How to improve your field force performance?

The new operating model can help you improve field force performance through solid customer engagement in digital channels. Finally, your sales reps can successfully execute both visits and digital communications. 

If you are faced with the challenge of increasing sales without expanding your sales force's resources, your first option is multichannel marketing. You'll spend time, resources and effort creating and maintaining websites, you'll invest heavily in content development to get found in search engines, you'll buy more and more ads on social media to gain access to your customers, and you'll send hundreds of email campaigns. This can work, but today's decision makers agree that it's difficult to predict the exact impact of multichannel marketing on your sales. Online content today is short-lived, search engine rankings are highly competitive, emails and ads are expensive, open rates are low and engagement is minimal. This is frustrating for most sales managers. Marketers in the pharmaceutical industry are uncertain whether multichannel activities will lead to growth and whether they will ultimately be significant enough to improve sales in the prescription drug industry from cycle to cycle. While OTC or FMCG products benefit from multichannel sales, where patients are counted in the millions, prescription drug marketing is dealing with a very different type and number of customers to reach, inform and activate. Multichannel gimmicks do not work well with smaller groups of oncologists, cardiologists, etc. Fewer emails are read, fewer websites are opened, and customers bounce spam more violently. Finally, you need a digital manager to help you pull off the next digital miracle.

At the same time, your reps' performance shines with successful visit appointments.

According to various reports (including the recent McKinsey report https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/the-future-of-b2b-sales-is-hybrid), the future of pharma is hybrid selling.

Imagine a pharmaceutical sales rep sending pre-approved rich media messages directly to the physician's smartphone after each visit or between visits. That's like doubling the capacity of your sales force with very meaningful and compelling video content. The only challenge: how do you put this into action?

Since pharma marketing is highly regulated, you can not pitch products via SMS, Whatsapp or other two-way communication. You need a one-way technology with pre-approved content and tracking capabilities that support SMS and other modern rich media technologies. Highp is a good example of a good solution for this goal.

When you deploy Highp, your sales reps will learn many new skills in the first cycle. They'll learn how to choose the right context for sending follow-up messages, build the right content expectation, and deliver the right message in the right context at the right time. With our training programs, real-time data feedback, and operating model (relationship context awareness), your team can achieve engagement rates of 30% or more right from the start. That means 30 out of every 100 invitations sent are opened and clicked on by the customer. 30% is much more than any cold email campaign can offer, but it's just a start.

Now here is an important twist. In digital marketing, we use CTR (click-through rate) to measure the click-through rate. This is the average of all messages that were clicked on. However, we have found that with direct messaging, there are three other important aspects that influence results: the relationship between the rep and the customer, the context of the delivery, and the perception of value behind the invitation. We believe these three elements play a critical role in customer engagement in hybrid selling.

In Highp, you can break down your results by rep and identify the 10 best and the 10 worst. You'll find that the best reps have an engagement rate of 70%, while the 10 worst only score 10%. The average is 30%, but that's irrelevant. To improve your engagement, you need to focus on the worst-performing employees and improve their skills, motivation, and engagement.

The Highp Operating Model can help you do this with real-time data, policies, and training programs. Our recent case studies show that a marketer can improve hybrid engagement rates by 10% per cycle. Such improvement cannot be achieved with multichannel marketing or automated marketing. Our most advanced customers achieve engagement rates of 80% or more.

Invest in maximizing the performance of your sales team with powerful technology and an operating model. This is how you can become the highest-performing product manager in your organization. The future is in hybrid sales.