Pharma and medtech business challenges sales enablement solves
The stakes are high in medtech and pharma sales — and getting higher.
Reps in these fields have a laundry list of business challenges to overcome, including:
- Learning and communicating benefits and features of complex products to highly informed customers
- Gaining and retaining subject matter expertise
- Reaching and providing stellar service to chronically busy customers
- Adjusting to hybrid and remote models during and post-pandemic
- Unifying messaging across commercial teams often operating in different time zones
- Keeping up with compliance standards
And, most importantly, there is a very real, human element to consider. Sales and medical reps can influence health outcomes for patients on the receiving end of products and programs they speak for, so clear communication and continuous education are paramount.
For these reasons, pharma and medtech teams are uniquely positioned to reap massive returns from sales training, coaching, and content management platforms. Below are some of the key metrics and business challenges sales enablement helps medtech and pharma teams improve.
Key metrics sales enablement improves in medtech and pharma teams
Leading Indicators- metrics that can be tied directly to your sales enablement efforts and indicate whether you are on the right track.
Availability of learning and training resources
The total number of easily accessible and current training materials available for sellers, such as short videos for microlearning or just-in-time learning, messaging briefs, or coaching challenges. A sales learning and coaching solution like Bigtincan Learning helps with the creation, delivery, organization, and tracking of sales training materials.
Number of course completions
Making microlearning and targeted training sessions available in a learning and coaching platform increases rep adoption and retention of training materials.
Content engagement
Reps need to know how HCPs are engaging with datasheets, videos, ebooks, and more— especially when they can’t be in the room with them. A sales enablement platform with content analytics and engagement tracking tells reps whether the prospect opened the content, how many pages they read, how long they viewed a video, what links they clicked in it, and so on.
Content availability
The number of pieces of effective sales content are available and easy for reps to find. Having a content management system in place makes it easy to automatically organize, track, and prioritize content for reps and other uses by serving them the most relevant content according to recent activity in the organization as well as their individual preferences and actions within the application.
Number of content shares (or rep usage of content)
This metric measures the total number of times sales content was shared with a prospective customer. It also tracks rep engagement within the application to see who is reviewing and sharing content and who isn’t. A sales enablement tool helps improve the quality of the content by filtering out unused or low-performing content.
Lagging Indicators- metrics that often can’t be tied directly to any specific initiatives, but they do indicate whether you are getting results from your enablement efforts.
Average customer lifetime value
ACLV measures the total value that you are likely to capture from an average customer. Medtech and pharma reps who can provide the ideal customer experience to HCPs by leveraging sales enablement tools will build long lasting relationships that result in increases in ACLV.
Customer satisfaction
Similar to ACLV, sales enablement helps improve Net Promoter Score by upskilling reps and increasing the overall quality of customer experience for HCPs by ensuring messaging consistency, easier communication, and more personalized, valuable content, among other benefits.
Increases in 'Intent to prescribe'
Enabling reps to become trusted advisors, build relationships with, and educate HCPs on product uses and benefits increases their intent to prescribe them.
Number of meetings/engagements/touches
Developing rep skills and expertise, improving content, and taking advantage of digital channels of communication reduces the number of touchpoints required to close a deal and cuts down sales cycle times.
Segmentation changes (e.g. no of 'high-prescribers')
Understanding the number of accounts in high, medium, and low priority segments help provide an understanding of where companies can spend time and resources most cost-effectively. Technology can help provide this knowledge via activities and surveys that dive into the doctor's or hospital's intent to prescribe.
Tender success rate
To be able to win in the life sciences, access is key. Tender success is critical to enable access. Tender success metrics may include number of tender wins, tender win profitability, and tender implementation delivery.
Ramp time or time to competency
The amount of time it takes a new sales rep to become effective, often measured based on their first sale. An easy-to-access content library that is also easy to navigate, training videos for microlearning, snippets from model sales calls, and active coaching activities are some of the elements shown to improve ramp time.
Pitch perfect conversations
Number of Pitch Perfect conversations available is a measurement of how many recorded sales calls were done according to standard, resulted in a close, and are available for other sellers to learn from. Sales calls can be recorded and analyzed using advanced voice analysis software to determine if the call ran according to the best sales practices.
Voluntary turnover rate
Voluntary turnover rate of your customer-facing team measures how many people chose to leave for other opportunities. When you set your teams up to be successful with enablement tools and processes the work environment improves and people are more likely to stay.
Lead velocity
Lead velocity rate measures the period over period growth in the number of leads your teams are generating and can help predict future bookings. Enablement tools help align sales and marketing around lead generation efforts by providing a platform for collaboration and building data-driven processes.
