Generating High Performance for Pharma Sales Forces

In competitive markets like the pharmaceutical industry, a high performance sales force is a strategic weapon. The right front-line sales people do far more than just close deals. They identify market needs, provide input for the development of new products and solutions and convey feedback from customers to marketing, management and product developers. 

A high-performance sales force is a conduit for gathering key market intelligence from all target customers in all important market segments.

Pharmaceutical sales reps play a large role in helping an industry in a rapidly changing environment achieve a new corporate vision.

The successful execution of strategies for growth, new product launches, new areas/markets and global perspective and collaboration depends on attracting and retaining the right sales force talent, and then rapidly developing the skills and knowledge needed to operate in this new world. 

Recently, much attention has been paid to training frontline sales people in the hopes of developing higher performance. Unquestionably, improved new hire sales training programs are effective at quickly ramping up sales force capacity to a productive level.

But ‘productive’ and ‘high-performance’ are two different performance levels, and whether general sales training has any impact producing high performance levels is an open question.

For world-class pharmaceutical companies, high performance for the sales force typically begins with the development of a sales competency model that can be used to assess individual skills and capabilities and gauge potential for identifying future top performers. So, what is a competency model and how does it work? 

Competencies are the skills, knowledge, behaviors and attributes that lead to high performance. They are the ‘how’ of your work – how you do your job. They differ from results that are the ‘what’ of your work – the outcomes achieved by applying the competencies. The best companies understand that competencies enable results, and increasingly better results are attained with increased proficiency and more frequent demonstration of the right competencies.

Typically, competency models in the pharmaceutical industry are made up of five key attribute groups, each divided into several individual job competencies. 

The five key attribute groups include behaviors such as:

1. Working effectively: Performing one’s work to the best of one’s ability with a continuous focus on quality, efficiency and ongoing improvement.

2. Customer satisfaction: Building and maintaining customer relationships and customer satisfaction.

3. Partnering: Collaborating across multiple boundaries – functional, geographic and company – to meet individual and organizational goals and objectives.

4. Building talent: Continuously focusing on individual performance and development and enhancing the talent of the organization.

5. Taking ownership: Taking personal responsibility for ensuring results, encouraging change, and fostering continuous organizational improvement.

While competencies vary from job to job and across job levels, they can be broken into two general categories – individual job competencies and behavioral competencies.
Individual job competencies are the skills and behaviors that make up a group of specific competency attributes. They are applicable to, and expected of, all sales representatives, regardless of title.

Individual job competencies may include items such as

• General decision-making,
• Communication skills,
• Customer loyalty,
• Sales ability,
• Contributing to team success,
• Developing others and
• Thought leadership.

Behavioral competencies are role-specific examples of what the individual competencies ‘look like’ in action for a particular job. They are the detail behind the individual competencies and are more specific and descriptive. Examples include:

• Building relationships with key influencers to help facilitate positive, productive interactions.
• Understanding the sales process and products.
• Proactively managing the sales funnel.
• Inputting all opportunities into the forecasting tools.
• Contributing to team success.
• Contributing to the development of team/group and plans.
• Helping others to be successful by sharing expertise, best practices and skills.
• Exhibiting thought leadership.
• Implementing creative solutions for overcoming obstacles and/or accomplishing key objectives or projects.

Utilized to assess current personnel, a well-designed sales competency model for pharmaceutical companies can identify areas for training and development that lead to dramatic performance improvement across the sales force.

When deployed in the new hire process, the competency model can help deliver new employees who already possess the key competencies required for high performance, speeding ramp-up times and increasing overall sales performance.

Image source: www.modernanalyst.com

(Source : “Generating high performance for pharmaceutical sales forces through competency modeling” by Joseph DiMisa and David Bello, Senior Vice Presidents at Sibson Consulting│Sibson – www.sibson.com)