It has been advocated that life sciences companies should adapt their organizational structures and processes to become more customer-centric in order to better meet the needs of their customers.
For most life sciences companies, this represents a major shift in thinking that will require a change in the way that the sales force interacts with their customers. In this article we focus on the impact that this change will have on sales training and explore how the sales training organization needs to adapt to meet the evolving needs of the sales force.
How should the sales training organization evolve? There is no single right answer or magic pill; rather sales training organizations should be enhancing their service offering across a number of key dimensions. Many of these not only reflect the changing needs of the pharmaceutical sales force specifically but also reflect improvements being made across industries in the way organizations train and develop their people to improve their customer focus. The dimensions are:
Strategy - Create a flexible and delivery-focused organization that mirrors the structure of the sales force
Design/Develop - Put in place a responsive content development process designed to not only build product expertise but also enhance the customer focus across the entire sales force
Deliver - Establish a technical infrastructure that can deliver personalized training content efficiently and to the right people at the right time
Measure - Embed the tools and techniques in the delivery process to allow the impact of training interventions to be assessed and the content and investment modified accordingly.
Addressing each of these areas in an integrated manner will deliver cost and service quality benefits, while ensuring that the customers needs remain at the fore. Let’s look at each in turn illustrating each with examples of how organizations are working to address them.
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Case study 1 – A global professional services firm
A well-established, global professional services firm provides us with an excellent example of an organization which has adapted its strategy to mirror its sales force. The organization was had stabilized following a difficult operating period and internal management challenges. At the time, with its sales force concentrated in relatively few locations, the organization elected to establish a centralized training center. This ensured that core training was delivered to its staff to acceptable levels of quality and cost and the center itself was also a draw to potential recruits.
However, as a result of buoyant conditions in the service sector, the organization’s business strategy evolved to one of international growth. The increasing global footprint and thus more widely dispersed sales force meant substantially higher costs, in terms of both travel expenses and time out of the market.
To address this, the organization transformed its training strategy to mirror its sales force. This included disposing of the central training center and moving to a hybrid model, which still serves them today. In this model, a small, central pool of training resources now train local leaders to deliver the majority of training courses regionally.
This leader-led training has resulted in a reduction in fixed costs, an increase in the time spent by the sales force time in the marketplace, greater training flexibility and higher course satisfaction ratings.
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Create a flexible and delivery-focused organization
Pharmaceutical sales organizations have recently been undergoing significant changes in order to become more customer-centric. The sales organizations that successfully achieve this and adapt to the changing demands of their customers will gain competitive advantage. Sales training has a key role to play in this process by helping to increase the flexibility of the sales force both by offering content focused on customer development as well by providing a more of flexible range of blended solutions accessible “on the fly” at the time and place the sales representative needs it.
However, flexibility is synonymous with ‘small and agile’ and for large organizations it is often sacrificed for efficiency. Take training delivery for example. At one end of the scale, training might be conducted in a prestigious, centralized training facility with the downside of inflexible fixed costs but the upside of consistent high quality. At the other end of the scale, training is distributed and might be conducted in local facilities with local experts, providing more flexibility at less fixed cost but with the greater challenge of ensuring consistent standards and quality. In addition, the overall cost of delivery might still remain high as each region may often have its own training personnel focused on a particular therapeutic area, training stage or market type (primary care vs. specialty care).
To achieve the flexibility that they need, it is important that large organizations strike an optimal balance between central or regionalized training delivery. The optimal solution will vary from organization to organization but typically it will have the following characteristics:
- It will have an account/customer as well as a therapeutic area/product focus
- Therapeutic area/product trainers will be organized centrally with more focused account/customer trainers organized locally (regionally)
- The cost of maintaining a significantly central training location will be managed down through improved approaches to sourcing both assets and staff
- The organization will sit within a sales support organization (as opposed to being part of the sales force itself) allowing an integrated view to be developed for the support, development and reward of the sales force across multiple dimensions including, for example, product and technical support, training, performance management and compensation.
A responsive content development process
Designing and developing compelling and high-impact training interventions is high on the agenda for all training functions particularly for sales training, which ranks organizations highest training priorities [Bersin 2007 Learning Fact book]. As a result, a number of Learning Content Management Systems are now available on the market, which facilitate the content design and development process. However, the proportion of budget dedicated to the strategy (definition), design and development of training is still, for many organizations, substantially below the budgets spent on training delivery. To develop more compelling content, organizations should:
- Drive learning design based on the strategy and objective of each intervention, which will help ensure that the key learning points are reinforced
- Ensure they have the right blend of e-learning, Instructor Led Training (ILT) and on-the-job training. Blended learning has proven to be more effective than a single medium but equally, most training content is better suited to only one of the mediums. Therefore it is imperative that organizations have a clear understanding of which content works best for each delivery medium.
