“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.”

Today’s sales organizations produce enormous amounts of data – but as useful as that can be as a catalyst for smarter, more effective selling, it’s typically far too disorganized and decentralized to serve that purpose.

Indeed, making sense of all that data is a monumental task that too often ends in expensive and disappointing failures. The result? A lack of timely insights into sales performance, which leads to slow decision-making, costly implementation of incorrect strategies based on gut feelings rather than facts, lost opportunities, lower revenue, dwindling market share, and ultimately C-level and board dissatisfaction.

Today, untangling your data shouldn’t be this hard. Producing quality sales operations reporting and analysis shouldn’t require complex, time-consuming projects.  Why then are so many organizations having difficulty?

Read on to see how we helped a client see a 10% gain quarter over quarter.

In 2015, a Fortune 50 conglomerate approached us with a problem: they couldn’t untangle the mountain of data they had coming in from across the globe. All that information was stored in discrete, incompatible legacy systems – with this mess rather than a single, harmonized source of truth, this company was struggling to make payroll on time and see clearly into performance data.

Today, this company enjoys clean, consolidated data that’s available to users at the push of a button. Our client can add thousands of payees and process trillions of dollars’ worth of transactions easily in a code-free environment. Their sales operations team now manually processes 90% fewer transaction-level disputes, and the Center of Excellence we implemented lets them run data processes smoothly in locations around the world.

Here’s the payoff: with more accurate data and access to timely insights across the organization, the company has seen a 10% increase in quarter-over-quarter sales performance since 2015.

This is the kind of real impact that results from untangling your data. Clear, usable data enhances process efficiency, enables data-driven decisions, and increases sales.

So how can you make more money by understanding your SPM data?

Step 1: Let go of antiquated legacy systems

You may be accustomed to them, but they’re not working for you.

Legacy systems are a roadblock in the path of your organization’s growth. Changing them can be complicated and time-consuming, requiring buy-in from multiple stakeholders as well as investments in terms of both labor and capital. But when achievement of your sales goals is hanging in the balance, it pays to move aggressively and decisively.

Replace your outdated and inefficient legacy systems with automated processes that consolidate and harmonize data for you – freeing up resources to focus on executing your sales strategy. There’s no need to handle data sheets manually anymore; instead, a modern platform can process massive amounts of data from disparate sources without you getting bogged down in the details.

Step 2: Connect siloed, disparate data sources

Data comes in a variety of formats and syntaxes, and for most organizations, it’s stored in siloed, disparate repositories. Without connecting all those sources together, you won’t be able to draw accurate and timely insights from all that valuable data.

With fierce competition across industries, every sales organization is looking for an edge – and gathering your data into one single source of truth can be that edge. With access to technology that can integrate into your SPM platform and process huge amounts of data at lightning speed, you’ll be able to make timely, actionable insights readily available to everyone who needs them.

Step 3: Get insights from clean, untangled data

Once you’ve gathered all your data into a centralized location, it’s vital that you have easy access that permits you to glean those actionable insights from it. Clean, untangled data paints a clear picture of past and present performance, allowing you to model predictive scenarios for all aspects of sales.

It also offers a major boost to your salespeople in the field – giving them the information they need to seize high-potential opportunities and close deals more successfully.

Step 4: Access the resources and knowledge to unlock the power of data

Even the most powerful and resourceful companies can struggle with this aspect of sales operations; it simply isn’t in their wheelhouse. That’s where a reliable, experienced partner comes in.

The aforementioned Fortune 50 company tried to do it all on its own with an ad hoc system, but that approach didn’t work. An in-house system might work for small-scale operations, but global businesses with massive data streams need a dedicated platform that can integrate, process, and transform all that data into a usable form that boosts sales and revenue.

With our innovative technology and decades of combined experience in streamlining sales operations, we can help you convert your sales data challenges into sales opportunities.

Learn more about this success story and get in touch with us today to discover how we can help you harness the power of data to build enduring sales success.

Making quota is a constant concern in sales; in fact, studies have shown that only 65% of field sales reps are hitting their quotas. Sometimes, the solution to this problem isn’t there to be excavated from your quarterly reports; rather, it hinges on how your organization understands and defines one key concept: territory management.

As businesses acquire new customers and existing customers change their purchasing behaviors, sales organizations are under constant pressure to stay in top shape and adapt their territory plans. In fact, research published in the Harvard Business Review indicates that sales can increase by up to 7% purely through territory redesign.

However, manual territory administration and a related lack of foresight into sales results can prevent your business from reacting quickly to internal and external change. This can lead to multiple issues: inaccurate and inaccessible data, disruptive reassignments, low sales productivity, infighting, and turmoil.

When a global pharma company was struggling with those concerns, we developed a plan to update their territory alignments rapidly and get their sales organization back on track. Their story offers a perfect test case for transforming territory management to support your business goals.

1. Balance your workload

Although your sales department might be looking toward the future, territory plans are too often rooted in past results – resulting in overly standardized workload distribution and an inability to adapt to market forces.

That’s why it’s crucial to have a deep understanding of workload planning. This process can be aimed at maximizing short-term sales by focusing on the highest-performing territories, or it may look to build long-term customer life value by concentrating on existing customers, regardless of their locations.

The key is discovering the optimal sales effort for each account and maximizing sales calls for analyzing each territory’s output and potential in terms of revenue and profit margins over a longer period of time. Doing so can reveal surprising insights about all your territories, from the most fruitful to the laggards.

2. Go beyond geography

Whether you’re a rookie sales rep or an experienced executive, the first thing that the word “territories” brings to mind is a map. In fact, most articles with advice pertaining to territory management will start with and insist on the importance of geographic coverage. However, defining your territory plan strictly by geography is rarely sufficient.

For instance, the aforementioned client was organizing territories by the zip codes of target accounts – in this case, physicians that could prescribe their products. Yet target accounts are always subject to change – whether it’s doctors changing specializations, new doctors arriving, or existing ones moving to other territories.

Delays in updating the target list were causing misalignment and sparking disputes between reps, so the timeliness of that process was a major concern. That’s where we came in, automating the process of updating the list and accounting for key factors that help reps perform even when geographical data proves unreliable.

Accounting for variables such as customer count and mobility, demographics, and best-selling products can help you ensure that the territories with the greatest potential get sufficient coverage – and that sales leaders make good use of their time and skills.

3. Provide visibility

Our client’s reps were constantly requesting updated territory information, but the updating process was slow because it was based on emails and spreadsheets, which in turn required internal approvals.

To speed things up, we streamlined communication between sales reps and upper management through our territory communication reports and integrated platform, adding technical capabilities that provide further insights. Our intuitive mapping helps reps pinpoint their accounts quickly and gain a better understanding of their area of focus, and the choropleth features make it easy to visualize sales performance across territories. These powerful tools enable reps to identify low-performing territories rapidly and make better decisions when planning sales visits and calls.

4. Improve your business process

Efficient processes enable collaboration among salespeople and help them adapt to product strategy updates and other changes.

When you’re building and adjusting the territory process, the input provided by your field managers during the planning phase can prove invaluable. With that in mind, when working with our pharma client, we collected and centralized feedback, then sent consolidated reports to upper management through our embedded workflow engine. Thus, the resulting process was not a management decision, but rather the culmination of the entire sales organization’s efforts.

Following these four rules can help you improve your plan, but sales territory management is an ongoing process. Our Sales Territory Management cloud applications offer the ability to configure and manage complex territory requirements with ease, thanks to flexible business rules and workflows that support exceptions, splits, overlays, and much more.

That means your teams will be able to spend their time and energy doing what they do best: selling!