How Pharmacy Management Software Can Increase Pharmaceutical Sales Effectiveness?

By Author: Bhupendra Choudhary
Total Articles: 4
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As a pharmaceutical sales leader, do you feel that despite investing in talented people, new-age sales processes, and tech-based sales enablers (infrastructure), your company or team is not achieving the desired sales effectiveness? This might be resulting from the disconnected balance between the above mentioned three key factors-people, process, and infrastructure. To create a balance, it is important to closely integrate all these factors into each other. Pharmacy management software programs are designed for this purpose only. A well-developed pharmacy app should serve as a one-stop platform that expands to all the three key factors of a pharmaceutical company, and thus provide the desired balance among the three.

What sales challenges can be addressed with a pharmacy management software?

Needless to say, that in the market there are numerous pharmacy apps, that claim to support your sales processes, perhaps you might be already using one. However, to increase pharmaceutical sales effectiveness ...
... picking up random software won’t help much. You must choose software on basis of what kind of challenges it is capable of addressing. Here are three key challenges identified by most of the pharmaceutical sales leaders:

Real-time visibility: When it comes to field sales, having real-time access to fieldwork status, MR’s activities and field data are imperative for the sales leaders. Because sometimes delayed access to the information leaves no scope to execute preventative measures to avoid damage. A pharmacy management software must allow the sales manager/leader to have real-time visibility of what’s going on in the field so that he can proactively identify the red flags and take the necessary preventive measures.

The productivity of the MRs: You have a team of experienced MRs, who are working for long hours? But are their working hours equal to their productive hours? If an MR logs into your system at morning 9 AM and logs out at evening 6 PM, ideally, he is working long enough, but how much of this time has been productive in terms of real face-to-face selling? The sales manager needs a better insight into the MR activities, also the MR needs better tech-enabled (infrastructure) support to increase his effectiveness. So, you must choose a pharmacy app that also serves as an MR reporting software.

The capacity of a reporting software should allow the MR to receive job schedules/notifications/ reminders for his regular appointments with physicians.
The software must provide him access to the company’s database on a real-time basis, so that he can have all the information, files, reports, etc handy and need not worry about carrying the hard copies. This allows him to record and use information on-the-go, anywhere, anytime
Better, if the app can do the route planning for him so that he can travel without wasting too much time in it.
Most importantly, the software must provide the MR the flexibility to take up remote-reporting. So that he can upload his field-accumulated data, payment reports, invoices, his worksheet, etc. on a real-time basis. Without the facility of remote reporting, many MRs are forced to travel back to their offices from their job locations just to take up the reporting formalities. This is pure wastage of productive time. Rather than traveling back to the office, the MR can utilize the time to rack another sale.
For the sales manager, the MR reporting software is a medium to have real-time visibility on MR’s location through geo-tracking as well as his job activities. This also brings in transparency.

Overlapping territories: Sales territory management is much needed in the pharmaceutical sales, as often it is being reported that the territories of MRs get mixed up, as a result, they end up meeting the same physicians, maybe with different products. Thus, without proper ways of territory management, it gets difficult and conflicting for a sales manager, when it comes to assigning physicians and sales quotas. A pharmacy management app comes with inbuilt features that allow a sales manager to categorize the territories, sort and filter the clients by territories and then assign or redistribute the pharma leads among the MRs to avoid any sort of overlapping.

Conclusion

To increase your pharmaceutical sales effectiveness, you need an integrated approach and also an integrated platform. MR reporting software is the right kind of integrated platform that can bind all your sales processes, allowing your MR team to function more effectively.

Bhupendra Choudhary is Business Head of FieldCircle - a leading field service management software company. He has extensive experience in providing apt business solutions for field service and field sales domain through field sales management software. A product thinker, he collaborates with industry leaders to understand business challenges and facilitate technology solutions for same.