“At the end of the day, when I think that somewhere in my territory there is a patient whose life has been improved because of a product I promote, I get a warm, fuzzy feeling and a deep sense of personal satisfaction.”

— Corey Nahman, CEO, InternetDrugNews.com

Pharmaceutical companies impact just about every American’s life. Our country is home to approximately 67,000 pharmacies, and according to a Mayo Clinic study, seven out of ten people in the United States take at least one prescription drug. From testing to production to selling to prescription, a medical product’s journey is complex and involves countless professionals.

The most significant of these professionals? For drug companies that want to stay in business, the answer is easy: sales reps. A pharma rep’s job is demanding, intricate, and at times exhausting. It requires specialized training in pharmacology as well as comprehensive knowledge of subject matters as diverse as biology and sales techniques. Succeeding as a pharma rep also takes a great deal of perseverance – not only to get the job done, but also to withstand misconceptions and misguided stereotyping.

Challenges and myths

If you’ve ever seen a pharma company hosting a banquet-room lunch for doctors and formed the assumption that pharma sales can be bought, think again. The complex relationship between reps and doctors is often incorrectly regarded as a quid-pro-quo system that starts with drug companies providing free meals and paid speaking engagements to doctors in exchange for those doctors prescribing their products. While it’s true that a strategy’s at work here, it’s not designed to woo. It’s about time – which, as we know all too well, doctors have very little of.

Often, coffee or a meal is the only avenue for pharma reps to get in front of a doctor. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of doctors won’t promote a drug they don’t like or believe in. So what’s actually happening at these lunches? The real answer is that salespeople and doctors are coming together to build a partnership focused on determining the best therapy options for patients.

That may sound like a lofty goal for a salesperson, and it is. That’s due not only to the stress of the sales process itself (which includes battling through the myth that reps lack sufficient education to interact with and inform doctors), but also because attaining and retaining a position is no walk in the park.

Many pharma reps come to the job with a background in chemistry, biology, or premed. According to the Princeton Review, pharma companies commonly demand that their sales employees have an advanced degree in the medical field. During their initial years in the industry, they often take advanced courses in pharmacology to deepen their knowledge of their company’s product line. Doing so helps them convey complex scientific and medical concepts in accessible language.

Reps may also have to learn how to interpret data and statistics so as to gain an understanding of both public and private health issues. As a primary source of information for doctors, they have to be prepared to discuss various diseases and new clinical studies, stay up to date with the competition, and thoroughly explain the qualities that make their product better than the competition.

In short, every last one of them has to become a trusted member of the local medical community.

“I love my job” vs. “I need to make more money” – a.k.a. motivation

The intensity, the intellectual challenge, and the satisfaction of helping patients may be just what draws people to this career. “You cannot get discouraged doing a job like this,” says James Bowden, a pharmaceutical sales specialist. “After all, by filling the shoes of a pharmaceutical representative, you bring a great added value to a physician and his or her patients through the drug products that you promote. Do not let anyone else tell you otherwise. That is why I’m doing what I love the most, and that is helping people live longer, healthier, and an overall better quality of life.”

In the best of all worlds, pharma reps are driven by an innate passion for the profession, and they find jobs with companies that value their unique skills and ability to build long-lasting relationships with doctors. But we don’t live in an ideal world, which means that reps’ financial satisfaction is a vital consideration.

A pharma rep’s earnings are 20-30% commission-based – a far higher rate than you’ll find in other industries. But the market is highly competitive – so much so that a “pay for performance” cult has developed and begun to take hold across other sales verticals. Recent HBR research shows that the number of companies offering bonuses or other forms of pay based on performance increased by 6% between 2014 and 2016 alone.

That sounds like great news for pharma reps, right? All they need to do in order to earn financial rewards is hit quota on a regular basis.

Of course, that isn’t as easy as it sounds. With quotas often set at unachievable heights, pharma reps are flying on a wing and prayer. Less than half will succeed – which means the majority will fail.

As you might imagine, failure is not a great bedfellow for reps, who tend to thrive on success; failure leads to frustration and loss of interest in selling your product. If you’re in a leadership position, you can avert such a scenario by instituting business processes that ensure goals are challenging but achievable – present and future – even during periods of enormous change.