Win rate
Win rate measures how many deals are closed compared to how many opportunities exist. Win rate increases when medtech and pharma sellers are equipped with supportive collateral and trained to become subject matter experts and consultants to HCPs.
Where Bigtincan’s pharma and medtech customers have seen the most improvement
It is easy to list metrics, but better to show real results. These are some of the outcomes Bigtincan customers in life science fields have seen from their sales enablement efforts. You can read the full case studies on our Customer Stories page.
ROI of education costs and efforts seen in sales increases
“One of our core values is to be data driven because we're a medical technology business. So everything has to be measured. So we're very, very clear on the return that we have from professional education,” said Wright. “For every dollar that we invest in professional education, the return on investment is around $8.50.”
-Matthew Wright, VP of Global Professional Education at Allurion Technologies
More productive and efficient training for clinics
Among Allurion’s measurable results, clinics who go through the Allurion training journey are 67% more productive than clinics who don’t.
Faster time to competency and time to effectiveness for reps
With the implementation of a combined learning and content program, Allurion has enabled consistency and accelerated onboarding and learning, which have a direct impact on effectiveness and the overall business results.
Watch Allurion's story:
Easier sharing of better content with HCPs
The integration between the Bigtincan Life Sciences platform and Bayer’s CRM made data automatically flow between the systems. This enabled tracking of customer engagement with email content (opens, clicks, conversions, content access) across countries in the region to understand best practices and share experiences internally.
Measuring content effectiveness
Bayer’s Bigtincan implementation enabled their Marketing team to review content and decide what was working and what wasn’t so they could further optimize their content and email strategy and continue maximizing digital engagement with customers.
Easier to keep communications and content compliant
Bigtincan “proved incredibly effective and enabled our medical reps to maintain the communication with our customers in a compliant way.”
-Mariam Fawzy, Head of Business Analytics, Bayer Consumer Health, Middle East
Better mobile/field sales usage and accessibility of content
Given the size and depth of its product portfolio, Merck Animal Health’s sales force receives and relies on constant content updates, and must be able to access that critical information in real-time with customers in the field. Due to the demanding travel schedule of the Merck Animal Health sales teams— often traveling 100 miles between meetings—it’s crucial that the mobile workforce be able to access the latest, most updated content when and how it’s needed.
With Bigtincan, Merck Animal Health sales teams across 40 countries have access to more than 55 gigabytes worth of content available to improve customer interactions and overall productivity.
Increased message consistency
“Video-based coaching is a great way to ensure that we're driving the message and that people are feeling like they are being supported along the way.”
-Jason Gwilliam, U.S. Manager of Sales Enablement & Training, Abbott
In a highly competitive market, one that is always changing with new clinical data and product updates, Field Sales teams need to be clear and concise in articulating the key data points in the limited time they have with Physicians who want to know about the safety and efficacy of Abbott’s products.
Abbott’s coaching challenges are laser-focused on product messaging, objection handling, clinical data product positioning, and the overall value proposition.
Easier expansion and access to global markets
Novo Nordisk (a global leader in diabetes) needed to extend their reach and provide service for healthcare professionals in geographically remote locations in Mexico, where they did not have an established sales organization and local presence. The goal was to make their type-2 diabetes and obesity products top-of-mind and their value proposition clear – and thereby increase the likelihood that HCPs would prescribe.
Having Bigtincan as a remote solution enabled the digital reps to precisely match HCPs’ requirements in terms of meeting times – even unusual hours or weekends. Bigtincan also enabled the provision of a full detailing experience online, while being easy to use and practical in the field.
Better omnichannel communications with HCPs
“The good results mean we are already sending ‘treatment starts’ to doctors that we have never seen in person.”
-Jose Miguel Torres García Coss GLP-1 Diabetes Marketing Manager, Novo Nordisk
Better unification and communication with distributed and remote sales forces
“With COVID-19 going on, how are the managers going to stay in touch without physically being with them? Video coaching is a great way for that connection.”
-Jason Gwilliam, U.S. Manager of Sales Enablement & Training at Abbott.
Due to the pandemic and shift to remote work, the introduction of coaching has been transformative for Abbott. Accessibility is also key – over 90% of the coaching challenges were submitted from iPhones or tablets.
Gains in active selling time
With Bigtincan, Thermo Fisher’s Life Technologies sales reps are able to search for, access, and utilize more than 50,000 catalog products.
Reps can also create, comment on and collaborate on a wide range of file types including PowerPoint, Excel, PDFs and more, which makes assembling necessary customer information and interacting with that information from a mobile device simple and easy. Being able to assemble customer content packages and materials from any location allows reps to focus on customer conversations.
Which of these challenges is your team facing? Speak to our team to understand how Bigtincan's complete sales enablement platform improves pharma and medtech sales.
