Creating a Successful Organisation

The pharmaceutical industry’s reliance on Contract Sales Organisations (CSOs) has increased rapidly since the 1990s to the point where now, around a quarter of all medical sales representatives are outsourced. Perhaps it’s not surprising because pharmaceutical companies recognise the value of being able to build sales forces quickly or expand into new geographic or therapeutic areas, without having the financial burden of permanent headcount. However, in the age of ROI, measuring sales force effectiveness is becoming increasingly important and the choice of which CSO to partner with is obviously an influence on that measure.

How do you measure effectiveness?

Of course, an impact on sales is what everyone is looking for, but it’s not the only measure. Companies also need to know if their representatives are happy in their jobs, how much they believe in the company and the products they are selling, and how well they get on with their managers. It’s these ‘softer’ elements that can make a real difference, not only to the effectiveness of a salesforce, but also to other factors such as stability and company morale. These can also be the elements that are most difficult to measure, but the Pf Company Perception, Motivation and Satisfaction Survey can give us some answers.

The Pf survey is recognised as the most accurate gauge to the performance of the industry’s sales forces because it is answered anonymously – and therefore honestly – by a very large number of representatives. This means that it is also statistically robust, and this is verified by the Royal Statistical Society.

So how are our industry’s representatives performing, and which companies have the best results? The answers may surprise you.

First of all, let’s take a look at company culture. Do representatives ‘buy into’ the credo and philosophy of the company they work for? Is there a ‘winning culture’?

Figure 1: Level of satisfaction with company culture

It may sound clichéd, but a CSO’s most valuable asset is its people. AmDel obviously appreciates the importance of recruiting the very best sales people who understand the pharma industry and they believe in providing a culture in which they can thrive. The responses to two other vitally important attributes of a sales force – belief in products and relationship with managers – are presented in Figures 2 and 3 and once again they demonstrate the strength of the AmDel offering.

However, in terms of relationship with manager, it is the negative results that show the most significant figures. Just three percent of AmDel respondents gave a negative response in this area, well ahead of the industry average.

When AmDel was founded by Duncan Morris three years ago, he vowed that he would settle for nothing but the best. The consequence is that the company boasts some of the most talented people in the sector, building on a strong, experienced platform of senior management and recruiting only the most dynamic, proven performers at representative level. So perhaps these results are no surprise.

Delivering Promises

A company needs to feel it can trust its salesforce to deliver results and so AmDel continually monitors the performance of its salesforces, encouraging the sharing of best practice and rewarding success. All of AmDel’s values relate to their dependability: openness, honesty, integrity and mutual trust. Once again, this is reflected in the survey results, which indicate AmDel representatives’ total commitment to honest and accurate call reporting, scoring far higher than the rest of the industry. Table 1 shows how, according to Pf’s survey, representatives across the industry use Electronic Management Systems (ETMS), with the number of people who responded “always” or “mostly” given as a percentage. Not only does the regularity of AmDel representatives’ ETMS usage outstrip the industry average, but, perhaps more importantly, the accuracy of their reporting is unrivalled. Indeed, this openness transfers to the company as a whole.

Aligning to clients

The derivative of AmDel’s name alone underlines a significant claim – Ambition Delivered – and this ethos runs through every element of the company. At AmDel, the best way to deliver ambition is to completely align its service with the needs of the client, and so AmDel offers a range of services to suit the varying needs of an evolving NHS. Services include the provision of:

• Doctor teams for peer-to-peer selling
• Dedicated teams
• Syndicated sales forces
• Nurse teams
• Dispensing doctor teams
• NHS specialist teams

AmDel encourages its clients to embrace the notion of partnering. Its aim is that the integration between AmDel representatives and clients’ permanent field forces will be so complete, the client will not perceive a difference between the two. This client-focused attitude has won them contracts with 16 major pharmaceutical companies. Their feedback is consistently good. For example, when asked about the service provided by AmDel, Paul Runeckles, Business Unit Director for Serono, commented: “The project has run like clockwork from the minute we chose AmDel as our strategic partner and AmDel have continued to deliver on all the KPI’s they agreed.”

With core values of honesty, integrity, openness and mutual trust at its heart, AmDel seems to possess the key qualities needed in a CSO and this is reflected in the company’s ability to live up to its promises.

The Future

In a market where prescribers’ needs are not only changing, but the very identity of the customer is also evolving, the value of the representative remains unequivocal. Yet as pharmaceutical companies develop complicated metrics tools to examine the effectiveness of their field forces, recruiting and deploying the smartest and most skilled representatives to deliver messages to a broadening customer-base is paramount. AmDel has raised the bar in the Contract Sales market. Its potent combination of experienced strategic management and the recruitment of dynamic representatives, provides a strong platform to meet the demands of the competitive pharmaceutical sales market. What’s more, it delivers its promises. So, if you’re an ambitious sales manager faced with a challenging target, consider outsourcing. For Ambition Delivered, consider AmDel.