Who Are the Next Generation Pharma Sales Managers?

Times have changed and what we need to do to be successful in our jobs has changed as well.

One of the roles that has seen the most change is that of Pharma Sales Manager.

Ten years ago, as a Sales Manager you spent your time tracking your sales numbers, rep activity and did tandems with the members of your team. Your job was to make sure that your reps were working hard and visiting the right customers. Coaching was getting your reps to use a vis-aid occasionally (at a minimum when you were around…) and repeating the right canned messages that had been provided by the company’s marketing department.

The tools that you and your team had available to you were medical education events and maybe taking a customer out for a lunch or dinner.

It is a different world now. E-reps, e-education, I-Pads, advanced customer management databases and patient support programs are just a few of the things that have been added to a now much more complex sales toolkit.

New regulations governing interactions with healthcare professionals have resulted in a complicated new set of rules and limits. Those lunches and dinners are pretty much a thing of the past.

Coaching sales skills is no longer about showing your reps how to use a detail aid and repeat a canned message.

As a Sales Manager, you need a much more advanced set of skills in order to be able to demonstrate to your team how to create a personalized, relevant interaction with each of their customers.

You have to be able to coach them on how to use language, examples and terminology that resonate with each one of those customers as an individual. It means using data from sources that the customer considers to be credible and explaining that data in a way that shows a relevant benefit to that customer.

Bottom line, to be a good sales manager now, you need to have the ability to analyze and understand your fast-changing business environment and develop insights into individual customer needs. In turn, you need to be able to effectively motivate and coach your team of experienced sales professionals on how to develop and use those same skills.

All this while at the same time leveraging a wide variety of evolving tactical tools in a complex compliance environment.

Sales Management is one the few roles that can make or break an organization. If your Sales Managers are able to successfully inspire and coach their teams, your customers will benefit and develop a strong and flourishing relationship with your organization.

If your Sale Managers provide poor leadership, that same relationship will suffer and eventually wither away.

Times are changing. Our customers have never had so many different choices as to where they can go to get what they need.

If our Sales Managers are not able to help our organizations to evolve and meet those needs, our customers will not be our customers for much longer.