If we consider the steps most successful sales representatives go through to increase their effectiveness on sales

:calls, we will see there are three general areas for consideration

Business Planning .1

(The Sales Call (pre-call, sales call, post-call .2

Follow-Up .3

Business planning is a critical step in ensuring your selling skills are most effective. Sales representatives in the
healthcare industry manage their territories as if they were running their own business. To be successful in your
sales territory you need to fully understand it before you attempt to call on customers. This includes knowing which
customers drive your business, what their “buying” style is so you can match your selling style to it, managing an
investment budget, managing your daily and weekly schedule, and working with your team to implement the territory
business plans. You can view the business planning process as creating a blueprint for success. Most healthcare
companies will give you a territory, a list of target customers, the sales tools needed to influence your target
customers and a budget. It is up to you and your territory team to come up with a plan that will most effectively make
.use of these resources to increase sales

Following the business planning process, there are three main steps to consider to improve your sales call
:effectiveness

(Pre-call planning (before you meet the customer .1

(The sales call (face to face with the customer .2

(Post-call analysis and follow-up (after your sales call .3

Pre-call planning done prior to meeting your customer involves several steps such as reviewing past customer call
notes, setting call objectives and preparing sales tools to be most effective in the short time with your customer. This
.will be covered in more detail shortly

During the actual sales call itself, there are several steps to be aware of: opening, presenting features and benefits,
probing, objection handling, etc. Making an effective sales call involves excellent skills within each of these areas
.and we will cover them more in-depth in the coming chapters

After leaving each and every sales call, post-call analysis needs to be completed, and any follow-up required
accurately recorded and completed. These notes which you make post-call are what you will be reviewing prior to
your next appointment with your customers. Without having these notes, your effectiveness on the next call will not
.be as high

One major goal of a healthcare sales representative is to be seen as a valued consultant by customers. Once you
are viewed by your target customers as an excellent and credible resource (and not just another sales
representative) you will have increased access and time with them – and increased face-to-face selling time is a key
ingredient for success in healthcare sales. Ensuring timely follow-up to customer requests in a professional manner
.will go a long way in ensuring you become that value added consultant in their practices

The Sales Cycle

A sales cycle is the stages that a typical customer goes through before agreeing to purchase or use your product.
Although the ultimate goal is a sale, there are several stages which you must take the customer through before you
.can ask for the business

In the first stage, called Introduction and Awareness, the customer is not yet aware that you or your products exist.
They may not even know about any problems they are currently facing because they have not taken the time to
consider them. Your goal with a customer at this stage is to introduce your products and services and try to identify
any problem areas which your product can solve for them, their patients or the healthcare system. Moving a
customer through this stage is sometimes not easy and requires certain sales techniques. Techniques used to move
a customer from this stage to the next one are rapport building, probing, objection handling, and gaining feedback.
.Throughout this book you will learn how to improve each of these skills to be successful in a healthcare sales role

The second stage is Identification. At this stage you need to convince the customer that a problem does indeed
exist. This is sometimes the hardest stage to get through as many customers will tell you that they are happy with
their current product. To move the customer through this stage, sales skills such as presenting features and benefits,
.probing, gaining feedback, and the ability to handle objections will be needed

In the third stage, the Knowledge stage, you must educate the customer on what your company and products offer
using the features and benefits of your products and or services. Without the proper knowledge of what you and your
company can offer (to the customer, the patient or the healthcare system), the customer will not be able to evaluate
his options properly. Excellent use of features and benefits, probing, and objection handling will help you to move the
.customer through this stage to the evaluation stage

The Evaluation stage is where the customer takes the time to compare your product to that which he is currently
using. It is sometimes extremely difficult to change the habits of a customer, so persuasion and persistence is
needed. Realizing where the customer is at within this sales cycle will help you to maintain perspective and use the
appropriate sales skills to move him along the sales cycle. This is where your needs analysis is critical, as you want
to ensure you are reinforcing, on a frequent basis, the benefits your product or service offers versus your competition
in addressing THAT particular customer’s needs. To move the customer through this stage you need to present
.strong features and benefits, use excellent competitive selling techniques in addition to probing and strong skills

In the final stage, the customer makes a Decision to use your product or service or your competitors. If he has
chosen your product, you can feel good about taking your customer through the sales cycle and convincing him of
the benefits of your product versus the competition. If the customer does not choose your product or service, then
your job will be to take him back to the evaluation stage so he can re-evaluate the options and reconsider your
product. Sometimes this is very difficult to do, as they may be very happy with what they are currently using. You
may have to take them all the way back to the identification stage to find new opportunities or problems which your
product can address and your competitor cannot. This is a very dynamic model, and each customer you deal with will
be at a different stage in this cycle. It is your job to identify where that customer is and try to get him to the next
.stage using effective selling techniques

