Achieving Sales Excellence™
Use a Systematic Approach for Improving Sales Performance

At the foundation of any successful pharmaceutical sales force lies its ability to skillfully plan and execute a sales call. These critical skills enable sales reps to sell solutions, not products; to listen not tell; and to understand the customer’s needs. While we consider these skills to be fundamental, we do not consider them to be basic or simple in any way.

Salesforces that realize that coercive and manipulative tactics do not work in practice need a selling platform that focuses on the customer. They know they can’t succeed with one-size-fits-all presentations and must find ways to differentiate their offerings. This program is for salespeople, sales managers, and marketing and product staff of organizations involved in team selling who need a common sales process and language for driving productivity gains.

The overarching goal in developing your sales representatives is to help them bring the relationships with their key physicians to a partnership level. Our research with pharmaceutical sales organizations has shown that world-class sales reps have mastery of the following skill sets:

• Fully understand the business challenges of the physician practice and the implications of those challenges on the practice
• Understand and address the Clinical, Financial/Pharmacoeconomic, and Organizational needs within a practice
• Gain and leverage partnership level access to key influencers and decision makers
• Develop effective questioning skills to build credibility and identify the needs and priorities of the different contacts within the practice
• Relate products and solution benefits effectively to decision makers and influencers
• Present solutions in a manner that reduces resistance and objections

Program Description
Achieving Sales Excellence™ is a highly customized, two- or three-day, hands-on workshop. All case studies and exercises are specifically tailored to your company and your customers’ unique business challenges. The ASE™ selling skills training helps organizations develop profitable relationships with all contact points within the practice and excel in competitive markets. Sales reps will learn how to:

• Align sales activities with the customer’s Decision Cycle so they can truly help the buyer buy
• Develop a shared vision of the business challenges and pressures that practice executives face
• Address the Clinical, Financial/Pharmacoeconomic, and Organizational needs within a medical environment
• Identify and align your capabilities with the needs of the multiple “buyers” within the practice (e.g., physicians, nurses, nurse practitioners, business managers, receptionists/office staff)
• Build long-term relationships with key personnel within the practice, understanding the roles, responsibilities, and “hot buttons” of each call point and partnering with their accounts to drive business
• Develop focused strategic questioning skills to build the credibility of your salesforce and identify the practice’s needs and priorities to drive prescribing choices
• Present solutions in a manner that reduces resistance and objections
• Utilize marketing collateral materials in a proven, effective manner
• Identify different strategies and skills necessary to succeed in each stage of the Decision Cycle
• Differentiate their offerings from the competition while clearly demonstrating how their offering meets the customer’s stated needs
• Analyze their comparative position by understanding the Decision Criteria buyers use to compare offerings to those of competitors
• Manage a complex and perpetual sales cycle

Implementation

• This comprehensive program is modular and can be rolled out in pieces or as a whole. Individual segments can be delivered at district, regional, or national meetings
• Clients have used these role play activities as an opportunity to videotape and provide immediate coaching to their representatives. Others take it a step further and coach the coaches
• When linked with GearWorks™, this becomes a powerful training experience in which sales representatives gain a unique perspective into their customers’ business
• The target audience for this program includes sales associates, sales managers, customer service representatives, and other members of the organization who desire basic or refresher training that will improve sales performance

Users include:
The Gartner Group, Amgen, Berlex, UPS, Pfizer Animal Health, Novartis Animal Health, Pan American Laboratories, 3M, Ernst and Young, Raymond Corporation, Weston Foods, Nextel, Google, BP Amoco, Boeing, McKinsey, Medtronic, Bank of America, United Healthcare