Identifying and nurturing talent in your salesforce
pharmafile | August 7, 2006 | Feature | Sales and Marketing | Schering-Plough, UK, sales, strategy
The aim of every company, pharma or otherwise, is to boost sales and take a greater market share. However, despite the intention, the way to achieve this goal may not be clear, and all too often, the route hurriedly embarked upon by sales managers is to increase the size and/or number of sales forces without any strategic plan. Taking this approach inevitably leads to a frenzy of re-organisations, none of which goes on to deliver the goods in the long-term.
In today's ultra-competitive pharma markets (especially in blockbusters), one thing is clear: size matters, and out-shouting and outspending your competitors becomes the number one priority. But increasing the size of the sales force is not necessarily the answer – doctors do not want to see a procession of sales reps passing through their doors, and, of course, a larger salesforce doesn't come cheap – in fact, it's the most expensive resource a company has.
So, if increasing the size of your sales force isn't a viable or productive option, is there another way to improve excellence (and therefore sales) without going down the same old routes ?
Quality not quantity
A good place to start is by looking at quality. Quality improvement is a valuable way of adding to the bottom line, bearing in mind that quality is not uniform across the industry, or even within your own company.
It might seem logical to assume that improving quality should begin with better interaction with physicians, leading to more sales and, from there, to more engagement with the physician audience for easier future access. But selling quality is just like finding gold in the ground – it's a hidden asset, or an untapped resource, waiting to be exploited. What's more, it's plentiful and it can be put into action immediately. But the drawback is you need the right tools to expose it, and if you don't have these, it can be very time consuming, expensive in resources and frustrating to get at it.
About a year ago, Schering-Plough decided that selling quality was going to be a key differentiator in the way the company demonstrated sales force and marketing excellence, and it started to look at ways of making this happen. The aim was to launch a selling-skills and competency model in a standard reproducible way across all Schering-Plough teams, thereby achieving a smarter coaching tool for the business, to give greater call impact.
However, this could only be done by having consistent skill and coaching processes, and by developing a field measurement tool to capture all coaching forms, which, when analysed, would lead to smarter training interventions at rep, team, national and company level.
One of the key aims behind this strategy was to ensure there was consistent management behaviour, particularly when assessing and coaching those reps making the field visit report, as there would be a much more objective and rigorous interaction between manager and rep. It also provided a move away from a subjective way of assessing and coaching towards a completely objective method using a coaching checklist and agreed performance level descriptors. Furthermore, by enhancing awareness across the sales forces, very high standards could be achieved.
The project would make use of field visit coaching, and the setting and tracking of objectives, both of which would link back to the Schering-Plough performance management process (PMP).
Out of the black hole
The first step on this road was to launch a complete sales and marketing process review, which quickly revealed that Schering-Plough had many good processes in place such as PMP, and a success and quality-based culture, based on collaboration between rep and manager.
But there were problem areas, too. For example, skills measurement was very subjective, with a wide range of skills among the first-line manager group, and a pretty much ad-hoc approach with a variety of tools, ranging from Excel spreadsheets, to recording on the ETMS system, and even to good, old-fashioned paper. This led to the black hole scenario, where information is captured at the lowest level, so it can't be compared to anything else or benchmarked, and, hence, best practice cannot be identified.
So-called silo mentality also presented a problem. In this situation, information is captured separately by sales, marketing, training and development, and HR, but inevitably some information is duplicated, and identifying these duplications can be tricky as they may be described differently by the various teams. Furthermore, sales performance and competencies/skills were not integrated as there was no link between the sales results, and the actions and interventions that reps and managers were taking to achieve these.
Once the current situation had been researched, it was clear there were some challenges ahead, and these were categorised into three main areas; namely process, systems and people.
Strategies and tactics
To further refine the processes, the already successful elements were blended to give more rigour and objectivity, integrating sales results and recognising the two different streams of tactical and strategic input.
This division into two streams was very important. Strategic was defined as competencies that were measured periodically, typically 2-3 times a year, and these could be developmental competencies such as leadership, cross-functional working etc, which could apply to any Schering-Plough employee. The technical competency, which in the case of sales people could be characterised as selling excellence, was measured by capturing all the tactical information acquired on field visits, and then rolling this up using special algorithms to populate the strategic level for this competency.
On the tactical side, the granular information of what happened on each and every field visit, which objectives were set, and the tracking of improvement over a series of field visits using sequential coaching, were available for review.
But the second and probably biggest challenge was to get all of the participants buy-in, especially as a large part of the potential audience, the sales force, had already been through recent technology rollouts such as ETMS. The systems also needed to be revamped to enable the newly defined processes to actually work, to capture, display, share and track all the information needed.
