Skura Corporation

Sales and marketing has always been the most crucial department for any business. Businesses flourish because of the adeptness of their sales team(s) and depth of their sales strategies. The success of sales and marketing strategies relies majorly on leads turning into customers.

To beat the competition, many organizations are opting for sales enablement tools that boost their sales apart from increasing the productivity and performance of reps. To simplify the definition, “Sales enablement is an energetic replacement for old school practices of sales and marketing.” It is a systematic approach to increase the productivity of your employees, by training them and providing them with good-quality marketing content, to use during client calls.

If you have already decided that you will be developing and working on some sales enablement strategies and tools, you shall notice a significant change in the performance of your salespersons, and the output of your entire sales and marketing department. Here is how you can measure this significant transformation.

List how many leads have been visited or attended by your sales staff

As said earlier, generating sales is all about leads. So, the foremost exercise for you, as a manager, would be to keep track of all the leads that are coming your way, how many of those leads have been approached and visited. A sales enablement tool can help you to manage this smoothly.

Sort the won & lost leads/customers

You will also need to maintain the list of leads and customers that you have won and lost, maybe weekly or bi-monthly. From this list, you will be able to categorize which leads need to be approached again, in some other way by some other rep.

Notice the trends of your closest competitors.

Unquestionably, there is a great competition which every marketer aspires to beat and defeat. By noticing the performance and trends associated with your rivals, you can evaluate, how well your strategies are doing, and what changes are to be implemented.

The pharmaceutical companies incur huge expenditure in marketing and sales by traditional detailing methods. The cost increases so high sometimes that it even crosses the research budget or simply fails to match the expected return. Moreover, the increasing numbers of patients are leaving little time for the doctors to fit in sales representatives in their busy schedule. This has led to new models of interactions between the two parties to get more fruitful results. Thus, a new model in pharmaceutical companies came into existence.

Meaning

E detailing pharma refers to the use of a  digital medium for interactions between the physicians and sales representatives. The method includes all activities from emails, sample ordering to presentation of products. Pharma firms know that with this remote marketing they can create better brand awareness, recall, and accelerate sales.

Advantages

• Provides access of drug information as per the convenience of the doctor and is highly flexible in the wake of busy schedule of the doctors. • Provides impressive content with clear presentations, and eliminates cost of extra hard copies and sales reps expenditure. This saves time and cost of the company. • Doctors can choose the most relevant information and access only that as per their need.

Challenge

Though, there are more pros than cons to pharma sales and marketing it has some challenges as well. Many doctors prefer and rely more on personal touch instead on the e-detailing model. They do not have time to experiment with a new way.

Need

Sales and Marketing Alignment

Sales and marketing alignment is potentially the largest opportunity for improving business performance. As the buyer’s journey continues to shift, it becomes more important for the marketing and sales teams to work together and learn from each other. It contributes appreciably toward improving overall business strategy.  A company’s marketing teams often have a complex relationship with the sales team, which is not ripe for good business. Here are few important steps to achieve the true alignment to sales and marketing teams in this context:

• Get your buyer profiles on the same page • Develop an integrated messaging strategy • Agree on common metrics and definitions • Establish the service level agreement • Create a clear process for handling off lead • Create a shared pipeline • Follow up review and refine your effort

Digital presentation

It involves continuous promotion of brands and products via assorted electronic media. Organizations utilize digital form of presentation to keep track of sales conversions, effective content type etc.  It is also helpful for potential customers as they can gain access to useful information any time and from any location without hassles. No wonder, this method is emerging as a growing source for news, entertainment, social interaction and shopping. It is capable of fulfilling the individual demands of people through reliability and understanding. 

Effective customer relationship

With different channel associations of sales and marketing alignment, the digital way of presentation becomes an integral part. It helps business owners to know their potential customers in a better way. It also gives them a subtle idea to adopt the ad campaigns that appeal to their customers the best.

Digital marketing is a term for the quantifiable and interactive advertising of merchandise or services by means of digital technology to arrive at and change leads into clients. The key intention is to endorse brand name, compile the primary option, and add to sale through assortment of digital marketing techniques. It includes an all-embracing collection of service, product and brand advertising procedures, which for the most part use the Internet as a central part of promotion. This is in addition to mobile and long-established TV and radio. 

Ideal way of promoting digital sales:

• Be undeviating and to the point: It is not good to make them speculate about the plan. Be crisp, and precise. Send clear mails and avoid any vague information. You should have a well thought plan before beginning.

