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Relationships
and Trust
I recently attended
BioFinance 2006 and there were two words I
heard discussed at many of the presentations:
relationship and trust. From the smallest start-up
to the mid-size successful company the management
teams talked about the importance of building
relationships and trust with both the financial
and the scientific communities long before
you go looking for money or a partnership.
Let's face it, we all will easily and happily
loan a friend $20 or possibly even several
thousand dollars to help them out of a bind
or to realize a goal. Would you just as easily
loan a stranger $100?
Overall, the message I heard was that relationships , drive success. It was a reminder to me, as
a director of a small company, of the importance
of building relationships with people not just "networking".
Once the relationship is established, trust
can then be built. Trusting someone's word
or motives is a vital component of any relationship,
personal or business. We were reminded by several
speakers that relationships and trust need
to be built first within a company, especially
among the management team, as well as with
people in the broader financial, medical and
scientific communities.
Biofinance was an interesting place to be
reminded of the importance of taking the time
to meet someone for coffee, lunch or a drink
and to build a relationship. Something I think
we all need to be reminded of in this hectic
world.
Yours truly,
Bonnie Kuehl, PhD
Executive Director
Scientific Insights® Consulting Group Inc.
ps: We have updated
our website with new pictures and information.
Our great new pictures are courtesy of an
amazing photographer Ann Marie May at Welcome
Aboard Photography. www.photosbywelcomeaboard.com
The image above was also used in a presentation
given by Dave Howlett along with Bonnie's favourite
phrase..."Don't let your passion blind
you!" Dave does this awesome seminar
- Knocking down Silos - it's not what you know,
or even who you know - but who knows you.To see
a podcast of his seminar go here: http://trafcom.typepad.com/blog/2006/03/selling_the_sto.html
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Competitive
Edge:
it's all about gaining access
to prescribers, right!?
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by
Robert Seguin
President, The Productive
Leadership Institute
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Right,
and Wrong!
Yes, it has a lot to do with the value
your field personnel bring to the physicians
office when they finally get face-to-face.
Each time they have to earn their next
appointment, and many pharmaceutical
and biotech sales teams have done a good
job of finding creative solutions to
the value proposition question.
But
that's not the only competitive edge
opportunity; what about helping your
sales reps run more successful "businesses"?
If you stand back from a typical territory,
be it general sales, specialty, hospital,
continuing health education or the like,
and examine it like a stand-alone business,
the biggest opportunity for competitive
edge and so-called "productivity
improvement" lies within the reps
themselves. It is their successful expenditure
of the most precious resource on most
pharmaceutical company Profit and Loss
statements - their time.
This is not a new concept, but the execution
of best-practices in field time management
is evolving rapidly.
Typically,
Pharma and Biotech management has taken
a top-down, didactic approach to managing
this precious resource, with mixed
results. Field personnel are given
very specific productivity targets,
like "calls
per day" and "hits per call" metrics
and subsequently told how to deliver
these metrics.
And what have been the outcomes of this
all too common top-down approach in the
industry? Sales productivity reports
that contain less than believable self-reported
productivity data, and stressed out middle
level managers, who often have to spend
more time checking data integrity than
spending days in the field supporting the
success of the field force.
The alternative
approach being adopted by a number
of highly successful sales teams borrows
from the models of successful business
practices, such as those described
in recent publications like Jim Collins "Good
to Great". Based on a more collaborative
approach to field management, progressive
pharmaceutical and biotech sales leaders
are taking a different approach, and
capitalizing on the competitive edge
this is creating in sales force productivity.
Michael
Tremblay, Director of Sales at Astellas
Canada, identifies some of these collaborative
leadership traits that have led to
the significant success of his field-based
teams. "We start
by hiring good independent business managers
to join our field organization. Secondly,
we recognize the power in having them
establish their stretch performance goals
and seeing our role as managers as being
supporters of their success. This includes
helping our representatives identify
the highest-value activities and empowering them
to spend their time accordingly. It's
our job to help them eliminate, simplify
or delegate the lower value activities
that can get in the way of them achieving
their stretch goals, and ultimately,
our success as a sales organization."
What can all this mean to a stressed
out sales manager under constant pressure
to produce more? A lot actually!
