How to Empower Your Pharmaceutical Sales Reps
The career of the pharmaceutical sales rep is fast-paced. It rewards assertiveness, persistence, and knowledge.
Assigned to a geographic region, pharma reps, also known as PSRs, have to travel extensively to meet healthcare providers and attend industry conferences. The extensive traveling and the pressure of being in a commission-based occupation puts a lot of pressure on pharma reps.
To prevent a high turnover, you need to empower your pharma reps with tools that make their job easier. Here are 3 specific steps how to empower them.
1. Provide a continuously updated contract and clause library.
The life of the pharma reps is grueling; some reps even report spending up to 184 days on the road. They are juggling many balls at the same time, including meeting times, addresses, client phone numbers, and sales objectives. The last thing that they want to have to worry about is having to void a sale due to the improper documentation or have to ask a doctor to redo the paperwork.
By providing them access to a contract management system with a centralized library of contract templates and clauses, you take the guesswork out of what documents to use and prevent delays in finalizing sales. Having a centralized library that is accessible from anywhere equips your reps with the latest and, more importantly, legally-approved contracts and documents they need to be successful.
2. Streamline the process of keeping track of documents.
When managing teams of several pharma reps, it’s likely that you will create a major paper trail monster. Sometimes in the name of making the jobs of the central office “easier”, we end up creating very complicated contract management processes for our reps.
Scanning documents, such as invoices and purchase orders, should already be part of your contract management lifecycle. However, the process should go the extra mile by using comprehensive data collection and management tools for capturing unlimited custom data, fee schedules, contacts, stakeholders information, and enhancing documents with scanning features such as accurate OCR.
Pharma reps would welcome the ability to keep a detailed record of all documents for a specific contract that is in digital form. This also helps ease the transition of a contract or account from one rep to another.
3. Automate tasks and alerts.
Pharma reps are in the unenviable position of having conflicting objectives too often. They have to service their clients consistently so those clients order more, but they also have to carve out time to meet education requirements from the National Association of Pharmaceutical Representatives and attend industry conferences. This is why, when surveyed about their stress levels, they often grade their profession as high-stress.
To avoid disgruntled clients and lack of adequate training, your company needs enterprise contract management software that sends alerts to pharma reps about key deadlines and contract milestones. Look for a solution that allows you to set fully configurable email alarms that can be designated to one or multiple recipients. It would be also highly useful to select a system that keeps a history and confirmation of emails sent and integrates with most email clients.
Takeaway
Professional sales reps are essential to the success of any pharmaceutical company, but the company needs to set those reps up for success through the use of effective tools.
Three specifics steps to empower pharma reps are:
- Maintaining a centralized library of updated contract templates and clauses
- Streamlining the process of keeping track of all documents related to a contract or account
- Setting automatic alerts and reminders for key dates and tasks