The role of the pharmaceutical field rep is highly complex. They need to be experts in clinical matters, disease states, provider businesses, and competitive analysis. They must also be highly skilled in building relationships, be able to recall an encyclopedia volume’s worth of product knowledge at a moment’s notice and have a cunning ability to sell value to providers. The more the organization can facilitate information consumption and contribute to quality provider conversations, the more successful the sales teams will be.
Such is the case for a global pharmaceutical organization that needed a better way to enable its field reps to drive more consistent business results.
Performance Development Group’s (PDG) partnership with this pharma giant began in 2019. PDG discovered that a crucial shortcoming in their sales delivery process was the quality of healthcare provider (HCP) conversations. Pharma reps are expected to have deep product knowledge; however, in the case of this particular organization, finding the right information at the right time was not always easy.
The pharma company realized they needed a better way to help their 1,200+ field reps access product information to facilitate more successful conversations with providers. In addition, they needed a solid process and technology to deliver, reinforce, and measure knowledge transfer without taking the reps out of the field to attend training, which would be costly.
This meant conducting a comprehensive assessment of how and where information is consumed and an evaluation of their existing information systems. PDG’s challenge was to develop a sales enablement solution that delivered the most salient and valuable information to field reps at the precise time of need so that they could improve client conversations. Additionally, all of this had to be accomplished without disrupting the sales reps’ flow of work.
“PDG’s challenge was to develop a sales enablement solution that delivered the most salient and valuable information to field reps at the precise time of need so that they could improve client conversations. Additionally, all of this had to be accomplished without disrupting the sales reps’ flow of work.”
PDG developed a strategic roadmap for program objectives, content, and a delivery method that aligned with their client’s business goals.
PDG initially focused on developing general content. From there, they built out program components to include additional paths for acquiring specific information, including clinical data, key talking points for pitches, specifics on diseases, and anything else that might add value to a conversation with a provider. Content was added quarterly related to new product rollouts and clinical changes to existing products.
To make the content both memorable and accessible, PDG developed an AI-powered solution delivered through the company’s learning experience platform (LXP). This delivery method enables field reps to access the most valuable and essential product knowledge in bite-sized pieces when and where they need it. They also served up daily, five-minute articles to keep important topics top of mind.
The use of AI helps tailor the content to individuals based on their unique understanding of the concepts. Key ideas are reinforced through fun quizzes and confidence scores (where the sales rep is asked to rate the confidence level of their answer). Questions with low confidence scores are repeated in a different manner.
PDG’s sales enablement solution makes it easy for reps to get product knowledge, fact-check, and gather the data that’s most important to their client conversations.
A key benefit of this solution is it allows field reps to maximize their time selling while giving them the data they need to establish credibility and trust with providers.
Stakeholder feedback regarding the sales enablement solution has been overwhelmingly positive. Field teams feel more informed and confident when interacting with providers, and sales leaders love the system as it contributes to more consistent performance hitting targets.
The sales enablement solution was not mandatory to use but proved to be popular among the field teams.
90%
“The average product knowledge baseline increased from 75% to 90% – triple the original target of 5%.”
Since the program has been in place:
This solution has been so successful that the company plans on expanding it to include more job-specific clinical knowledge.
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