Think of the sales cycle as a series of steps that you are climbing. Before you reach the top step (the sale), you have
to walk the customer up each of the lower steps first. It is very rare that you will meet a customer for the first time
.and walk away with a sale. You need to complete the steps in the cycle and earn the right to ask for the business

Another concept to keep in mind is that the time needed to move a customer through the sales cycle varies based on
:several factors

Type of product – Healthcare sales products which are more expensive (such as capital equipment for use in .1
hospitals) often requires consensus from a committee before the contract is signed. As a result, to get all members
.”of the committee to agree takes quite a bit longer than a sale where only one customer needs to say “yes

Frequency of sales calls – The more frequently you are able to get face to face selling time with a customer, .2
.the quicker you will be able to move them through the sales cycle…IF you have developed excellent selling skills

Representative selling skills – Without effective selling skills, you will not be able to move customers through .3
the sales cycle. To move them more quickly through the sales cycle, you must continually develop and improve on
.all of the sales skills listed in this book

Of the three listed here, representative selling skills is by far the most important one which affects the time needed to
.move a customer through the sales cycle

The Customer Environment

Before we discuss each stage and the selling skills needed, we will consider the customer environment. The
healthcare customer environment and selling into it requires a significant amount of planning, preparation,
persistence and versatility to be effective. As you will learn, time is a very valuable commodity in the healthcare
office or clinic, and making effective use of your time is critical to move that customer along the sales cycle to a
decision which is favorable for your product or service. The key to success in this environment is ensuring you are
!calling on the right customer, the right number of times using the right message
?Why is it getting more difficult to get time with our customers
Over the past several years, it has been getting more and more difficult to access customers in the healthcare
industry, and those that can be accessed are giving less and less time to sales representatives. We will now have a
:look at some of the main reasons this is occurring

Time Pressures – Today’s professionals try to squeeze more work into a day. Some physicians see between .1
30 and 60 patients per day. In addition to seeing patients, physicians need to finish patient charts, fill out insurance
and lawyer’s reports, return phone calls and attend meetings. This is in addition to trying to have a life outside the
office and spending quality time with their families. Five minutes with a representative is five minutes they could have
.spent completing other tasks

Lack of Monetary Gain – Physicians do not get paid to see representatives but they do get paid to see .2
patients. If they could see a patient in the time it takes to talk to a representative then they are losing money every
time they talk to a representative. This reiterates the fact that you must provide value to your target customers on
.each and every call if you want to continue to get face time with them

Number of Representatives – In many offices that see representatives, it is not uncommon for six or more .3
representatives to visit on any given day. The sheer number representatives can be overwhelming, not only to the
.physician, but to the medical office assistants who have to deal with the patients in the waiting room

Lack of Value Seen – This is the most important factor to keep in mind as you work on your territory. If a .4
physician truly believes that seeing a particular sales representative will add value to his practice, he will take the
time away from his patients to hear what that representative has to say. However, if he feels that a representative
will bring no value, he will likely not spend any time with him or her. There can be various reasons for this, but the
number one reason is that only the best representatives take the time to identify “true” needs of each customer and
sell to that particular need. There are a lot of representatives who do not take the time to identify needs, involve the
customer in the sales call, or prepare for each call to ensure value is seen every time. Without providing value to
.your key customers you will not be able to get adequate selling time to be effective

Key Terms
 To be most successful as a healthcare sales representative, you must understand two key terms: targeting and
.frequency

Targeting: The Right Customer

When considering who your target customers are, there are two key questions to ask: how important is this customer
?to your business and how accessible is the customer to you

?How important is this customer to your business

When considering this factor you need to look at not only how busy their practice is, but also what their patient
demographics are. Yes, you must call on customers who see many patients per day, but if they are not the right
types of patients for your products, then you are wasting your time. For example, if you are selling a medication for
high blood pressure and you are calling on a busy physician who sees mainly younger women and children, this is
not likely a good use of your time. It is crucial that you look at both how busy your customer is and what types of
patients they most commonly treat. Generally speaking, the more patients a customer sees the better, as long as
.these are the types of patients your product will help

?How does a representative find out what types of patients a customer may see
There are many ways including viewing the waiting room to profile the patients waiting to see the physician, looking
to see what types of product samples are on the shelves, and asking the medical office assistant or local pharmacist
what types of patients the area services. If all else fails, ask your physician! They will usually give you a straight up
answer as to the types of patients they look after. Just remember, it’s not just the busy physicians who are important
to you – they may be busy, but may not be seeing your targeted patient population. If this is the case, they may not
.be a true target physician for you

