The debate continues within the industry of Professional Pharma Marketing regarding on-demand speaker training—to use it or not to use it. In this day and age of pharma cost-cutting, government regulations, and industry oversight into each program your contracted speakers participate in, solid speaker training is a must. How it’s administered, however, seems to be the debate.
Today, many companies are trying to simplify their workload and provide either live, in-person training, or on-demand training. A Vision2Voice internal analysis has shown that pharma companies that offer both have 22% more satisfied speakers than those companies which offer just live speaker training.
On-demand speaker training adds great value to the speakers for several reasons:
1. Speakers are Busy
All speakers simply cannot make a pre-arranged meeting date, they are busy people. Family activities, weddings, and other key commitments keep average attendance to live speaker training at less than 100%. Your speakers are typically pulled in many directions such as their clinical practice, their university and/or hospital affiliations, and not to mention their educational efforts with your company and other companies. Sending them away for 2 days, and sometimes more, can be a major burden. On-demand speaker training reduces the time burden from days to a few hours or less.
2. You can Add Contracted Speakers in Mid-cycle
In an ideal world, all speakers are contracted to work with your brand once per year and they are all added to your process during the same time frame. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work out that way, and sometimes it’s necessary to add a speaker when live training isn’t available. Offering an on-demand training option can ensure that your key messages and core slides are described and shared so that these individuals can learn about the medical, regulatory, and legally approved content from your organization.
3. Less Cost of Training Per Speaker Trained
According to Cutting Edge Information, speaker honoraria are 60-85% lower for on-demand training/events than for live training/events. Not to mention you won’t have to pay travel costs. You can get the information you need to your speakers efficiently, and in a more cost effective manner.
4. More Focus on What’s Vital
On-demand training allows you to focus on what’s truly important. Live training offers terrific insights into the brand, methods for improved speaking, a means of getting to know your speakers personally, and a terrific forum for questions and answers. There really are many benefits that come from live training. However, your on-demand training can be focused on what is critical—to help those who just can’t make your live training meeting.
Pharma brand leaders who have chosen to add on-demand speaker training to their speaker training mix have recieved great feedback from their speakers. It helps those very busy speakers to learn what’s required, it saves the pharma company honoraria and travel costs, it allows speakers to be added mid-cycle, and most importantly, it can serve as a method to update speakers throughout the year who just happen to want a refresher before conducting a speaker talk.