How? With the right technology, for one. Advanced technology enables accurate quota management, balanced territory design, and – most importantly – forward-thinking comp plans that tap into your people’s inner motivations.

Gamification, for instance, appeals to salespeople’s competitive spirit. Visibility into individual and team performance will also light a fire beneath them; it’s empowering for reps to have access to sales and call-planning insights that indicate which doctors or institutions are likely to be most receptive to their overtures. Proper visibility also helps reps decide which doctors and institutions would benefit from more visits – and which would not. Add on a bonus calculator, which should be included with any truly robust technology solution, and reps can capitalize on these insights by projecting how much they can increase their earnings. When reps feel inspired to maximize their compensation, the company is simultaneously rewarded with better bottom-line performance.

But technology is only as good as the people who implement and use it. That means it’s vital to bring in expert staff who know their way around the tech and can help you utilize it to its full potential. These experts can conduct ongoing analyses of processes, continually gain and share insight, and cement improvement and revenue growth as an integral part of your company culture.

Beyond love and money

They’ve followed your bliss. They’re not living paycheck to paycheck. They’re energized by running from one doctor’s office to another, checking in with pharmacies, attending conferences, and taking extra courses. But something’s still missing. What is it?

Too much of the time, like many remote workers, your reps are alone. Keep them involved by fostering interactive programs; regular coaching and training sessions are a good place to start. It’s also absolutely vital that your solution can be accessed on mobile devices. The addition of social apps can encourage productive conversations and encourage reps to share inside tips and best practices. Push notifications that provide regular updates on quotas, targets, sales results, and other performance indicators can be a great tool to keep salespeople informed while fostering connectivity.

The bottom line

Pharma sales reps truly are a rare breed, and they’ve got a unique brand of responsibility to the end buyer. Just think about it: when you go to the doctor, it’s typically the pharma rep’s recommendations that end up on your prescription slip.

In such a vital field, giving these professionals the right tools to succeed can have a tangible impact on the life of nearly every American.

Big data, smart data, data lakes, data warehouses, data repositories! It seems like nowadays, the word “data” makes an appearance at every sales conference and in every article. Though this article’s no exception, it’s a little different: we’re here to help you understand these oft-confusing terms and find your way to the right solution.

Most organizations know what they want out of their sales operations, but they often struggle to transform that vision into a reality.

That’s especially tricky to achieve when you need to process large volumes of data from multiple sources. Cleaning, centralizing, validating, and analyzing data are all highly technical and intensive tasks, but the value they can bring to your company is immense.

Data storage: the first stop, but not the destination

A data lake is, in effect, a repository that allows you to store both structured and unstructured data at any scale. The main advantage of this architecture is that the data can be used in its “natural format” – i.e., without having to be structured first – for the purposes of processing, analytics, and visualizations.

Data swamps, meanwhile, are damaged data lakes that either are inaccessible to their potential audience or cannot provide any valuable information. In other words, a data swamp is a data lake “gone bad.” The line between data lakes and data swamps can be a thin one, especially since there’s a relatively low number of users who can realize the full benefits of data lakes.

While undeniably popular, neither of these concepts is particularly new or revolutionary. To perform proper data management, you’ll have to concentrate on both structure and format, which brings us to another highly used term in the data world.

One of the most common ways of storing large volumes of data, data warehouses are essentially massive repositories of integrated data drawn from one or multiple sources. Warehouses can store both current and historical data; they’re used to create reports for both sales reps and management, but also for analytics and similar operations.

In contrast to data lakes, information isn’t “thrown” into a warehouse; rather, it’s transformed, structured, and assigned a specific purpose (say, a particular business area).

Where lakes typically need an expert hand to be useful, warehouses are typically either semi- or fully automated – offering easier access for the common user as well as for company leaders who want to analyze sales figures and related information.

Your North Star: data processing

The debate over the merits of data warehouses vs. data lakes is difficult to settle. In our experience, though, the most important detail is not your storage methodology, but the way you process your data.

