The workload of HCPs is stretched today more than ever. Between seeing patients and administrative duties, clinicians have little on-the-job free time; which means the amount of time they have to talk to sales representatives continues to diminish to less than 3 minutes per call. And this makes medical sales more challenging today than ever before.
Despite these barriers, personal selling can be quite effective. Many HCPs trust in the relationship of their sales reps. Others have confidence in their reps to provide fair-balanced clinical information and yet others gain inspiration to treat conditions they may have never treated. And so it goes that sales reps have been a mainstay in the industry and will continue to be. Yet with decreasing sales rep time per call, half of all offices being no-see to sales representatives and less than 7% of all sales calls getting more than 2 minutes of discussion time with the HCP, an evolution in their role is a must. In these headwinds, how can you more effectively leverage the role of sales reps?
Well we know that technology has reshaped healthcare marketing with new types of professional strategies that allow for representative-mediated product promotion. Let’s look at sales representatives implementing 3 steps for a national broadcast.
The event would be a 60-minute VisionCast national interactive broadcast from a central studio with nationally recognized experts on the panel. This program is broadcast to, let’s say, 100 restaurant locations around the US. Let’s look at the three simple steps for each sales representative:
- Recruit local HCPs. Based on our experience, average attendance would be about 25, so about 2500 HCPs would interact with true experts in one sweeping night.
- Attend the event. What a great opportunity to further build relationships with customers, and to be the host.
- Follow up after the program. By leveraging information that was discussed, representatives have the opportunity to discuss their product in greater detail by covering one key topic from the program that resonated with each HCP. When this combination of tactics is done, the impact is tremendous showing up to a 402% ROI.
When looking at the numbers a little deeper, this program equates to about 150,000 selling minutes. Compare that to 2,500 sales calls alone, which would provide about 7,500 selling minutes. That’s a 20-fold increase in discussion time.
What all of this means is that combining peer to peer programs like national broadcasts with personal selling is worth it. Even though Reps cost pharma companies about $66 per minute of selling time as compared to about $8/minute when the program is a VisionCast, these costs lead to very positive ROIs that aren’t seen with sales alone.
