Smart Sales Force Model

The Whitepaper focuses on how a smart field force can better drive sales. Looking for additional ways of getting more from less, Pharmaceutical companies have tried many ways to reduce the fixed cost and at the same time mange the productivity of sales reps; right from addressing the mirroring (multiple reps overlapping on the same set of local customers) issues, creating micro-territories (one rep becoming the single point of contact for all products), structuring around customer types (few reps specialized in high value customers) and downsizing (shedding more than 20,000 field sales positions). Total industry sales representatives are expected to continue declining slowly, settling around 60,000-65,000 by 2014 in US. Sales reps continue to drive sales; when used without proper strategic oversight, however, it leads to costly overspending and missed sales targets. Pharmaceutical companies require sales reps to achieve the market share after the launch of a product. After about 20 to 30 months, the impact these reps would be bringing to the table in terms of revenue and market share is bound to go down. Yet, companies are required to pay them for the next 5 to 7 years to detail the product. Companies start reducing the number of sales reps used in the campaign as a means to reduce the fixed cost. This would possibly decrease the market reach of the product which would in turn reduce the revenue generated from the sales of the product. Even though, simply cutting down the number of sales reps gives an advantage, it is predominantly a temporary fix rather than a complete solution. Decreasing the number of sales reps creates a gap in the reach of the market.