CEO INSIGHTS

Beyond Numbers – Reshaping Pharma’s Measure of Sales Success

Written By: Dave Manning

Are you tracking your pharma sales activities but still not seeing the results you expect? It may be time to rethink your overall measurement strategy and expand the roster of key performance indicators (KPIs) you are tracking. 

Your ability to optimize sales performance as a pharma/life sciences brand and/or sales leader is significantly shaped by the metrics you’re tracking. It’s vital that you monitor your field sales reps’ daily activities, not only to determine the effectiveness of their approach, but to make sure you are able to identify opportunities for ongoing improvement. However, if you are monitoring only some of the most critical KPIs you may miss out on insights into the essential behaviors and strategies that are actually shaping your overall sales program and the success of the field reps who are at the heart of it. 

Pharma companies have long relied on “hard” or quantitative metrics that are tied closely to monitoring reach and frequency. However, such metrics only tell part of the story.  “Soft metrics” or the qualitative aspects tied to behavior tell the other side of the story and provide a more well-rounded picture of a team’s true performance. Behavioral metrics are those that evaluate how well sales reps call plan, how they perform in meetings with HCPs, and how effective their customer follow-up efforts are. Through direct observation and tracking of winning behaviors and strategies, sales managers will readily recognize the most impactful behaviors and strategies, and can then use these new-found insights to provide targeted feedback that drives ongoing improvement. 

Why Quantitative Metrics Don’t Tell the Entire Story

Everybody appreciates clear-cut quantitative metrics—the ability to measure certain performance attributes in discrete units and then track them using color-coded bar charts. Such visual dashboards provide a useful glimpse into where things stand at any moment and how they have changed over time. 

• You may be familiar with these commonly used metrics and use them to capture the reach and frequency of your sales efforts:  
• Number of sales calls (daily and overall), HCP discussions, and practices visited 
• Call-plan adherence (reach and frequency) 
• Which products were discussed, and which lead product was prioritized during the presentation 
• Sample delivery and utilization per office 
• Metrics related to iPad use during the visit (as the core visual aid used to deliver messaging) 

These quantitative metrics are often seen as the north star for assessing the performance of the sales rep and are routinely tied to compensation and promotion. However, while useful, each of these KPIs simply measures an activity—but provides no deeper insight into the quality of that activity.  

This process is much like monitoring a patient’s pulse, blood pressure, and temperature to determine that a patient is healthy. While these vitals are important, they do not provide insights into a patient’s actual health. Similarly, data gathered from quantitative metrics can help to flag an issue that exists but should inspire you to dig deeper—not draw a final conclusion.

 

There’s another downside to only relying on quantitative KPIs. When aggressive numerical targets are set by the company, field reps tend to put blinders on—becoming so focused on hitting the mark that they lose sight of the quality of the effort put forth to foster trust with HCPs and deliver the clinical messaging in the most targeted way.  

When your reps are more worried about checking the box to confirm how many sales calls they’ve completed or which products they discussed, it creates a perverse incentive to ignore other important elements that could help them raise brand awareness and inform prescribing behaviors among the physicians. Again, this creates an enormous missed opportunity for all stakeholders. 

Adding in Qualitative Metrics Provides a More Complete Diagnosis

Brave, informed leadership is required to break from any business paradigm. It can be hard for pharma companies to move beyond the traditional “reach and frequency” model as the primary measure of success and expand their approach to incorporate qualitative assessments, as well. But by making the top-down commitment to incorporate this new approach, and deploy the right mix of quantitative and qualitative KPIs, you will get a better overall results. 

To bring your sales team’s performance to the next level, you should identify a mix of quantitative and qualitative metrics to obtain more nuanced insights on behaviors that can be further nurtured through accountability and coaching.  

Specifically, when you assess performance through a more humanistic lens, you develop richer insights that will: 

• Inform ongoing process and program improvement 
• Focus hiring, onboarding, training, and coaching activities for individual reps 
• Align the expectations of both the field reps and the sales leaders who manage them 
• Identify best practices that can be modeled for other reps 

Putting it Into Practice

Driving success in a sales organization means adopting a Get Better culture. A Get Better culture is one where good enough is not good enough, and every member of the sales team-leaders and reps-is focused on improving their performance every single day. The Get Better culture is a mindset, but it’s also a skillset, consisting of deliberate practice, frequent observation, and clear and actionable feedback.  

In her book “GRIT,” researcher Angela Duckworth defines deliberate practice as that is driven by goals. When reps engage in deliberate practice, they should be clear on what goals they are trying to achieve, whether it’s clearer messaging, better HCP engagement, or compelling responses to objections. Observation and feedback require at least one other person involved—and that is where leaders play a crucial role. 

Reps are responsible for their performance, but leaders are accountable—and accountability plays a critical role in sustaining behaviors. This means top-down buy-in, consistent coaching, and consistent check-ins to understand how aptitude or attitude might be impeding performance. Sales managers play a critical role when it comes to assessing a rep’s “soft skills.” When it comes to behavior change and performance improvement, observation and feedback are the key tools in the toolkit. That’s why field rides have become the standard in the life sciences industry—because they allow for deeper observations and robust conversations that allow for qualitative dialogue as well as coaching opportunities.  

When you adopt a top-down approach that embraces the use of both quantitative and qualitative metrics, your sales leaders will feel more empowered to evaluate individual call plans based not only on the quantitative targets established by the company but on assessments of the quality and consistency of individual rep activities. The ability to assess performance through direct observation and identify strengths and weaknesses enables more meaningful feedback and more targeted coaching.