Is your pharmaceutical sales team motivated? If you are like most sales leaders, you look to KPIs to find out. And that’s a good start – after all, making your sales targets at least indicates that you are putting in the work to be successful. Or, a nice bonus might be the motivator to continue hitting sales targets.

However, we tend to overlook the fact that sales environments are high-pressure, punishing environments to work in, especially when it comes to pharmaceutical sales. Salespeople often face barriers that are out of their control, and failures can stack up quickly.

So, how do you get your sales teams to deliver consistently, stay motivated, and think outside of the box to generate new opportunities?

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In Part 1, we showed how your current leaders are an essential asset in filling your leadership pipeline. We also introduced the Five Critical Capabilities needed by current leaders to develop upcoming leaders. In Part 2, using a real case study, we took a deeper dive into those Five Critical Capabilities: strategic talent mindset, talent identification skill, creating development opportunities, coaching skills, and interpersonal awareness.

Here, in Part 3, we discuss how to ensure the health and strength of your pipeline, by answering three questions:

1. What is the status of your leadership pipeline?
2. Is senior leadership aligned and bought in?
3. Are key organizational levers aligned to create a culture that accelerates leadership development?

From our quarter-century experience in consulting with HR executives to help their leaders, here are the important things to consider in each question.

In Part 1 of our series, we explained that your company’s long-term strategic advantage relies on current leaders to develop future leadership talent. We identified Five Critical Capabilities that leaders must demonstrate: strategic talent mindset, talent identification skills, creating development opportunities, coaching skills, and interpersonal awareness.

Here, in Part 2, we present the remarkable story of how one HR executive leveraged those five talent-development capabilities with leaders to expand their severely restricted leadership pipeline.

Your company’s long-term strategic advantage relies on strong leadership to align people, execute strategy, clearly define the culture, and engage all employees. But as Baby Boomer leaders rapidly retire, most of their collective leadership experience — often 30 to 40 years’ worth — is out the door.

It’s not easy being a Regional Director in a pharmaceutical sales organization. There is a lot of pressure that comes along with the role.

After all, regional directors (RDs) are frequently being pulled in different directions, trying to satisfy corporate initiatives while also catering to the unique demands of their own districts. They are initiators as well as implementers, expected to translate strategy into its most tangible form in the field. Often this leads to an unfortunate series of misalignments, miscommunications, and misdirection.

So what then can be done to ensure strong and consistent regional director performance in pharmaceutical sales?

Pharmaceutical sales organizations are extremely diverse and have multiple generations represented in them – from baby boomers (born 1946-1964) to Generation X (born 1965-1980) to millennials (born 1981-2000). There are big differences between the generations, including different expectations and preferences when it comes to how they communicate, how they want to be managed, what they are looking for in a job, and how they approach their work. There are also things that the generations have in common. 

As a leader, it’s important to be able to flex your style to meet the needs and expectations of all of your employees. 

One of the questions you should ask is: How can I tailor my approach according to generational preferences and help meet individuals’ expectations to ensure an aligned, engaged and productive pharmaceutical sales team.

Try the following four strategies to harness the power of a multigenerational workforce.

The start of a new quarter and a new year typically generates a search for innovative ideas that can increase pharmaceutical sales growth and performance, especially if numbers have been lagging.

So, where do you look for the best ideas? Behavioral science may not be on your radar just yet, but it should be. Managing pharmaceutical sales performance by recognizing the science behind the behaviors visible in your organization can be just the differentiator that improves performance and creates lasting change.

Instead of following trends this quarter, why not implement these proven, evidence-based principles from applied behavioral science?

Change leadership is critical to your pharmaceutical sales results because of the acceleration of change in today’s pharmaceutical sales organizations. Change has evolved over the years from leaders just managing the change to leaders needing a full set of change skills and capabilities.

Change is no longer an event; it is a constant for organizations, and pharmaceutical sales representatives are looking to their leaders to help them navigate the flurry of change and to understand how to harness it to produce profitable performance.

In today’s environment, companies are heavily engaged with multiple, constant, concurrent and rapid changes impacting their pharmaceutical sales force.

When we think about achieving lasting behavior change in pharmaceutical sales organizations, we tend to mean change in the behavior of the consumers.

For example, how can we get consumers to develop sustainable habits around taking medication? How do we make interacting with web portals easier and more user-friendly

What many companies have not yet realized is that there is a different group that warrants the same kind of purposeful attention around behavior change – your pharmaceutical sales team.

While some pharma sales organizations are already taking advantage of behavioral levers today, there is still plenty of opportunity for growth in leveraging behavioral science to drive pharmaceutical sales team performance.

Pharma organizations can take a cue from other industries, which have realized the power of the behavioral science for their own sales forces.