?How accessible is your customer

If you have a customer who is extremely busy and services the types of patients that would be a great fit for your
product, it makes sense that they should be a target for you. However, what if this physician is not willing to see you
as a sales representative even though you have tried many ways to see him or her? In this situation, it may be wiser
to take them off your target list and replace them with another customer that you have access to. However, it is
important to remember that just because you have tried a couple of times to see this customer and have not had
success, it does not mean they are not accessible. You need to try every means possible (using all of the activities
you read about in the Introduction to the Pharmaceutical Sales Industry from PharmaCareer) to ensure that there
is not some way that you can access this customer. There are many times a customer seems inaccessible but
somehow, someway, you manage to make contact with them. These can end up being your best supporters as
much of your competition may have given up calling on them, giving you the opportunity to sell to them in a less
competitive environment. It is important to remember that on average you will need to make contact with your
targeted customers six to twelve times a year to make an impact. Seeing a customer once every two years is not
!going to make much of an impact on your sales

Frequency: The Right Number of Times

A physician or other healthcare professional’s accessibility will affect another key aspect in healthcare sales, which is
called frequency. Frequency is simply how often, or how many times during the course of a month, quarter, or year
you should be in front of a customer selling your products’ messages. Frequency must be established for each target
customer by realistically evaluating how often you can access that customer. Each customer you call on will have an
effective frequency which you will identify over time and will dictate how you manage your sales territory on a day to
.day basis

Not only do you have to call on your customers the right number of times with the right frequency and the right
message, but you must identify which activities are best suited for each customer as there are many different ways of
accessing them. Here is a list of activities that you can do with each of your customers or physicians. The goal is to
find out who responds best to each activity and then use this knowledge to develop your business plan around each
.customer to ensure you are seeing them often enough to make an impact

• appointments

• drop-in calls

• video lunches or lunch and learns

• journal clubs

• symposia

• CME (continuing medical education) programs

• conferences

• hospital rounds
 • hospital displays

• business development or public relation events

Value or Needs Based Selling

The key to value selling is to ensure that you are selling based on what is important to your customer and NOT just
what is important to you. During the training process, you will be given every possible advantage of the product you
are going to be selling. The key to success on territory is finding which of those advantages are most important for
each individual physician you call on. Many sales trainers talk about finding the physicians “hot button.” The hot
button is a product’s features and benefits which are most important to a particular physician. Many new
representatives just out of training will do a “data dump” or “product puke” which simply means trying to present two
weeks of product training in five minutes. Instead of doing this, spend time trying to find out what is important to your
customer (using your excellent probing skills) and then using the two or three features/benefits of your product that
.are most relevant

Consultative selling simply means selling as a consultant by involving your customer in discussion to ensure you are
talking about areas that are important to them. Most adults do not like being talked “to” and would rather be involved
in a discussion. Plus, this will allow you to gain much more information than if you were doing all of the talking.
Based on the information you have received through consultative selling and probing, you will then use the
appropriate sales tools to highlight the features and benefits your product offers which best match the customer hot
.buttons

Features and Benefits

Features are simply things that are built into a product or service and cannot be changed. Examples of typical
features of a healthcare sales product include: efficacy, safety and price. Efficacy answers the question “does the
product do what is says it will do?” If a medication was designed to lower cholesterol by a certain percentage,
efficacy is a measure of whether or not it does so in the manner described in the literature and communicated by a
sales representative. Comparing the efficacy of two medications by a physician will often lead to him developing a
preference for one over the other. Safety is another area where products may differ. Safety is simply a comparison
of the adverse effect profile between medications (contraindications, cautions, side effects). Price is self
explanatory. Products rarely cost the same, and often higher priced products need to be sold more assertively to
.convince customers they are worth the extra money paid

Features by themselves do not sell a product. It is the benefit attached to a particular feature which will impact the
customer and sell your product. The benefit explains to the customer why a feature is important and how it will help
him, the patient, or the health care system. For example, consider a product which costs one dollar a day for a
patient. This feature ($1.00) will not sell the product. However, the benefit may be that the price is 25% less than the
competitor’s product and this means that the physician’s patients (who may all live in a lower income neighborhood)
may have more money in their pockets for other living necessities. Conversely, the $1.00 price tag may be more
than what the competitors charge. However, your product may have data (which the other product does not have)
which shows it reduces heart attacks by 30% which means a savings to the total healthcare system. As a sales
representative, your goal is to find the feature that is MOST important to your customer (hot button) and then focus
.on explaining how the benefits of this feature are better or more pronounced than the competition

When deciding whether or not you have presented a feature or a benefit, ask yourself “so what”? If there is an
answer to the “so what” question that you just asked yourself, then you may have presented a feature and will need
to go one step further to present a benefit. Keep asking yourself “so what” until you really have trouble answering it.
You need to take a benefit down to a very basic level and be able to communicate it in a clear and effective way –
.using a visual aid to reinforce your message

In addition, to make your features and benefits more impactful, many successful healthcare sales representatives
“paint the patient picture.” Painting the patient picture means helping the physician visualize exactly which type of
patient in his practice will most benefit from your product. If you do this successfully, the next time that patient comes
.in, he or she may get your product and your sales will increase