Moving the Needle on Understanding Customers

My ah ha moment came when I did a round of one-on-one meetings with my new team. During these meetings, we reviewed their top customers and it quickly became apparent that even for reps who had been working on the territory for over a decade, they often did not have a good grasp of why their doctors were prescribing the medications in our therapeutic areas.

My reps could tell me that efficacy for instance was a priority for a doctor but could not tell me what efficacy looked liked to them in that therapeutic area. Was it low relapse rates? Speed of action?A specific value on a lab test?

It was a bit like a car salesperson knowing that the client wanted something to drive around in. It is too general and hard to offer value to the customer with only this information to work with.

Efficacy, safety and tolerability don’t tell you anything if you do not know what they look like to a specific customer.

So, the place that I felt that I could help my team the most was in getting them to take their understanding of their customers up a level.

I tried the usual things that sales managers do. A couple of didactic sales training courses, reps practicing their customer interactions with other reps and the standard field coaching that all sales managers do.

After a number of months of effort, my sense was that we had really not made any significant progress. People who have spent their careers thinking and doing things a certain way just naturally tend to stick with old habits despite the courses and coaching.

What was I going to do to get them to look at their customers in a new way that they would apply consistently?

What ultimately worked was spending a lot of one-on-one time discussing their top customers and for each of those customers, working through a series of questions that I had developed to help the rep to get insights into why the customer did what they did.

To start to familiarize my reps with this process, I asked them do a profile on their top ten customers. Then, using the questions as a guide, once a month we would sit down together andgo through these profiles to see what progress they had made.

For every customer, we discussed what the rep already knew, what they needed to learn and what the next questions were. We then discussed, based on the customer’s interests and needs, how the repshould customize their presentation to that customer.

Just saying tolerability was a decision criteria for a physician was not enough. I would challenge the rep to go deeper and figure out what tolerability looked like in that therapeutic area for the physician. What questions could you ask and what did the physician’s behaviors suggest?

At first this was clearly painful for the team. They were not bought into the process and felt that it was extra work for nothing.

Over time though, and I won’t say that it was easy, but over time, they all started having ah ha moments as they got insights into why their customers did what they did.

Knowing this, they were better able to tailor their presentations to their customer’s interests and needs. This led to better conversations and ultimately, more patients being helped by our medications.

Our team was #1 in the country largely because they understood their customers better than anyone else.

My learning was that to really move the needle and get my reps to develop the habit of going deeper in their customer understanding, we needed to do several things. First, regular one-on-one coaching interactions provided the opportunity to reinforce and build on what they had learned. Secondly, having standard questions about their customers to work through really helped give them the structure that they needed to develop customer insights. Lastly, going through this process for a small, set group of customers on a regular basis helped them to see their progress and develop the habit going deeper in their understanding of their customers.

I hope that my sharing of theselearningshas been helpful to you. If you would like to get thelist customer insight questions that I used, feel free to contact me at Marc@SolutionsMRC.com and I will be happy to send you a copy for your personal use.

If you have experiences or learnings around what you did to better understand your customers, I would love to hear about it!

I always like to get feedback on these articles so please feel free to thumbs up, thumbs down, write a comment or contact me directly.

Thanks so much for taking the time to read this. Have a great day!

Marc