The process review, in conjunction with allowing the audience to participate fully in the prototyping and piloting of the systems, handled these first two hurdles very effectively, while the system's needs were met by CSL's SFE manager system, which was then customised to Schering-Plough's needs, and configured to match the Schering-Plough processes.
Finally, to breathe life into the project, and enhance ownership and pride, it was christened SQP – selling quality programme.
A user-friendly system
The system shows in a graphic and user-friendly way the competencies and skills, the key activities, the sales results, objectives and, finally, the summarised PMP results and document publication. The principles of the system were that data (such as sales and activity) were automatically imported into the system, measurement of skills and competencies were then performed on field coaching days, and this information was subsequently recorded and tracked over time.
This approach had a number of advantages, including accuracy, as information was captured in a timely way when manager and rep were working together.
It was also rigorous because all skills and competencies were measured against a matrix agreed and understood by all parties involved, i.e. sales, training and development, and HR. This meant that information could be shared as it was collected off-line and then synchronised between management, reps, HR and so on, thereby cutting down on communication overheads.
The process and system were seen as fair and objective by the reps, which meant they participated willingly, and it was easy, after a day's work, to discuss and capture real-world issues. Any objectives were jointly agreed and had to conform to a template, and include all the specifics of the objectives, timeframe, ownership, and resources required.
Successful implementation
Any solution is only as effective as the people involved, and it was essential to make sure that everyone was comfortable with using the system, and understood the process. This was achieved at first by involving multi-disciplinary project teams, including business leaders from HR, T&D, sales and business information, and also end-users such as first- and second-line sales managers and, of course, reps.
A progressive pilot rollout structure was used, starting with one team and then expanding to others, taking on feedback from each team and improving the system incrementally each time as the result of experience.
The results have been extremely good, as there have been striking improvements in both the rigour/objectivity of coaching and how this information is captured, and also in the overall engagement of the sales teams, who now feel that they have a process that not only enhances excellence for Schering-Plough, but also works for them.
On the tactical side, it is now easy to look at an individual's skills and coaching needs from a point of view of sequential coaching, thereby highlighting on each field-visit the key skills to improve the performance compared to the previous time it was measured.
Looking at the strategic side, there have been two main benefits: skills gaps across the company can be assessed, and strategic thought can be applied to the planning of training and development interventions, in the most efficient way; for example, by planning courses or e-learning initiatives.
Pinpointing talent
But perhaps the most important benefit, corporately, is knowing the identities of the top talent sales and management people. By combining information on sales performance and competencies/skills within SQP, Schering-Plough can now see who these individuals are; people who are ambassadors for the company, successful, and highly skilled, as distinct from those who have only some of these attributes. This reveals who is really doing the work in the mirror territory scenario where sales results are identical, but skills and coaching are not.
Furthermore, it is now easy to identify people who are successful in sales, but who currently lack the right skills/attributes, allowing appropriate development and training interventions to be put in place to give them a road map to achieving top talent status. Equally, those who exhibit the right skills, but are not currently achieving sales success, can also be identified, and objectives for converting their theoretical knowledge and skills into practical sales can be set.
Another benefit coming through is the reduction in management time required to complete coaching and appraisal documentation – instead of a frenzy of cutting and pasting from various documents, everything pertinent to the coaching and development of the individual reps is entered once into the system and linked to them, which has the effect of drastically cutting down administration time, both for day-to-day field coaching and the PMP cycle. This allows managers and reps to concentrate more of their time on revenue-generating work.
Reaping golden rewards
Company-wide within Schering-Plough, motivation is now boosted as any staff member can see where they are within their career progression pathways and can consider how they are going to get to where they want to go.
Results are showing distinct improvements in skill levels – some as high as 40% over six months, with the sales results to go with it – and these results are coming from previously average or lower end performers.
Considering that in most organisations, 20% of sales people are top performers, 20% are low performers, and 60% are average, leveraging quality for this 60% of people by just a few percentage points can make a huge difference to the bottom line.
To summarise, still taking the gold-mining analogy, Schering-Plough went through four distinct stages on the route to sales force excellence. It started by ensuring the skills appropriate to the business were tackled (defining); it identified best practice so it could concentrate on the skills most likely to make a difference (mining); it then set up a loop of constant improvement, filtering out distractions and focusing on the matter in hand (refining); and, finally, it achieved best practice with a fully motivated team (shining).
Richard Whitehead is Global VP, sales and marketing, at CSL; richard@csl-uk.com
Lorna Passmore is Director Business Operations at Schering-Plough; Lorna.passmore@spcorp.com
This case study was first presented at the BHBIA's 2006 conference.
The British Healthcare Business Intelligence Association aims to promote the professionalism and value of business intelligence within the healthcare industry.
It is a non-profit organisation which represents pharmaceutical companies, independent organisations and individuals in the UK that provide business intelligence and consultancy services to the pharmaceutical industry.
www.bhbia.org.uk
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