For example, one of our largest clients is a national telecommunications company, and they came to us with an enormous amount of data to process. What architecture recommendation did we make for them? None at all. Although we did ultimately utilize a flexible storage solution, that wasn’t one of our prime considerations.

Our client’s business units required the permanent processing of many terabytes of data that had been drawn from multiple sources in multiple formats. The large volume of kickouts and the consequently low quantity of valid data made both storage and usage into major issues.

The first step was establishing best practices for processing the data. It was no problem to replace our client’s legacy systems and combine their formerly disparate data sources into a single repository. However, cleanliness, not storage, was our main concern – so once we got the data in one place, we evaluated it for purity and prioritized it accordingly with logical algorithms.

With the data centralized, the next step was to make it widely accessible through our easy-to-use, code-free data management.

Suddenly, our client’s salespeople had instant access to information about customers and prospects, while management gained the power to execute accurate sales planning. This repository ultimately came to be recognized as a single source of truth for the company’s multiple business units – enabling the creation of better metrics along the way.

The point is, despite storage type and general architecture being common points of contention, they were in fact the least of our client’s problems – and they should be the least of yours, too. No matter how you’re keeping your data, if your reps and managers don’t have easy, real-time access to digestible information, all your investments in storage will be moot!

Data transformation: the wind in your sails

The concept of a single source of truth for corporate data is gaining wide appeal. However, just as a lake isn’t much good if the water is contaminated, a data repository can’t help you much if the data hasn’t been transformed into a usable format.

As many businesses have discovered, the data ocean’s perils don’t stop at processing. Even if you do have a flexible storage solution and know precisely what data is going through your system, it will eventually become obsolete. No matter which route you’re taking, new layers of information will be added constantly, making your data run deeper and deeper.

So, how can you stay afloat?

Well, instead of pushing against the current, use it to your advantage. Consolidate disparate information into a single platform so that you can analyze your data and use it as a catalyst for sales enablement. In other words, strategically transform your data into the wind that fills your sails (or sales!).

It’s great to see companies starting to discover the potential of a single source of truth – after all, we’ve been talking about it and doing it for years. However, making the best of your data requires turning it into actionable insights that can not only improve your reps’ performance, but also give you a whole new perspective on the sales organization.

Those deep and meaningful analytics are the lighthouse that helps you make port in a storm of ever-shifting data.

With our no-code Data Repository and ETL capabilities, Optymyze can handle even the most complex data management as well as extraction, transformation, and load (ETL) requirements – managing and processing thousands of data tables with hundreds of millions of records that comprise multiple terabytes of data.

We all get territorial sometimes. It’s part of being human; when someone’s territorial boundaries are violated, it naturally sparks a defensive response. That may be unavoidable in life and in love – but when it comes to sales territories, conflict doesn’t need to be inevitable.

It’s a simple formula: sales reps will cry foul whenever they feel their sales territories are distributed unfairly, triggering infighting and chaos. Obviously, fruitful territories are a big deal, given that they translate into better quota attainment and higher compensation. So it’s only natural that when salespeople think their accounts are getting taken from them without good reason or that other reps are overstepping their designated territories, tensions flare up. Of course, if you’re a sales manager, preventing this scenario should be one of your top priorities.

Although some healthy competition is natural – even beneficial – fights over territories are bound to affect team cohesiveness and, ultimately, your bottom line. That’s why it’s vital to ensure that your sales territories create a collaborative environment that motivates your reps to work toward achieving your company’s goals.

Go beyond geographic territories

Approximately 20 percent of sales organizations still delineate their sales territories using only geographic dimensions. This is a useful strategy for preventing conflicts between salespeople, but it’s also a simplistic approach that can result in ambitious sales reps getting stuck with territories that aren’t particularly active – a situation that not only creates resentment but also prevents them from realizing their full sales potential. Fortunately, there are other territory management strategies that can prevent infighting more effectively while getting more productivity out of your reps.

Dividing sales territories optimally starts from the ground up. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for sales force structuring; rather, there are numerous possibilities, each with pros and cons. A well-designed structure may incorporate elements from any or all of them, just as long as it outlines clear selling roles and responsibilities while leveraging your people’s skills and experience with specific industries, types of accounts, or products and services.

