Business planning for medical sales

There are a number of little clichés you hear relating to the subject of business planning in Medical sales. ‘Fail to plan and you plan to fail’ was one of the first teeth grinders delivered to me by my manager. There’s also the usual spread of acronyms, such as the five ‘P’s, planning and preparation prevents poor performance.

They all amount to the same concept, which is perhaps best described by NLP (neuro linguistic programming) experts in relation to ‘vision’. They say that the clearer someone’s vision is of where they want to be in the future ( a future ‘goal’), and the clearer they can see the stepping stones and milestones along the way to reach that goal, the more likely it is to occur.

It’s true to life in general as well. There are those you meet who are dreamers, they want to be rich or famous, but there only concept of how this might be achieved is either doing the lotto each week or entering the ‘X Factor’. You (and probably they) know full well it’s not likely to happen. On the other hand there are those who will deliver detailed plans, broken down into many small steps along the way. Although the end goal may seem way out of reach, the next step ‘is’ within manageable grasp, and each step beyond is a realistic step to achieve beyond the previous one. For these people, you are far more likely to see it happen.

Medical sales is no different. If anything, it’s a relatively simple role to coast in, just doing the necessary to do ‘okay’. However, if you want to ‘rip up tress’, get pay rises and promotion, you’ll need to apply a little forward planning. In addition, if you plan of moving jobs in the future, a ‘Plan for your first six months’ is a favourite for presentations at job interviews.

There are no right and wrong answers to business planning, it’s about having a rational thought process which leads to a set of actions, which can be assessed and adjusted along the way. As with any business decision making, there will be elements of ‘best guesses’ in your plans, this is the ‘risk’ element of any business. However, you should minimise the guesses and ensuing risk as much as possible through research.

For a standard GP/Hospital representative role in medical sales, I would suggest considering three basic criteria.

a) The distribution of business potential

b) The distribution of Key opinion leaders and known sponsors of your product

c) Access to your customers.

The distribution of business potential

If you haven’t done it before, here’s how to work out ‘brick potential’.

    * Take your RSA (regional sales analysis) and record the total sales for your product’s market in each brick, that is, the total of your sales and all of your competitors.

    * Now work out the difference between your product’s sales and all of the rest (your competitors) and this will give you the total available opportunity in each brick.

    * Now divide this figure by the number of GPs in this brick and you have your ‘brick’ potential. That is, the amount of sales available per GP in a specific postcode brick.

What you will find is a spread of potential with brick potential in some bricks far higher than others. The idea is that you are far better investing time and money on GPs in a brick where the potential is 100 scripts a GP rather than 10.

In practice this is too simpler criteria to simply rank bricks based upon this potential and plan around this, hence my other too criteria. If a brick has the highest potential, but you know you can’t access the customers, there’s no point in giving this the highest priority.

In addition, ‘key opinion leaders’ is a common industry term, but I prefer to refer to ‘sponsors’ or supporters of your product. These are important because product usage and support is infectious, and this is common to any business. People are more attracted to something that is tried and tested. Hence, if you know you have a brick with good users and supporters in it, time invested here may be more fruitful as you can use this support to generate additional business. The obvious example would be a presentation to a practise of 5 GPs where one is already a prolific user has obvious potential benefits, as you should be able use their endorsement to persuade others to adopt their usage patterns more quickly than if the example wasn’t available.

In summary, for a medical sales role, once you have mapped out your territory in terms of a) business potential b) the distribution of key opinion leaders and c) Access to GPs, postcode bricks which score highly on all three criteria should be your prime targets to gain a greater share of your time.

Just a few other tips for planning, which you would also need to detail for a presentation. Be specific regarding your goals and what you want to achieve. This applies to the end goal or vision, the tracking all the way back to the mile stones along the way. It’s a horrible acronym, but remember SMART goals should be used(specific, measurable, achievable, reviewable and time specific….more about this in another article!) So what impact are you expecting after 6 months, and what are the manageable milestones along the way? Remember, there’s no right or wrong answer here, the important thing is to construct a well reasoned explanation for how you will proceed, and why this should achieve the desired results.

Good luck.