To determine whether a sales force is truly effective takes a certain amount of skill, quite a lot of information and the ability to accurately determine potential. Essentially, the amount of selling time available, based on a realistic allocation of hours and multiplied by the number of people on the team, can be combined with an assessment of market potential to create a market response matrix. In the past, this was often a time consuming and error-prone process, conducted with a spreadsheet around the table, but there are far more productive ways to approach this issue these days.

For a sales force to be truly effective, territories must be aligned properly at the very beginning. To do this, boundaries must be clearly defined, workload balances correctly determined, travel time minimised and contiguous territories carefully handled. Even though this may sound fairly clear, it’s often not so, and unless the sales executive’s time is protected from waste and fully optimised, the company simply won’t achieve its full potential. Without proper territorial alignment, the sales executive could be faced with having to deal with far too many potential customers. This will undoubtedly result in a net loss in terms of productive time, as the high workload will result in ineffective interaction with individual clients. The opposite is also true, as if too few customers are allocated to the executive, potential can be wasted and this can be really unfortunate if the allocated executive is known to be a top-level and highly productive person.

Before a sales force should be deployed, the pharmaceutical company must ensure that it has a comprehensive roadmap to success. This can be especially challenging for the business executives as they have so much on their plate to start off with. It goes without saying that the business chiefs are interested in sales force effectiveness, but they should get help from pharmaceutical consultants to help them prioritise effectively. The pharmaceutical consulting firm will show the business executives how to prepare adequately, how to plan and optimise the workload of the sales force. Building on years of experience, industry insight, education, training and street smarts, pharma consulting will certainly help the parent company to prepare for battle.

A company’s sales force should not be deployed unless a number of criteria have been met, including strategic alignment, both current and future, goal and objective auditing, data incorporation and resource deployment, human and otherwise. Each individual must be honestly assessed to see where he or she should fit into the entire picture, given the anticipated workload. Any current deployment of resources should be highly criticised to expose any inequities in territory alignment.

In an ideal world, members of the sales force should each have a excellent and very productive track record. Remember that it’s not up to the sales executive to solicit improvements in territories or necessarily to find new clients. It’s up to the pharmaceutical company executives, in concert with pharmaceutical consultants, to set adequate goals and to make sure that they have laid out the matrix to take into account maximum potential gain.

Alan Gillies is the Director of L2L Consulting, an elite pharmaceutical consultancy firm which specialises in Strategy Development and Implementation Excellence for prestigious multi-national organisations.

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