• Utilize the stipulated time. Do not waste the customer’s time: Make sure to have a plan prepared with the work schedule. You should know what the presentation or promotion is all about. Clients hardly tolerate wastage of time, and it is your responsibility to give due importance to them and their time.Remember that customer is the ultimate reason for a business.

• Understand the target audience: Know what kind of audience to target. Build a strategy that caters specifically to that section. Beating about the bust leaves a negative impression. It does not do any good to the business. Use sales analytic software to determine the requirements accurately. Ask them about their doubts and fears. Try every bit to solve them.

Every business has its monthly, quarterly, half yearly and yearly goals. Every time it achieves a target, it sets a bigger one. It is the story of every organization, operating in whichever part of the globe. But, as a business owner, have you ever realized is it really achievable for your sales team to draw better results and achieve a further target, while following the same marketing strategy as earlier? No it is not!

To accomplish a greater sales target, you would need a different marketing strategy; the strategy with which you will be able to attract new, and retain your existing clients; the strategy that will improve your sales revenues.

Sales Enablement Applying Sales enabling techniques will add depth to your marketing and promotion campaigns. It works as a bridge that helps you reach your exact audience. To improve your sales and to leave your contenders behind, you would require a more aggressive marketing technique. To enable the door of better sales, you would need a new-age marketing strategy, popularly named as sales enablement.

What is sales enablement? The answer for what is sales enablement can differ according to various marketing experts. But in the simplest definition, ‘it is a kind of training or tool that cheers up your sales team to sell more aggressively’.

Your key purpose of assigning new targets to your teams is of course not to trouble your employees. All you want is increased revenues. For this, you need to train them in understanding the dimensions of the market; you need to implement the sales enablement strategies in your business practices.

Frequent Training To fight the market war with your competitors, your sales team needs to learn the behavior of your competitors and customers. 

What is it that your target audiences find attractive in your rival’s products or services – your employees need to be trained over this. Understanding the transforming trends and moods of the market is very important for sales professionals.

Creating effective marketing content Creating extraordinary marketing contents that interact with the audience is another key to success. Using the same old age methods aren’t very effective nowadays. When you increase the customer engagement, you actually increase the visibility of your products and services. Sales enablement is not just about training the sales professionals and creating interactive marketing contents, but also about utilizing existing contents in a more effective approach (the contents that were rich in quality, but weren’t be employed due to some misunderstandings and confusions). The deployment of e-detailing, sales applications and smart devices would benefit in increasing the performance of sales team.

In simpler terms, e detailing can be referred to as providing details about something, in the pharma sector, about medicines and surgical equipments. The entire concept of e detailing came into existence at the end of the previous decade, when the global markets were suffering from the great economic slowdown and downfall.

It was when some old practices started vanishing. The sales and profits of pharma companies reduced drastically, and even though the demand remained as it is. Optimizing to e detailing, pharma companies started presenting their products and services in a very new manner.

E detailing in pharma not only modernized the way of product presentation, but also it revolutionized the reach of the products, and hence the sales of the pharma cos. E detailing, to be exact, is the employment of new-age electronic and communication tools, like iPad and mobile apps, to broaden the reach of the products and the impacts of the marketing strategies of a company. These effective communication tools also enable you to make way to your client doctors’ clinics and retail outlets in a more effective manner.

These utilities improve the way sales representatives present their products before the physicians. In earlier times, there would use papers and pens to make the clinicians understand their products. The way of sales presentation has changed significantly, thanks to e detailing tools!

How it has comforted the pharmaceutical industry?

E detailing can be seen as tool that ensures sales enablement success for a pharma company. Here is how an organization can leverage from e detailing –

More reach – The primary aim of a pharma company, or any other organization working in whichever field, is to reach its target customers. Convincing the doctor to recommend his/her patients with your drugs becomes more convenient with these modern-day means. The term e detailing includes presenting your products through digital media; as in sending the presentation email, product specifications to the physician. By implementing the e detailing techniques, you make sure that your presentation is reaching the physician.

Revolutionized sales call – You can speak to the physician directly over the phone, and send them your presentation, without having to go for the sales meeting. E detailing techniques may also be termed as remote marketing techniques.

With digital media, you can create more effective presentations, and pitch them to your target customers, and increase the brand awareness. Your contents will be available 24x7.