Taking a holistic view in evaluating and revamping sales force effectiveness can have a significant impact on the overall health of multi-national pharmaceutical company.
Our client, a large global pharmaceutical was facing a range of outside stressors with regard to brand health and overall effectiveness of its sales force. The client, with a $1B market lead, had in place a highly complex sales team structure with products at various life stage and objectives.
Despite maintaining a large portion of market share, there was a high degree of uncertainty of future events due to competition and regulation, a loss of exclusivity and a second generation of competition, an overstretched forecast of a new brand, and high regrettable turnover amongst the sales force.
In order to revamp and restructure the sales force and bolster its effectiveness, KMK worked to evaluate and design a series of responses, taking a multi-pronged approach to address a wide range of sales issues.
With client collaboration KMK re-evaluated the overall brand strategy and forecast, researched promotion responsiveness and analyzed short- and long-term ROI.
In addition, we looked into the structure of current sales teams including account size and sales rep time allocation, team collaboration and management efficiency.
Part of the sales force effectiveness redesign would necessarily include a “Reward for Growth” IC plan, visualized reports with full sales transparency across the teams and management, an analysis of IC as investment vs. expense, as well as to identify data needs and to streamline the process from top-to-bottom.
By utilizing these changes, we were able to help our client achieve channel profitability and balanced payer mix, as well as significant enhancements to referral and affiliation network identification.
In addition, overall sales success and restructuring led to minimized rep displacement and turnover, as well as created balanced earning opportunities between brands through a superior IC methodology.
Activities
- Brand strategy and forecast
- Future events and market environment change
- Promotion responsiveness
- Short-term and long-term ROI evalution
- Account size and sales rep time allocation
- Team collaboration and management efficiency
- Take employee address into territory design
- Geography workability
- Geopolitical boundary and referral network
- Visualized reports with full transparency
- IC as investment vs. expense
- Identify data needs and streamline processes
Results
- Channel profitability
- Payer mix
- Sales growth and avoidance of sales team cannibalization and rep turnover
- Effective “Reward for Growth” IC plan
- Effective geography workability
- Geopolitical boundary and referral network
- Full transparency with visualized reporting among teams and management
- Streamlined and data needs and processes
Key Learnings
- A variety and breadth of factors can lead to sales force stagnation, the problem must be evaluated holistically at each stage of the sales process
- IC plan redesign can cure turnover quickly
- Restructuring the sales force geographically can generate immediate changes