Remember: there’s no such thing as a perfect, immutable sales structure. As businesses expand, merge, go international, or add more segments, their sales structures need to be adjusted accordingly – and that isn’t always easy since such major changes often result in territory infighting. For instance, going through a merger without a sound process for realigning territories can result in some areas becoming flooded with your reps, who end up competing with one another for accounts. It won’t be long before those conflicts between your salespeople turn from isolated events into a nagging problem.

If revising your sales structure sounds like a daunting task, consider bringing in sales territory management experts who can help you eliminate territory infighting and create a more tailored sales structure, all while working toward longer-term goals such as expanding into other markets.

Approach territory planning as an ongoing process

Once you have a flexible, effective sales structure in place, the next step is implementing a territory management plan that will help you allocate resources fairly and efficiently, preventing imbalance and infighting.

No set of territories is a finished product; the need for changes, be they big or small, will inevitably present itself. It’s crucial to make rapid, data-driven decisions to account for factors such as new customers, changes in customer purchasing behaviors, and major turnover. Who should get the accounts that once belonged to the sales director who just left your company? What territory will you assign to new sales reps that will motivate them and put them in position to succeed?

The answers to such questions lie, just waiting to be uncovered, in your sales data. Which of your reps is great at chasing down new prospects and having initial conversations, and who’s best suited to demo your products and close the sale? Do some of your salespeople excel at handling large enterprises, while others have an innate capability for closing smaller deals? A strong, agile territory planning process needs this information to leverage your sales force’s skills in ways that maximize productivity, shorten sales cycles, and avert conflict.

Properly aligning or realigning sales territories also requires the ability to model various scenarios and evaluate the impact of changes before rolling them out – factoring in sales data such as workload, capacity, number of accounts, market trends, and revenue and account potential. This typically involves some collaboration, so it’s important to have a streamlined process in place that incorporates all the relevant stakeholders.

The bottom line

Territory infighting is a seemingly minor problem that can trigger enormous headaches down the road, so it’s best to have a system in place that reaches multiple levels of the organization. Start with a thoughtfully designed sales structure, and reinforce it with an agile, data-driven territory planning process that ensures optimal coverage. That way, your reps won’t ever need to argue about who’s getting the best accounts – and you’ll be able to tackle change head-on.

Planning your sales territories is about much more than just drawing borders. You have to balance several key aspects: from skill distribution to sales force tenure, from turnover to territory sizing and so on. Each of these elements can significantly impact the success of your business.

Research shows that effective territory management can result in attainable quotas and increased rep productivity, resulting in increased sales and reduced costs.

Let’s take a look at the main steps in territory planning and what determines the success of their implementation.

