Marketers must rethink their sales-force models as product portfolios become increasingly weighted toward specialty medicine.

Pharmaceutical marketers can reinvigorate sales forces during mergers and restructuring with a touch of personal communication and investments in the sales rep’s role.

As contracted sales account for an ever higher percentage of brand dollars, companies are looking for ways to make their managed-care sales forces more effective through improved resources and integration.

Marketers who meet the real-world needs of doctors stand a better chance of communicating their message and influencing prescriptions. Understanding the connection between a physician’s opinion and attitude and his actual behavior can help uncover the real drivers of how that physician is going to behave. A number of techniques exist to help marketers get inside doctors' heads.

As physicians close their doors to pharmaceutical sales representatives, top marketers are combining telesales call centers with e-detailing as an effective alternative for reaching the growing number of no-see and limited-access physicians. Companies have seen success with this strategy, but some challenges must be overcome. Physicians must be shown how engaging with a telesales rep offers added value and convenience, and the field reps must be assured that the call center will not eliminate their jobs.

Physicians want information they can trust from sources they respect. Because of this, medical thought leaders are an increasingly important component of the industry’s sales and marketing efforts. Effective management of key opinion leaders poses many challenges to marketing teams. To address these issues, a range of providers has emerged to offer pharmaceutical companies management platforms designed to identify opinion leaders, map their influence, and put product messaging strategies into effect.

By taking a proactive approach to improving sales-force effectiveness, sales leaders can diagnose causes of poor performance and identify other opportunities for improvement. Maximizing sales-force effectiveness involves many disparate elements, some of which are easily understood and measured with qualitative data, and some of which require in-depth quantitative analysis to grasp. As a result, evaluating sales-force effectiveness should consist of an analysis that uses qualitative and quantitative data.

Although the advertising maxim "sex sells" may be true, successful pharmaceutical companies put a higher premium on skill and aptitude when hiring sales representatives.

Tablet PCs have become increasingly capable and affordable, allowing companies to outfit entire sales teams with a tool that can deliver customized, interactive, face-to-face presentations to physicians. Uptake of closed-loop marketing strategies throughout the industry has been slow, however, as companies work to overcome the considerable infrastructure hurdles.

Response modeling is no longer working. This traditional way of planning and measuring sales-force performance relies exclusively on measuring the effect on market share of physician targeting and call frequency. Response modeling fails to consider a representative’s ability to gain access with target physicians and overlooks the actual interaction between reps and physicians.

Fewer doctors than expected are participating in the American Medical Association’s Prescribing Data Restriction Program. In almost one year since the program’s launch, about 7,000 doctors have decided to opt out of having their prescribing data released. Sign-up rates are being affected by a lack of awareness and a wait-and-see position taken by many physicians on the issue of prescribing privacy.

Pharmaceutical companies have planned their sales and marketing strategies based on prescription data since the 1990s. Since the introduction of the American Medical Association’s Prescribing Data Restriction Program in July 2006, pharmaceutical companies need to evaluate the effect of Prescribing Data Restriction Program violation, mediate their Prescribing Data Restriction compliance strategies, revisit their existing sales-force effectiveness practices, and decide on additional metrics to gather data.

Opportunities exist for contract sales organizations to grow, even as the large pharmaceutical companies drop contracts and re-evaluate their sales-force models. For contract sales companies to survive, they need to provide more diversified services and present themselves as a sales and marketing partner. In particular, emerging specialty and biotechnology companies are searching for a sales partner that can offer well-tested methods and expertise based on long experience.

Sales-force effectiveness is critical for emerging pharmaceutical companies to compete successfully with larger, more established players. A company preparing to launch its first product faces the challenge not only of establishing the brand of its product, but the company name. At the same time, the company struggles with a tight budget and limited resources. Although joint promotion and outsourcing can help a company quickly build a sales infrastructure, these strategies may hamper a company’s long-term strategy to become an independently viable commercial operation. To build an effective, independent sales force, companies need market intelligence, access, and team work.

Successful pharmaceutical companies have found that the key to long-term profitability lies in training sales people to understand and meet clients’ needs and to allocate time for on-going dialogue with clients. Gaining efficiencies in sales-force operations is more important than ever, according to Eyeforpharma, a pharmaceutical business strategy information provider.

About 4,100 physicians signed on to the American Medical Association’s Prescribing Data Restriction Program as of September. The program, which prohibits access to physician-level prescription data, directly affects first-line managers and sales representatives. New Hampshire took an additional step in June by passing a law, HB 1346, which criminalizes the collection and disclosure of information about the prescribing practices of physicians and other health-care providers.

Trust is at stake when the ethics of a pharmaceutical sales force are called into question. Lack of trust can hamper the effectiveness of a sales force in a number of ways. When sales representatives lose trust in their managers, performance suffers. When physicians lose trust in representatives, sales suffer, and when consumers lose trust in the industry, public health suffers. Fortunately, lost trust can be restored, and attentive management can ensure trust is not lost in the first place by maintaining a culture of ethics.

Access to prescription data is about to change in a major way. To address physician concerns about the inappropriate use of prescription data by pharmaceutical sales representatives, the American Medical Association has put in place the Prescribing Data Restriction Program, which takes effect July 1. The program allows physicians to choose to block their prescription data from sales representatives and first-line managers. The program will have a ripple effect throughout all areas of sales and marketing. With little time to prepare, pharmaceutical sales organizations must do all they can to educate themselves about the new rules and make adjustments to their business practices.

The pharmaceutical industry is continually focused on improving the return on sales-force investment. This focus has gained momentum and has penetrated nearly every corner of the world and can be attributed to sales-force saturation, reduced access to physicians, and competition from generic products.

Few guidelines for DTC advertising make the role of the pharmaceutical sales force in educating physicians even more important. Leading pharmaceutical companies have pledged to abide by a new guiding principle for the industry that calls for the delay of direct-to-consumer advertising until new product information has reached physicians. Delivering product knowledge to physicians is vital, and the responsibility of the sales force to deliver that information in an efficient and timely manner has become more critical to the success of the brand.

Pharmaceutical companies and physicians are looking to move more of their operations online. Web-based programs can increase efficiency for detailing, writing prescriptions, and training sales forces. Analysts say these online initiatives will help increase the effectiveness of sales representatives, rather than replace them.

An arms race mentality and an increase in the number of blockbuster products propelled the growth of sales forces in big pharma, but the trend may have reached its peak. Several pharmaceutical companies have made cuts to their sales forces, and Pfizer Inc. is realigning its sales organization. An individual company’s need to reduce sales-force size hinges on a number of internal factors, and experts say before the decision is made to downsize, companies must make several important assessments.

Shrinking share of voice is making pharmaceutical product detailing increasingly difficult, but steps can be taken at the training stage to help prepare sales representatives for the new reality. Pharmaceutical sales representatives have only a small window of opportunity to make an impression with physicians. Although strong scientific and technical knowledge is vital for establishing credibility and providing value, many companies are failing to provide the relationship-building skills representatives require to understand physicians' needs.

The first in a series of articles that will examine the problems and solutions of detailing medicines to physicians. As sales forces get bigger, they are getting weaker. Are pharmaceutical companies out of control with their direct-selling strategies?

Sales forces are expanding, but return on investment is declining. Pharmaceutical companies have increased the size of their field forces about 75% during the past six years, but return on promotional investment for the top 14 companies declined an average of 24% between 1998 and 2001.