- Use and pilot new technologies and approaches to enhance the impact of the intervention. Adobe System’s Macromedia Breeze is a good example of a product that has gained popularity with training organizations due to its Web conferencing facilities, multimedia capabilities and ease of use.
- During the design of e-learning, carefully consider the size, structure and duration of training interventions to ensure they are convenient and do not present a psychological barrier to use by the sales force.
- Transition printed materials to digital media to facilitate updates, storage and distribution.
- Build or buy libraries of learning objects which each address specific skills and can rapidly be assembled to create specific training.
- Leverage template-based approaches and seek to outsource any manual, or resource intensive activities.
A word about learning content management systems, which are a newly evolving form of developing and delivering training materials in an enterprise. E-learning systems such as ForceTen from Eedo Knowledgeware Corp. (Nashua, NH), are on the rise in pharmaceutical training organizations. These technologies provide a flexible platform from which organizations can develop, manage and deliver training materials across the enterprise. Standards, such as SCORM (Shareable Content Object Reference Model), ensure that learning content developed within the organization or by third parties will also work fully with the functionality of the learning content management system.
Establish a technical infrastructure
To be effective, a pharmaceutical sales force needs to be in the field and workers need timely access to the latest product and customer information while there. However, each salesperson will have different needs when it comes to training information and the delivery medium.
To help keep the sales force in the field and to provide them with the right information at the right time, organizations have employed self-service infrastructures which:
- Exploit technologies to allow the storage of a library of relevant customer and product training materials on a sales person’s laptop
- Provide frequent updates to the training information to ensure consistency of message. This, for example, can be achieved through automated synchronization with content management systems, which can also highlight the specific updates to the sales person
- Personalize the training information provided to a sales person to address knowledge and skills gaps they may have. These knowledge gaps can be identified by tools which administer a basic product or topic-related assessment and adapt the training content delivered accordingly
- Provide periodic product or skills testing to ensure knowledge is maintained and appropriate training interventions and provided
- Exploit additional channels, such as mp3 files, podcasts and m-learning (mobile learning), to deliver content. For example, one pharmaceutical firm is experimenting with the types of content the sales force would find most useful to access from Blackberry devices. This may be product- customer-, competitor-, regulatory-or sales-process-related.
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Case study 2 – A leading high-tech organization
The training group of a leading high-tech organization, with a substantial sales force and an expansive network of resellers has taken a holistic approach to improving its content delivery. Following a detailed sales force segmentation review, the training group examined its existing channels to each segment. The number of channels was expected to be high but the results were far in excess of projections.
The training group initiated a program of work to significantly reduce the number of channels and enhance the experience provided to the sales force through the remaining channels.
Based on increased sales performance and specifically additional products sold, the organization realized an ROI in excess of 500% for each dollar invested in this initiative.
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Embed tools and techniques in the delivery process
For sales training to help the sales force to be more customer-focused, it is important to understand which training interventions are having the highest impact and to target investment in these. Where courses are less effective, energies need to be invested in understanding if the content, the delivery medium or other factors are influencing the outcome.
Despite having a clear opportunity to show cause and effect by tracking sales performance against training interventions, the majority of pharmaceutical companies have yet to tackle this in a robust fashion.
To accomplish this, we believe that there are four key steps:
- Design new programs with measurement in mind. For example, associating measurable objectives with each module and ensuring baseline data (e.g. product sales figures) is available to compare progress against
- Develop a balanced scorecard which establishes a picture of the effectiveness of the course. Revisit the balanced scorecard periodically to understand the frequency with which the concepts are used and the impact they have on the sales force
- Make someone accountable for developing and managing the effectiveness of learning on an ongoing basis. Ensure that the metrics are visible to management via a performance dashboard or Executive Information System
- Go beyond the tactical measurement of one training course against another and seek to integrate the measurement and strategy of learning into capability development .
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Case study 3 – A global oil company
A leading oil company has embraced the measurement of learning and targeting of investment to address organizational and individual learning needs. Specifically, it has introduced a digital academy, which provides a set of tools that enables it to:
- Measure capability against its selected framework, such as a skills, competency or role based assessment
- Provide a portfolio of development initiatives which target individual and organizational learning needs
- Focus investment on the interventions that best address learning needs based on a set of prioritized criteria and business drivers defined by the business strategy
- Plan future workforce requirements, based on existing capabilities, expected demand and organizational strategy.
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In summary, there is no single thing that the sales training organization should be doing to become more customer-focused. Rather, sales training organizations should be trying to measurably improve their efficiency and effectiveness across the design and development of content, the delivery of training and the measurement and feedback of metrics—all the while retaining their flexibility to follow the next inevitable industry change that is sure to follow in the near future. This can be achieved by learning from the experience of other organizations in other industries, looking beyond the traditional competitive boundaries of “Big Pharma” for existing and emerging best practices.
