US pharmaceutical companies have for decades relied on a "pinball-like” sales model: sales representatives literally bounce from one doctor's office to another in hopes of stealing a few moments with physicians and influencing which drugs they prescribe. This model has been very successful, increasing the physician's awareness of a full range of drugs available and providing big pharma companies with rising sales and higher margins than any other mainstream industry. However in recent years the new evolving dynamics of this business model have prompted a massive expansion of sales forces. This resulting system is very costly, very inefficient, and generates a lot of dissatisfaction. For instance ,many sales representatives complain that they are under- trained, under-valued and under-rewarded; their district managers are overburdened; physicians feel under constant assault; and pharma companies face rapidly escalating costs. On top of all that, the government and others (politicians) along with the media often criticize sales practices such as taking physicians to dinner or sponsoring weekend seminars at plush resorts.
For these reasons, pharma companies need to reconsider what needs to be done to transform their sales model. The sales model solution, we believe, lies in one that reemphasizes the importance of forming valued relationships with their physicians. As the industry portfolio of drugs expanded, their competition intensified, and sales forces expanded to cope with these changes—they lost their focus on their doctors. It could be regained if they helped their sales representatives to be better at delivering the information the doctors want. Putting the spotlight back on physicians and their needs, individual pharma companies would be better placed to capture more market share and pull ahead of their competitors.
Meanwhile, the onslaught of mergers and acquisitions- with more to come-introduced other concerns, created confusion among doctors about which companies were marketing what drug. And with many companies attempting to take a similar approach of developing and launching drugs with virtually no distinguishable differences, now the doctors commonly tell the sales representative detailing them that “all the drugs in the category are the same” therefore the differences among products have become blurred. The industry's response to this situation was to simply throw more reps at the same physicians…creating an industry workforce approaching 90,000 reps.
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Healthcare Client List
- Abbott Immunology
- Abbott Primary Care
- Abbott Renal Care
- Abbott Virology
- AstraZeneca
- Bayer
- ECR Pharma
- Genzyme
- IVAX Laboratories
- Kos Pharmaceuticals
- Pamlabs
- Roche Hepatology
- Roche Oncology
- Roche Primary Care
- Sepracor
- Solvay
We at DELTA POINT believe that this situation will only be fixed with the right approach, which is customer-centric- providing the doctor with believable and compelling sales messages that resonate and having sales representatives that possess the requisite knowledge of the disease, patient and doctor’s practice needs.
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