The pharmaceuticals sector is one of Britain's leading manufacturing sectors, bringing in a trade surplus of £3.4 billion in 2005, with the value of UK pharmaceutical exports in the same year at £12.2 billion*. Yet selling pharmaceutical products remains one of the most difficult sales jobs due to tight regulations and, increasingly, changes in the target audience within the medical profession.

The decision about which drugs can be prescribed no longer sits solely with GP's or consultants, who have come under increasing pressure from health authorities and local primary care trusts (PCTs) to follow recommended treatment procedures and drug regimes. Today's strategic decision makers within the NHS are more distributed than ever before and sales professionals are often called upon to communicate 'high and wide' within a formal hierarchy.

Adapting To Change
The pharmaceuticals industry is still adapting to changes throughout the UK health service and is struggling to identify the key influencers at whom to direct their sales messages. As a result, sales professionals have to build relationships with a wider range of audiences, for example pharmacists and committees at hospitals and PCTs. This shift in decision making is also having an effect on the way drugs are sold. While evidence of a drug's effectiveness is still the most important reason for choosing a drug, price and value added services are increasingly 'deal breakers' in a fiercely competitive market. Pharmaceutical sales professionals of the future will be more solutions providers than drug sellers and will have to work harder to get their product's unique selling point across. In addition, changes in the marketplace such as the rising cost of research and the demise of 'exclusive marketing' periods mean that, when a new drug is launched, the manufacturer must gain market share very quickly. For this, a strong sales effort is essential.

For the sales representative, the reality of keeping track of a wider, and in certain cases more senior, network of contacts, in addition to managing an extensive product range, is simply more work. A recent study by the University of North Carolina showed that senior executives value meetings with sales professionals who deliver not just products, but valuable information and insight. In other words they need specific information that is relevant to both their clinical and business performance objectives. This means that the successful sales person will be the one who has the right information at his or her fingertips at the right time. But how can this be achieved?

Vecta Sales Intelligence
Recently, sales professionals in a number of similarly competitive and developing industries have been putting their faith in a new breed of out-of-the-box sales technology, known as sales intelligence. Designed specially for sales professionals working in wholesale and distribution markets, sales intelligence solutions are able to take information from existing back office and accounting systems and deliver insight into customer buying patterns by proactively alerting sales people to specific sales opportunities or potential problems, such as drifting customers, without any need for time consuming data analysis.

The leader in this field is VECTA Sales Intelligence, which also incorporates those elements of CRM that are relevant to distributors and wholesalers such as contact, diary and activity management. It automatically delivers critical information about customer buying patterns that translates into real sales opportunities. It is able to identify potential up-sell, cross-sell or switch-sell opportunities, in addition to highlighting customer drift, without relying on an operator to perform complex data analysis.

Delivering Results
In practice, this means that the typical pharmaceuticals distributor with a range of generic and branded products for wholesale, or even retail, is constantly aware of customer value and opportunities for repeat sales. Without this type of sales intelligence, the sales force is tempted to offer ad hoc discounts, or bundle additional products and services into its core offering in order to defend their position and stop business from drifting. This 'scattergun' approach merely teaches the customer to focus on price rather than value. By using sales intelligence, the sales professional can focus their valuable selling time on the highest margin opportunities, and avoid customers that cherry pick and only buy discounted lines.

The key difference in the VECTA approach is that it does not require the level of investment, both in terms of time and money, as that of traditional customer relationship management (CRM) or traditional business intelligence (BI) solutions. VECTA delivers actionable sales intelligence, out-of-the-box. There is no need to build data warehouses and dashboards using toolkits like many BI solutions, and crucially, unlike CRM, salespeople don't have to enter data before they get useful information back, so end user adoption is almost guaranteed.

In a fast developing industry such as pharmaceuticals, speed of relevant information is key to avoiding the traps that undercut price integrity. As drug development cycles quicken and the decision-making community grows more disparate, it is vital that sales professionals resist the commoditisation of their market. They will only achieve this by having the right tools to understand, and influence, their customer's buying decisions.

* Association of the British pharmaceutical industry.

Key Pressures:

IT decisions are being made in the boardroom not by IT departments.

ROI justifications are becoming more sophisticated.

Customers demanding flexible pricing models.