Let's take a look at just one example.
Let's say you
have a sales team of 10 representatives
calling on a specialty prescribing audience.
If each territory produces $5M in sales/year,
of which $2M is at risk (growth or loss
to competitors) each year, then the value
of an hour of time from each sales representative
is $600/hour, not the $30 they are paid
by your company. How so?
Assuming the $2M in topline at play generates
a 60% contribution to corporate income
(after cost of goods and variable expenses),
then you divide the value creation potential
of $1.2M by the average of 2,000 hours
worked per year by each representative.
Now if
your 10 reps, with your support, can
shift just 20% of their current time
allocation away from lower value activities
(low prescribing physician calls, meetings,
e-mails, phone calls, conferences, travel)
to higher impact "face time" with
high prescribers, the 20% productivity
improvement would generate an additional
$4.0M in sales and $2.4M in contribution
to your company, across the 10 reps in
your region. This may make you "Sales
Leader of the Year" in your organization!
Now that's competitive edge!
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In a Canoe
by James Paterson
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Those
of you who know me well know that I will go
on a canoe trip at the drop of a (wide brimmed,
sun and rain protecting) hat. Of course, we
all really know that canoeing does not develop
skills that are really useful in the business
and sciences world, right? Well, not exactly.
I am struck by a number of similarities.
Before setting out on a canoe trip, there is actually
a lot of planning, both "big picture" and
detail. Big pictures planning includes type of
trip, the experience of people coming on the trip,
the duration, time of the year, emergency access
points. But the devil is in the details - things
like food likes and dislikes, allergies, backpacks,
sleeping bags, food for which day. What I find
is that messing up any of the details can be as
bad as messing up the big picture - you won't enjoy
a trip if the meals don't agree with you (or forgot
the toilet paper) just as if the trip was too long
or hard. The solution? I get to know the people
going on the trip and their expectations and plan
accordingly. The same process occurs in both science
and business. For example, starting a new business
- the big picture, things like potential market,
competitors, exit strategy are important, but the
details, like capabilities of employee's, building
requirements, management team are what ultimately
will either make or break a company.
Usually my canoeing expeditions are on rivers
that have at least some white water (that is
rapids). Some may think that this must be very
dangerous and it can be. However, with every
rapid, there is a process that I follow. The
first thing is to stop and plan what I will
do. Here is where skills and experience begin
to become really important. I stand near (or
sometimes in) the rapid and I watch the water
- I judge where the deep channels are, where
the water flows, look for underwater (and invisible)
rocks by disturbances in the current. I then
plan. I picture the possible routes through
the rapid for a canoe, remembering how skilled
the paddlers are - with more skilled paddlers,
I can choose more aggressive routes with better
payoff (more fun!). I look for ways around
obstructions and pay attention to see if the
route continues downstream. I look for out
points throughout the rapid, and places I can
throw emergency lines to. If I find a route
that I like, I will communicate that route,
in detail (things like go left of that rock)
to the paddlers and remind them what to do
if the canoe spills. Everyone then dons the
requisite safety gear and one at a time, away
they go. If there is a problem, the first thing
done is to rescue the biggest asset - the person.
Gear is less important and we have more leisure
to do that.
How does all this seem like business? This
seems to me a good way of approaching a business
development process. There will be long stretches
of moving between deals, with sudden flurries
of activity (the rapids in a river). However,
rushing headlong into the details of a deal
process is full of danger, many which may be
avoidable. Stop, look at the currents flowing
into the deal process - are there obstacles
that may not be obvious (anything from personal
preferences from either side of the deal to
conflicting goals). Plan how to navigate past
those issues, look for places you can bail
out or delay a deal until you are ready, remember
the skills of your team - sometimes getting
a deal done with slightly less return is better
than risking the whole deal. Give the team
everything they need to get the deal done.
And remember to be ready to rescue your team
members if the process goes belly up - have
an out ready. Sometimes, like with canoeing,
the best way to get around a rapid is not try
to shoot it, but pull the boat out of the water
and walk around - it might be hard work, but
it is much safer.
So, if you ever try to call me and find out
that I have gone canoeing, don't think that
I am on vacation - I am honing my work skills!
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