency. The more the new pharma reps get hold of it, the more they want it, and that will cause them to add few more days, months or years with the company. All because of add on training.

If they decided to leave after that, the company had already recouped it's investment in providing the training. Possibly more. Look at it this way. The company spends maybe a few hours (training can be very fast and effective these days) training the reps and in return, the reps provide it with months and years of optimum revenue.

Optimum because, for a motivated Pharma rep to get maximum incentive, he had to be a high achiever. And that's easily translated to 15 to 20% more than the basic budget requirement as discussed before.

This scenario happens only with trained Pharma Sales force.

For the untrained sales force, they will only do the necessary to hit the budget, just enough for them to keep the job. They might be motivated but their motivation is different. They just want to keep the job and enjoy the perks e.g. company car, mileage claims, travel allowances, etc. Period.

The longer they stay with the company, the bigger the loads the company had to carry. By load I mean the compensation if let say the company decided to cut him loose if the need arises.

It is not a surprise to see some company still keep certain people even though it is more profitable to just let them go than to keep them.

There is too much at stake.

And this sums up my argument to why I prefer 'trained-but-leave' Pharma sales rep than'untrained-but-stay' rep. I simply choose short term high profit over long term high liability. But that's just me.

Training Pharmaceutical Sales Reps is not the only issue in Pharma Companies. What are other existing issues? What are the emerging issue? How to best handle it? Discover the answers to Pharma Sales Rep job issues at: http://contrarian-sales-technique.blogspot.com

Source: www.articletrader.com