Consultative Selling in Pharma is a philosophy rooted in building a relationship between you and your prospects. A salesperson who practices Consultative Selling in Pharma develops a holistic and nuanced understanding of the buyer’s needs, and then they try to fulfill those needs with a customized solution.

Since pharmaceutical sales calls can occur in unusual locations, sales representatives were often unable to take advantage of formal presentations using notebook PCs and have typically had to rely on printed collateral. The printed materials often lacked complete information and became outdated, making it difficult to have an informative dialog. Many sales executives in the pharmaceutical industry made the decision to switch to tablet PCs and electronic promotional material. Merck & Co. and AstraZeneca are among the companies that have widely deployed tablet PCs to the sales force. In the meantime, tablet PCs run applications that support the full Consultative Selling in Pharma cycle, from accessing CRM-based contact information to getting an electronic signature for samples.

Digital transformation
What has changed is that the digital revolution has created a profusion of available and relevant information to act on. We are in an era where there is no alternative but to mine, link and position various data sets for commercial success.

Leadership in data science
The first couple of slides of any popular conference presentation these days describe how pharma has undergone a data-driven, customer-centric transformation. In the process we have witnessed the convergence of data from different disciplines and historically organizational siloes. That process is what ultimate enables commercial success, requiring the coordination, linking and triangulation of insights between managed markets analytics, social media, customer segmentations, longitudinal prescribing information, geo-location data and DTC marketing statistics, to name just a few data sources.

Messaging mistakes center around failing to communicate your company’s value proposition in a way that resonates with your target audience. For businesses that serve pharma companies, it’s paramount to articulate the main benefits prospective clients will receive instead of conveying information about your brand or the mechanism behind your solution.
Messaging Mistake #1: Selling the product instead of the insight
Solution selling has been a go-to sales tactic for several decades now. The main principle behind it is sound: by promoting the solution to your clients’ problems, rather than your product, you give your prospects a more tangible reason to do business with you. The pharma industry in particular “demands expertise in solutions selling, based on the needs of the customer rather than the attributes of individual products or services,” writes James Robinson, Eye for Pharma.

But, in a changing landscape where 77% of B2B buyers educate themselves before beginning the purchasing process, selling solutions is becoming more and more difficult because buyers have a better grasp on their current problems and how to fix them. Companies marketing to today’s pharma market should focus on selling insights.

“B2B buyers are coming to the table more prepared and better educated than ever before. In many cases, they’ve already honed in on a desired solution and, as a result, they no longer appreciate a solution selling approach that relies on open-ended questions aimed at diagnosing their needs,” writes Falon Fatemi, Forbes.

Messaging Mistake #2: Focusing on promotion instead of education
As we noted above, most B2B buyers today research the solutions to their problems before reaching out to a company to help them. This requires businesses to focus more on developing resources for prospective clients to learn and less on pushing out purely promotional material. “By educating your target audience, they will be more likely to think about your offering when they need a solution to that particular problem you solve,” writes Thomas Oppong, Entrepreneur.

Recently, our team received a request from one of the top 10 international consulting firms for help with positioning themselves as an authority within their target pharma audience. We didn’t attract this prospect by promoting ourselves.

In addition, tablet PCs support the concept of rapid delivery of new promotional materials. When a new product is launched, sales reps can simply download the materials, which can shave off a number of days between the customary paper launch and electronic launch. The most visible aspects of sales force automation via the tablet PC—reduced paperwork, full availability of order history and notes from previous meetings— are time savers that will make the sales rep more productive. But the tablet PC is also the front end to far more extensive customer relationship management capabilities. Reps can incorporate trend information into individually tailored presentations for each customer, stressing the benefits most appropriate to physicians, hospital dispensaries and pharmacists.

If the rep treats the relationship with the physician as a long – term project as opposed to a series of sales calls that are designed to push a product day in and day out, he has to be more successful. All this can be looked at as an opportunity for reps to begin the process of building the kinds of meaningful relationships they enjoyed with physicians in the past.