1. Play with scenarios. Territory modeling can take your results from good to great. Correct modeling requires experience supported by the right data and tools to ensure the end result is decisive. Flexible sales performance management software allows you to evaluate different scenarios and reach the right decisions. Running different territory simulations with real data can show you the overall impact on all affected individuals, directly or through hierarchy rollups. Modeling enables you to size territories effectively, forecast with greater accuracy, and budget appropriately.
2. Evaluate skill distribution. Assess individual contribution and draw the conclusions that will help you sustain sales performance with a consistent coverage of territories. Identify top, average and low performers. Look where growth rates are highest and which are the most stable segments. Translate all KPI data into meaningful percentages, such as which territories are below the national or regional average. You sit on a mountain of data, so use it! This way, you will know where you have to work harder, transfer knowledge, or improve team performance. Also, you can identify areas that require a partnership with HR to retain and/or develop talent.
3. Analyze tenure and turnover. You know what losing experienced reps can do to your sales performance. Research from DePaul University indicates that it takes an average of 6.2 months to replace an open sales position. And the bottom line impact of losing an experienced rep is about $115,000 ($29,000 acquisition costs, $36,000 training costs, and $50,000 in lost sales. What do you do when that happens? Start by mapping turnover to sales performance to identify geographies where the two trend lines sharply diverge. You then have a few ways to manage the situation: partner with HR to improve employee engagement in trouble areas, involve Sales Ops to reassign talent to the geographies most in need, or adjust compensation plans within those regions to increase retention through long-term incentives. In a similar way, the expectation is that tenure should drive sales performance, so look for signs where they are going separate ways.
4. Look at territory sizing. Split/merge sales areas if needed. When was the last time you resized territories? Is the current division aligned to market conditions? Measure current market share/market share growth and compare to the similar time last year. If salespeople are the same, and market conditions have improved, yet sales have dropped, this is your hint to take action. Remember, it’s the market that drives territory sizing, not the other way around.
5. Use compensation plan design to optimize territory coverage. Keep an eye on your compensation plan and be ready to make adjustments if you want to succeed in transferring knowledge from one place to another. For example, some areas can be tougher than others or simply new and undeveloped so market share might be very low. If you expect sales talent to accept a challenging territory, make sure the incentive matches the complexity. Synchronize your compensation plan to your business strategy and any changes planned for the sales team.
6. Use the power of big data. Effective reporting can shed new light on your sales performance in each territory and bring you closer to your targets. Explore data from the different areas to trigger actionable items, like dropping or adding a sales channel. Geographic information, market conditions, and customer data can help you recognize opportunities, improve performance, and increase sales. Identifying leakage and misalignments can also drive decisions that will change territory performance.
7. Make change your ally, not your enemy. Big sales organizations are very slow to change. Sales Ops departments can play a big part in making change easier and achieving the desired outcome. Your goal is to compress the time that passes from the moment a problem materializes until you solve it. Bring forward data to support solutions as soon as possible and sketch action plans faster. Is your organization ready to play the changing game today? Answer these seven questions to assess your organization’s capacity to change:
   • How many changes has your company deployed over the past three years?
   • How many changes does it have planned over the next three years?
   • How many automated triggers are in place to detect early signs that change is needed?
   • Are skills and tenure evenly distributed across all territories?
   • Are your compensation plans aligned to business strategy?
   • Is your Sales Ops organization agile enough to react before the competition beats you to it?
   • How often do you simulate results of territory changes before actually making a change?

If you are displeased with the answer to one or more of these questions, it might be time to step up your game. Typically, implementing change across territories can take months, even years. You need the knowledge and the tools to compress that time. Remember that all the players in the market know their game. Making the best decisions in the shortest time is what makes the difference.

Originally posted on Dec 9, 2015

“My patients could really use your medication, but their insurance will never approve it!”

If your pharma sales reps keep hearing that from the doctors they’re calling on, it can seriously harm your company’s bottom line. When a global pharmaceutical company’s business hit an insurance roadblock, it enlisted the help of Optymyze to help its salespeople reach the right prescribers and increase sales.

Growing Pains

Visiting office after office, only to be denied repeatedly, is not exactly what salespeople’s dreams are made of. Unfortunately, that’s precisely what was happening to the reps for our client’s proprietary cholesterol-reducing drug. They found that some of the nation’s biggest insurance companies were only willing to cover generic cholesterol medicines – meaning they simply wouldn’t pay out for this more expensive pill.

Indeed, generics are now more than 11 times cheaper on average than their brand-name equivalents, and as such make up a whopping 89% of the prescriptions written in the United States. That leaves a relatively narrow market for the brand-name medications that are effectively pioneering new treatments.

All this conspires to create a difficult set of circumstances for the sales reps tasked with connecting patients to this drug – and the result, you may not be shocked to learn, was lagging sales.

In search of a solution, the pharmaceutical company enlisted the help of Optymyze, bringing our experts in to participate in councils with both salespeople and management. We studied their business processes carefully, and we even sent some of our associates on ride-alongs with sales reps to observe their experience in the field firsthand.

Code-Free. Full Scale.

Our answer to our client’s problems: the new Managed Care app – a no-code application that expands the power of the Optymyze solution for pharmaceutical companies.

By combining industry data streams with company-provided data, Optymyze built a powerful database of prescriber and insurance information. That data is transformed into vital insights for sales reps and delivered through the simple and intuitive interface of the Managed Care app, which identifies doctors in each rep’s territory who have the greatest potential to become prescribers of this – or any – medication.

