The augmented salesforce

Next-generation sales, just around the corner

20th-century salesmanship. A pharma sales representative visiting a healthcare professional or a pharmacist. A suited-up middle-aged man arrives to the client’s office carrying a case full of samples and promotional materials. Displays the product list to agree what order to take and a number of prescriptions until the next visit. Tries to increase quantities here and there and gives out the samples the client wants. Pitches on a specific topic of choice, asking if anything else is needed.

End-of-21st-century salesmanship. A healthcare professional is called by a robot, an intelligent software trained with language recognition, human voice emulation, and millions of patient data. It starts the conversation by asking about the client’s children and how she’s doing overall. Tells her there are incredible things to discuss today while showing some revealing stats on patients of the area. Presents opportunities to address their condition and treatment, and how all this could mean a positive upside for her activity. Focuses on one of them and articulates a story based on the latest clinical study the company has produced, supported with comparative figures on what other competing brands do plus some interesting forecasts. Tells her what they will cover on their next discussion, how they will ensure patients are making progress, and what positive impact she is making.

Despite the hype on machines replacing human labor, and without pretending to deny the trend in broad terms, the question we like to address in very practical terms however is how technology that is already available can help individuals make more of their talent and surge on their capabilities. A scenario that can be just around the corner and offers significant benefits to human individuals. Artificial intelligence offers the opportunity to monitor the surrounding environment, translate reality into data and hand it out to the individual, while learning how to react to or anticipate to certain events all the way through. With this as an input, the sales agent is thus empowered to excel at the human side of the engagement, the crafting of the message, the execution of the one-to-one marketing, the advisory and counselling, and then feed the engine back with more data.

How to remove the red tape from salespeople’s routines? One that leads to the bureaucratic use of systems, the tediousness of the scheduling process, or the systematic order taking in front of customers? These auto-pilot behaviors are usually what locks down the previous scenario from happening.

Or, how to move away from just product delivery towards actually marketing solutions? Ones that help clients cater to different consumer and patient realities? Sales reps knocking on clinic doors with a case full of samples, going through product listings in front of clients to replace assortments, or managing the same or very similar product ranges almost everywhere, are traits still very commonly seen.

Or, can we minimize the gut-feeling factor that predominantly drives reps’ actions and decisions on where to go, how often, what to do, etc.?

These are the type of questions we address. Challenges that are very valid today and that we help solve with the use of technology that is at our disposal also today. If used a bit innovatively, it can mean a turning point to the performance of sales teams.

The ambition

Create an impact in society. By tackling the mentioned challenges, we ultimately pursue the big opportunity in salesforce management, and pharma sales in particular: to increase the impact in society by reaching more clients and making more of the current relationships – doctors, clinics, pharmacies; to help improve the condition and well-being of consumers and patients; and to do so while delivering incremental efficiencies, growth, and profitability. A step-up growth in sales and market share. This translates into achieving more income per point of sale, both sell-in and sell-out, more regular customers, and a robust, scalable, and flexible platform to grow efficiently and more rapidly in other markets. Doing things differently. This platform delivers a new way of doing sales that sets the focus on enhancing the technical side of a goal-oriented consultative sales meeting, managing individual client needs, developing categories and brand equity, and boosting content-driven prescription and recommendation habits at client level. Using available technology. The underpinning technology aims to “digitize” the sales process to enable automated customer knowledge: a data intelligence engine to produce the best course of action to meet specific targets in each meeting and for each customer, with the capacity to learn overtime how to refine and grow on those targets.

Addressing it

The solution is based on a data intelligence engine that acts as a virtual agent to help sales teams identify how to create a more significant impact on clients, driving their performance, and planning their activity. It is, in essence, a tool to manage a pharmaceutical – in this case – salesforce in real time by doing what it can do best: automatic activity, customer and sales planning, done at scale with centrally aggregated data. On the other hand, reps are then relieved of these tasks so that they can concentrate on what they can excel at: the engagement with the customer around the value to add to patients and consumers. This is the human-machine duality that we design and implement to make the best of the two in its application to sales excellence. The technical solution is structured on 3 legs: First, the algorithms, neural-net based, to provide customer actions, customer profiles, contact plans, frequencies, etc., plus the learning of new actions, adaptations, and opportunities hardly to be detected by the human eye. Second, a “digital twin” to represent the inner workings of the sales network and understand the different rationales to performance: real-time visual network monitoring – locations, meetings, routes, etc. – activity-based dashboard to report on key variables, agile simulations, and facilitation of insights on performance, capacity, and customer needs. Third, the systems interface – on CRM – to capture the field data in a standard way, with a high frequency – every customer contact – and to visualize the outputs of the algorithm, tailored-made for every rep and customer.

Creating impact

More quality customer interactions. An average 10% increase in the number of customer visits per representative, plus an increase in the value of the visit: sales are in average 10% higher after the first year of operation – factoring out increases due to inflation and market momentum – with a more diversified offer – from 20 to 28 SKUs per point of sale on average – and more customer engagement – more than double the number of training courses and tailored campaigns been delivered. More network capacity. An average 17% increase in the number of clients per rep due to the redefinition of the sales role. More market outreach. From being present on just 40% of the accessible market – 40% of the total potential clients being visited – and concentrating on 30% of those – being visited +4 times a year – to accessing 100% of the market – visiting all clients on year 1 – and concentrating on 70% of those – visiting +4 times a year further on. More sales. All ends up in more aggregated sales, averaging +30$ after the first year of operation. More markets. Capacity to accelerate the go-to-market timing for new market entries – organic – due to the bundling of all the core processes – central data, algorithms, and systems – into a plug-and-play platform.

This service set-up described allows for an entirely new way of operating sales, which requires new roles and behaviors – sales reps themselves along with customer service teams – a new organization – i.e., a center of excellence to operate the technology – and new processes – i.e., how to make the best of the technology and insights across all teams and stakeholders. We design these modules too within a modular, turnkey solution, and also provide expert capability to operate it “as a service”, similar to an external CSO. For details on the latter, see www.bejarvis.com.