Focus Magazine - Summer 2013 - 11

GUEST EDITOR
JOHN RIGGLE

The Importance of
Training Analytics

Strong selling
skills will always
rule the day.

hile walking back to my desk one
afternoon, I heard someone call out, “I
want more data!” Another team
member replied, “Data is king!”
And with those two quick statements, my
belief in the need for robust sales data at the
representative level began.
Historically, I have seen capabilities ranging
from field sales representatives who were unable
to sort columns alphabetically in Excel to former
consultants-turned-specialty reps who were able
to identify national trends in sample response
curves by analyzing the data available to their
territory/region.
As an individual who has worn two hats for a
little over a year now – sales operations and
training – the opportunity in field sales training
is enormous. We do a great job training reps on
how to enter a call, and even how to leverage the
weekly/monthly/quarterly reports we send
them, but how many of us have trained
representatives on advanced analytics?
Granted, there are a lot of companies that
push limited data to the field. For those
companies, advanced analytics training at the
field sales representative level is unrealistic (you
don’t send someone to racecar-driving school
and then give them a Moped).
For those companies who have made the
investment in robust sales data across the
organization (e.g., weekly TRx/NRx, top
increasers/decreasers, top plans by
prescriber/territory, call activity and
promotional response data), if you do not train
the reps to master these tools in order to identify
trends and opportunities, you are not getting the
full value of the investment.
So what do you do? From a staffing

perspective, you can hire a field sales force of
former sales operations analysts but you might
not be able to find enough of them to fully build
out your sales team. You could continue to do
what many companies are doing – hiring field
sales representatives with former sales
experience and the awards/recognition to back
up that experience – but roll the dice with regard
to their analytical ability.
My suggestion, if you’re not doing this
already, is to expand new hire training to include
analytics. Representatives need to know how the
systems work, obviously, but equally important is
the ability to carve the data multiple ways to
identify the trends and opportunities mentioned
before.
In the current pharmaceutical and biotech
climate, companies are scrambling for any
opportunity they can get to grow market share
and move product. Representatives don’t need
to know the top 10 plans in their territory; they
need to know the top 10 plans in each office.
Representatives who have access to weekly data
and can track what competitive product (at the
SKU level) is on the rise in any given office (and
on which plan) will be able to tailor their
promotional message to curb the competitor
growth and potentially redirect the prescriber to
their product and its features and benefits.
Strong selling skills will always rule the day –
you can’t sell your product if you can’t effectively
message. Making sure each member of your
sales team has a robust understanding of the
available data and how to “data mine” in their
respective territories focuses those strong selling
skills and makes them unstoppable. I

John Riggle is senior manager, sales operations and training, for Promius Pharma. Email John at
JRiggle@promiuspharma.com.

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Focus Magazine - Summer 2013

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