Commercial Training - Case Example
Client
The client is a Belgian subsidiary of an international pharmaceutical company focusing on a couple of treatments to which they dedicate their entire R&D, as is the case with many pharmaceutical companies. Their sales force shrunk significantly over the last years. Our client has an organisation with which they cover specialists working in or from hospitals, and a different team with which they cover a limited number of independent physicians.
Situation
The sales staff had, on average, good rapport with physicians. Typically, these sales representatives do not sell, but recommend their product to physicians who subsequently prescribe medicine for a specific patient. Between the two events there is a time lag.
The client’s product range delivered scientifically proven superior results for specific diagnoses, but as they were more costly than some alternatives, they also implied physicians to comply with regulations involving the repayment of the treatment by the social security system. In short, although the product worked better, the physician had alternatives that took less time and were cheaper for the social security system. Moreover, their products were not the only alternative: some physicians prescribed basic low-cost medicines, others prescribed medicines providing better results than the basic ones at a marginally higher cost. Additionally, our client had direct competition from
products which were rather similar to their own.
ATC’s value
The company had been proficient at putting forward the logical arguments to the medical establishment and most relevant physicians were quite well informed about the different products on the market and the scientific studies related to them.
The difference to be made was by interacting more appropriately with each of the physicians. Together with the client we built a typological model suitable to the client’s environment based on the ATC model, in order to define better how to differentiate how we behave and deal with medical doctors with varying personalities.
Subsequently, management followed up and established that over two thirds of the sales representatives had significantly better alignments with the physicians and could use this approach for commercial purposes.