Pharma Sales - Storytelling for Success

The story of how your product can make a significant difference to patient wellness, told by your representatives, has a huge impact on the success of your company. As every representative on your team has their own unique style of storytelling, it’s an ongoing challenge to ensure that the key facts are delivered to the physician. When your representative is driving down the road after a call, how much of the story is retained? Physicians will forget what you said and indeed forget things you did, but they do not forget the feeling you left them with. One of the most important questions you can ask during post call analysis is: “what is the feeling you left them with?” Your best storytellers plan the feeling they want to leave their customer with before each call. They work relentlessly on making their story relevant to each individual physician while at the same time delivering the key points with emphasis.

Creating great customer experiences means focusing on the responses you get from physicians. A physician’s response to the sales story is your insight into their current mindset and should form the basis of how the story unfolds. To facilitate this need to continually focus on the responses physicians give to the story you tell, QBC have recently offered representatives a chance to break away from selling for 30 minutes and dial into a conference call once a week. Three representatives review one recent call and receive feedback from a sales coach. The conference call is recorded and posted as a podcast the following morning onto a private website. The podcasts are downloadable automatically to an iPod for anyone authorized within your company to listen. Within 24 hours of the conference call your entire sales team can be listening to continuous professional development. Whether you’re driving from Cork to Dublin, waiting in a surgery, or on a flight to London you can keep up to date with what’s happening in the field.

Apart from sales representatives listening to each other’s account of recent sales calls, marketing, regulatory affairs and a whole host of other parties reap value from tuning in to what effectively becomes ‘YourCompany FM’. The long term value of the podcasts is that new sales people can get a head start on their territory by simply pressing the ‘play’ button. Speaking of ‘play’, perhaps the most important positive side effect is that it’s lots of fun. Anyone with authorized access can blog and leave comments on the podcasts, we have a comment line that you can dial after listening to the podcasts and your comments are available for all to listen to as well. One our clients requested we call some of their customers and ask them about the level of service they were receiving. This made for great feedback that anyone in the company could positively act upon.