A highly effective tool for pre-call planning and sales coaching, the Managed Care app helps sales reps use their time more effectively, including focusing on offices with multiple prescribers and higher densities of potential patients. With the app, reps can refine their messaging, handle objections, plan calls to maximize sales opportunities, and cement their relationships with doctors for the long haul.

A Long-Term Prescription

Developed in just four weeks, the Managed Care app’s valuable insights have “leveled the playing field,” in the words of one top-performing sales rep.

Since the launch of the app, the cholesterol medication has stopped lagging behind the manufacturer’s other offerings, with both the company and its sales reps reaping the rewards. Those reps who’ve used the app most heavily have seen their income increase by a whopping 150%, while the business has seen its revenue rise more than 20% since it began working with Optymyze in 2015.

Along with those material changes has come a change in mentality within the pharmaceutical manufacturer’s sales force; once focused on looking backward due to an old sales compensation solution that required extensive shadow accounting, the reps enjoy a more forward-looking mindset today. To wit: early on, reps were spending 75% of their time in the Optymyze portal looking at past results; by 2017, that figure had dropped to just 20%.

But this single company’s success is just the starting point. The standardized, code-free nature of the app means that it can, with minimal setup time, be integrated into any pharma enterprise’s sales operations, allowing its sales reps to reap the benefits of instant, actionable insights.

In other words, our one-time solution has grown into a full-time cure!

Discover our solutions

With No-Code Application Development, Optymyze can improve time to value within sales in all industries through its non-technical, fully integrated platform as a service – enabling rapid deployment of apps and automation of business processes without any need for programmers, developers, or coders. Improve the agility of your sales ops with apps that add even more functionality and flexibility to the Optymyze solution.

Time is a precious commodity – but especially for salespeople.

However, recent research has shown that they’re spending only about 37% of their time on selling – meaning more than 60% of their time is being wasted.

It’s common for sales reps to spend much of their days catching up on emails, handling tedious and often unnecessary administrative tasks, engaging in shadow accounting, and trying to make sense of disorganized sales enablement data.

Worse yet, when businesses go through major changes – from mergers and acquisitions to the addition of new business units – salespeople are usually the ones left hanging. Signals get crossed, inboxes get flooded, or the communication system breaks down altogether. When you’ve got a large sales force, issues like these can quickly blow up into a logistical nightmare.

One of our clients, a global manufacturer of high-end beauty products, encountered just this sort of problem: their legacy communication processes were no longer sufficient for a company with 30-plus brands, more than 1,000 sales reps, and thousands of retail locations.

Their sales force was inundated with an uncoordinated, unstructured torrent of emails about educational/reference material for promotions, new products, seasonal instructions, sales goals, and industry trends. Although it was all relevant information, digging through all those emails was wasting time and preventing reps from carrying out essential sales activities. They also had little guidance available as to which stores, brands, or product categories needed extra attention to drive sales.

Streamlining and automating all these communications may seem like a daunting task, but thanks to our code-free application development, it took only a matter of weeks for us to roll out a host of apps that present sales reps and management alike with all the information they need to sell more successfully.

From highly detailed, priority-identifying call-planning apps to the customizable store feedback app, we’ve given the sales force clear direction on which stores to visit and how often – and they, in turn, can more easily inform management about individual stores’ needs, such as more or different training. Reps also enjoy a central repository for all their educational/reference materials.

And whether they’re in the office or out visiting stores, they can always access all the essential information they need from either desktop or mobile.

Meanwhile, leadership now uses our specialized task-planning app to push key priorities to reps and then track their progress. Rather than dealing with messy emails full of status reports and Excel sheets, they enjoy real-time visibility into their salespeople’s daily activities with a live, interactive app that helps draw valuable insights from the realities out in the field.

The newly centralized and automated processes have cut sales reps’ email volume by 60% – and accordingly increased the time they’re spending in stores by 47%.

If your organization is wasting time on menial administrative tasks or struggling with inefficient processes, consider how no-code apps can liberate your sales force and increase productivity. After all, as Benjamin Franklin once said, “Lost time is never found again.”