Are you looking to improve your sales force targeting and medical sales results?
In my previous post, I covered the importance of sales force targeting, some typical errors, and the financial and non-financial impact of un-targeted sales strategy. Today I will discuss some strategies that can help you increase sales force targeting and improve your medical sales results.
What is sales force targeting?
In my opinion, targeting is identifying the most promising prospects and proposing the right product, with the right message, at the right time. This enables the customer to buy the product with a relatively small sales effort.
How to identify the most promising prospects
One of the objectives of your marketing department is to produce the ideal customer profile. Your ideal customer profile must be based on market research and product value proposition analysis.
Combining common characteristics of the customers and the different dimensions of the value generated by the product is fundamental to determining the ideal customer profile. Your ideal customers are looking for your solution and they want to know what you have to offer and how it can help them satisfy their needs.
Physicians’ specialty, subspecialty, and special clinical interests are for sure the core pillars of your ideal customer definition. For this reason, it’s one of the primary ways in which physicians define themselves.
Moreover, other basic but relevant information such as years in practice, decision-making process, degree of independence, belonging to groups or networks, gender, setting of practice, patient type, etc. must be added and considered in the ideal customer profile.
The Job to Be Done and targeting
A key element to identifying your ideal customer is understanding the Job to Be Done.
This theory was popularized by Clayton Christensen, a former Harvard Business School professor, and basically, it considers that a customer hired a product to do a job.
This theory goes beyond the common segmentation categories mentioned before to explain why customers make their choices.
Doctors don’t simply use, buy, or prescribe products; they hire them to make progress in specific circumstances and this is why it is called the Job to Be Done. It has two equally important parts, the context or situation the individual finds themselves in, and the goal they want to achieve. So, for instance, the same doctor can have a different objective in different environments, for example in hospitals and clinics or public and private centers.
Moreover, the Job to Be Done has different dimensions:
- Functional dimension: It is the most obvious and here, the product or service must function in order to help the customer to solve the problem.
- Social dimension: The social dimension of the Job to Be Done is about the way “others” view the customer using the product or service.
- Emotional dimension: The emotional dimension of the Job to Be Done is about how using the product makes the customer feel.
Understanding this theory and the determinant of the value proposition of your product is fundamental to effectively targeting the correct customer having the specific Job to Be Done and eventually selling the product.
A controversial medical example of the Job to Be Done theory
I would like to discuss a very controversial example of how the Job to Be Done theory works to show that even in a highly regulated environment like the pharmaceutical market, some doctors make decisions based on the Job to Be Done even if guidelines and strong clinical evidence do not support their decisions.
For instance, in the US, several doctors working in outpatient settings use corticosteroid injections to treat acute respiratory tract infections like the common cold. Although this practice is not recommended and no clinical evidence supports it, the phenomenon is growing and the US medical community is studying it.
I do not have all the details of this common practice; however, I think the Job to Be Done theory can help in understanding the reasons behind this practice.
Functional job
Acute respiratory tract infections normally need symptomatic treatment and in some cases no treatment at all. However, suppose the patient seeks a doctor’s advice. In that case, the doctor prefers to do something instead of nothing and can suggest the steroid injection thanks to its euphoric and anti-inflammatory properties making the patient feel well in a very short time.
Moreover, the injection in an outpatient setting is reimbursed by the medical insurance making the procedure more profitable for the doctor compared to writing a simple prescription. Finally, according to some studies, patients having a steroid shot are more prone to return for a second one; an opportunity for the clinician to create patient satisfaction and retention.
Social job
Clinicians, especially in the US, must pay attention to their reputation, and word of mouth from a satisfied patient is fundamental to increasing their popularity in the community. So, providing patient gratification by reducing the symptoms associated with acute respiratory infections is a simple way to increase patient satisfaction.
Emotional job
Almost any doctor when consulted prefers doing something for the patient over inaction and this is part of our human nature. Moreover, the patients asking for a consultation expect medical action and they will with difficulty accept an answer like “Wait for a few days and you will get better”. Therefore, the corticosteroid shoot satisfies greatly the emotional dimension of the job.
Conclusion
When it comes to medical sales, there are a lot of different applicable strategies. But in my experience, if you’re looking for something that will really help you improve your sales, I recommend targeting.
It is worth noting that the marketing department should clearly define the ideal customer profile which must be broad enough to include all the potential customers but narrow enough to be specific to your ideal customer.
In my next post, I will discuss how to deliver the right message to the correct customer.
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Thanks for reading.