Your Drug is Ready. Is Your Salesforce? 4 Steps to a Successful Commercialization

A new drug launch is an opportunity to expand market share, increase sales, and positively impact the lives of patients. Yet while new drug launches are up 146%, only one-third of new drugs are expected to meet sales expectations during the first year on the market.

Why do nearly two-thirds of new drugs fail to meet sales expectations during the first year on the market? Because a drug’s success post R&D is determined not only by its chemistry, but by how well (and how quickly) the market —physicians, patients, payers, and key opinion leaders—understands its benefits.

For a pharma company, failing to plan how to educate the marketplace is simply planning to fail. As sales reps are responsible for educating stakeholders, a successful drug launch requires an investment not just in R&D but also in salesforce preparedness. Maximizing uptake depends on more than consistent, effective product messaging; it also necessitates an agile salesforce that can adapt to uncertainties and course-correct based on market changes, the arrival of new competitors, and positive- and negative-leaning research.

So, how can pharma companies drive salesforce preparedness?

With these four steps:

1. Make Learning Relevant and Ongoing2. Get a Clear Picture of Your Current Salesforce3. Follow Hiring with Immediate Onboarding and Training4. Facilitate Knowledge Sharing and Collaboration

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1Make Learning Relevant and Ongoing Are employees ready to address market changes, new regulations, and shifts in prescribing practices?

A successful launch depends on more than just sharing a drug’s benefits. In today’s fast-moving environment, employees must also understand and readily address changes in the market, new regulations, and barriers to prescribing - including reimbursement issues, pricing challenges, and negative media. Yet, research by McKinsey shows that for most pharma companies, the process of changing messaging and educating an entire salesforce can take at least six months—a lifetime during a drug launch. Training and preparation as important as this simply cannot be neglected, or left to the last minute.

Any company striving for a successful launch must be able to educate all reps quickly and continuously, especially as information changes. This requires a highly agile training solution, one that enables continuous learning that is both accessible and easily updated. When training can be updated immediately to reflect new messaging, reps can respond to market changes more effectively and continue making sales. When training is mobile, reps can take training on their own time, as well as in the moment of need. Finally, when training is ongoing, it’s easier to quickly build a salesforce that is ready to work in multiple territories and effectively sell more than one product.

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A successful launch requires addressing both people and skill gaps.

Training up your existing sales team is already a formidable task; proactively identifying and addressing personnel and skill gaps is another. This type of proactive workforce assessment and planning absolutely demands that pharma organizations have a comprehensive view of their workforce and accurate data to help understand sales capabilities. Organizations must move beyond relying on multiple disparate systems or outdated, cumbersome spreadsheets. Spreadsheets simply can’t deliver the real-time insight and data visualization necessary to identify what teams may need more training or require additional headcount to cover their territory. The smart alternative? Unify your workforce data across your organization into a centralized HR system which can help HR teams visualize areas of need while providing the necessary tools to build proactive plans to ensure optimal workforce coverage across territories.

2 Get a Clear Picture of Your Current Salesforce

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3 Follow Hiring with Immediate Onboarding and TrainingLocate, enlist, and onboard the key hires you need to hit the ground running.

Ongoing training helps create knowledgeable, agile employees. Workforce planning serves to identify what’s still needed—the gaps in people and skills—to ensure a successful launch. The next step is proactively filling those skill gaps through temporary or permanent hiring.

During a launch, the window to gain market share is small—months at best—so a well-trained, robust team that’s ready to hit the ground running is crucial to capitalizing on early buy-in. For this reason, it’s not enough to hire the right people; companies must also onboard them effectively. Creating a strategy that automatically onboards new hires shortens the time to readiness and lengthens the period where they can operate effectively in the field.

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4 Facilitate Knowledge Sharing and CollaborationYour sales reps are listening to the market. But are they listening to each other?

Field employees aren’t just marketing and selling a new drug, they’re also gathering information about the market. Yet, if it’s not easy for reps to share information, companies miss out on an invaluable source of critical market feedback.

Each rep’s experience in the field is critical to the effectiveness of the salesforce as a whole, therefore, reps must be able to learn from and connect with each other. Sharing and collaboration don’t just nurture a more knowledgeable team; they also increase the rate of learning and drive continuous calibration. When reps realize others are facing the same challenge, this “triangulation” process not only establishes the validity of that particular challenge but also helps reps create new solutions faster, together.

In some companies, reps are expected to collaborate via email chains or forums. While these tools enable sharing, they don’t allow that same knowledge to be organized effectively and stored for later retrieval. Effective collaboration among geographically dispersed reps requires a solution that enables both asynchronous and synchronous connection, as well as a streamlined way to capture, organize, and store knowledge.

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1. “Beyond the Storm: Launch Excellence in the New Normal.” McKinsey & Company. Page 37. Accessed at http://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/healthcare%20systems%20and%20services/our%20insights/the%20secret%20of%20successful%20drug%20launches/beyond_the_storm_launch_ex-cellence_in_the_new_normal.ashx.

2. Ibid.

The company has already invested in the R&D. Successful commercialization also requires an investment in your people.

A pharma company’s sales reps are on the frontline directly driving the success of a new drug’s commercialization efforts. As such, they need to have education and training that helps them not only explain the drug’s benefits but also address objections, explain new research, and mitigate influence from the competition. And because no sales rep is an island, teams must also have the opportunity to collaborate and learn from other reps.

Proactively assessing, planning, and distributing the company’s workforce is the key to creating a successful, profitable launch. While developing this workforce and ensuring its readiness isn’t an easy task, pharma companies don’t have to go it alone. Cornerstone OnDemand already helps 7 of the 10 largest pharmaceutical companies manage employee recruiting, development, and performance. Companies use our Human Capital Management solution to improve workforce planning and visibility, enable collaboration, and streamline the delivery and tracking of training to employees, channel partners, and end users.

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