Four Considerations for Managing Agile Sales Teams

Aug 19, 2020 | Bilyana Hristova

The vast majority of pharma executives (80%) recognize that their current operating models support growth. Yet, only 10% have strong confidence that these models can support future changes.¹

To better sustain and fuel growth, sales teams should have a responsive approach to change. Agile sales organizations can easily adjust interactions according to customer preferences, adapt to evolving market needs, and allocate resources quickly when they need to.

Here are four considerations to assess whether your sales teams are agile enough to sustain growth:

1. Can you rapidly restructure your territories based on market or strategy changes?

Factors such as mergers and acquisitions, a product launch in a new market, or the recent global pandemic can require drastic changes in your strategy. These changes can then trickle down to commercial operations in how you structure territories, target customers, and allocate reps to accounts.

Most companies adjust territories periodically to adapt to these kinds of changes. Some carry these sessions twice a year, while others do it more frequently, at least once a month. The more frequent you hold the sessions, the more you can minimize data gaps and ensure that information is clean, up-to-date, and ready-to-use.

By allowing your sales teams to provide feedback on your alignments and request territory changes through mobile devices, they can capture real-time insights without having to wait for another territory planning session. Teams can also speed up the process, by up to ten times, and reduce the frequency of these sessions from a quarterly to an on-demand basis.²

2. How quickly can you reallocate roster members to territories?

The average turnover rate of field roles in pharma is around 9.4%, leaving about 37,000 unattended or vacant territories globally.³ Short-term absences or unplanned sick leaves increase the number of vacancies even more. Processes such as new hire onboarding and rep transfers can cause delays in getting reps ramped up. Every day that you have an unattended territory, your company loses potential revenue.

These changes rarely show up in your CRM as information sits in complex downstream systems in various functions, such as human resources. Automating your roster management processes with CRM helps you gain visibility on team changes, simplify your onboarding process, and maximize sales potential.

You can grant CRM user access, assign products, territories, and targeting goals to your reps in one solution. These capabilities reduce the ramp-up time for reps, simplify your onboarding process, and maximize your sales potential.

3. How easily can you adjust your channel mix and targets?

The accelerated adoption of digital engagement channels, especially over the last few months, signaled an overall need for change in how pharma companies interact with customers. These channels are essential in delivering relevant content to customers when face-to-face engagement is impractical.

The challenge is ensuring that sales teams use the appropriate mix of traditional and digital channels to engage with customers effectively and maximize the impact of these interactions.

Multichannel cycle plans allow your sales teams to understand how to target their customers better, using preferred engagement channels, based on your segmentation data. You can adjust these cycle plans anytime there are changes in your segmentation or channel preference. This flexibility allows your field teams to work on always current information and ensure high-quality customer engagement.

4. Are your current commercial solutions modern enough to keep up with change?

About 25% of top pharma companies in Europe still use spreadsheets for crucial commercial operations processes like roster management.⁴ These bespoke solutions require heavy customization and manual loadings that make the data error-prone, non-compliant, and not trustworthy.

As the industry shifts to a more digital customer engagement model, with the increasing adoption of channels such as remote meetings and rep-triggered emails, spreadsheets and bespoke solutions are no longer sustainable growth options.

Moving to a single global alignment and targeting solution integrated with the CRM allows your teams to be flexible and agile by reducing dependencies on IT, and increasing autonomy in sales operations. A single solution also ensures alignment across your entire sales organization in both home-office and customer-facing roles. Ultimately, enabling your company to respond better to change and support growth in the long term.

Read this eBook to learn how to modernize your commercial operations processes.
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^{1 Source: Accenture: Breathing Agility into the Pharmaceutical Industry
2 Source: Astellas: Improving Organizational Agility with Veeva
3 Source: Turnover Rates for Sales Employees Reach a Five-Year High
4 Source: Veeva Territory Alignment Survey}