Pharmaceutical companies have been talking about patient-centricity for years.
Yet, many pharma companies find it challenging to make patient-first thinking a pervasive trait throughout their organization. 

In its simplest terms, creating a patient-centric culture is about being authentic and open in communicating to patients, taking care to understand their needs, and giving them a voice in the management of their care. Patient-centricity simply requires putting the patient first or being empathetic to their story. 

Are you searching for ways to get better results from your sales team? Here’s a chance to look back at some of the top articles and tips from 2018. As we shift into the new year, you’ll have a valuable perspective on how to get the most out of your sales team.

The health care industry has made strides to involve the patient across the entire value chain, from research and development to differentiating the needs of patients, to ensuring efficient ways for access to medication.

There is a movement towards patient-centricity, typically defined as more than just feeling empathy and a connection to patients. More and more, patient-centricity is about creating the intersection between a positive patient outcome and a business benefit.

Pharma sales teams can leverage and form this value-based intersection of patient outcome and business benefit by creating a patient-centric approach in their daily work. If you can increase the pharma sales team effectiveness in creating a patient-centric culture, it likely equates to more sales, more lives saved, and a greater impact on the community. 

Digital transformation is top of mind for many organizations, large and small, these days. However, knowing exactly what digital transformation means to a company and its leaders can be fuzzy at times. The complexity of the needed transformation can be daunting, and the path to realization of a digital transformation strategy can be filled with false starts and resistance.

Coaching is an investment and should be a positive experience for your pharma reps, where they learn what they do well and discover where they can improve.

Below are three proven coaching actions used by effective pharma sales managers to help their teams reach business goals.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are at the core of pharmaceutical sales. They are simultaneously the output and driver of sales representative behaviors.

Sales representatives use performance indicators to evaluate their relationship management and district sales strategies, ensuring they get the best results. Regional directors use them to identify training and development opportunities in sales reps, revise targets, clarify their own vision and direction, or find new or different ways to motivate performance. National directors use them to make strategic hiring and market development decisions, coach regional directors, and remove barriers.

But while pharma sales KPIs are valuable to all members of your organization, many companies fail to use these metrics to their full potential. Learn how the following three steps can ensure you’re aligning with KPI best practices and maximizing performance improvement.  

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.