Healthcare Sector: Driving Medical Representatives’ Performance for a Drug Launch

In the context of a drug launch, it is essential to gather, coach, motivate, and engage your promotional teams. Two key elements need to be optimized internally to ensure a successful drug launch on the market: communication and training.

A unique and active communication strategy must be established, optimally deployed to ensure message consistency within the company. Furthermore, it is crucial to ensure that medical representatives have a perfect understanding of the drug and are capable of presenting it concisely, accurately, and engagingly to doctors and pharmacists. The drug’s objectives must be clear to both customers and competitors.

The secret to a successful drug launch? It involves combining efficiency and quality while fostering the motivation and well-being of internal team members.

Coach Your Team Members and Deepen Their Knowledge

Medical representatives must know everything about this new drug: from the functioning of the molecule used to the price justification, including the technology employed in its production. Key topics for KAMs and medical representatives to master:

• Knowledge of the molecule used and the technology employed during the drug’s creation and production
• Patient benefits in terms of efficacy and safety
• What makes this drug unique and differentiates it from its competitors

Furthermore, your promotional teams must be able to address the following topics to ensure their credibility:

• Possible objections from healthcare professionals regarding the drug’s benefits
• Price justification
• The regulatory context surrounding the drug

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Foster Collaborative Learning Within Your Team

To engage your team and improve its performance, encourage the sharing of best practices and the practice of feedback through fluid communication between headquarters and the field to increase responsiveness.

Furthermore, offer your teams workshop sessions to improve their pitch for the drug being launched. This will allow your team members to align their pitch with the commercial launch strategy, to practice in front of sales expert colleagues, and to exchange internal feedback.

Leverage Your Team’s Energy Through a Challenge

The digital transformation of healthcare companies offers numerous benefits for renewing internal organization. Take advantage of the excitement of a new drug launch to capitalize on your teams’ renewed energy through an innovative digital sales challenge.

One of the simplest and most effective ways to re-energize your sales team through digital means is the use of a digital platform. In a product launch context, an effective and intuitive platform should contain:

• A micro-learning system that will allow for learning and knowledge assessment for medical representatives and KAMs regarding the launch drug
• Real-time performance analysis so that each team member can assess their added value within the company and their progress
• A documentation space for quick access to knowledge about the launch drug

Your teams’ work will be considerably simplified thanks to unique and transparent access to the information necessary for effective drug promotion. But it’s not enough to simplify the work of medical representatives and KAMs through digital means; you need to gamify it to boost performance!

Use gamification methods to unite all your team members around your sales strategy by providing visibility into objectives through your digital platform. Key elements for a successful sales challenge:

• A scoring system allowing your promotional teams to earn points based on simple criteria
• A reward system that values actions leading to results more than the results themselves, through performance indicators such as the number of best practices shared on a specific topic, the number of KOLs met, and my NPS status
• A prize for the winning teams to orient challenges towards a collective rather than individual spirit, to foster collaboration among medical representatives.
• Promote short challenges (4 to 8 weeks) that you can renew several times a year to avoid fatigue and channel team energy.

The Importance of Post-Launch Feedback

Finally, it’s never too late to learn! Encourage rapid field feedback through your communication platform to assess potential difficulties encountered and provide solutions. To this end, the sharing of post-launch experiences (doctors’ remarks, specific questions, resistance, signs of enthusiasm, counter-arguments) is a good practice to promote within a healthcare sector organization.

Conclusion

For a successful drug launch, it is essential to encourage the development of your promotional teams’ expertise through a system of best practice sharing, internal mentoring, and feedback. Furthermore, a sales challenge in such stimulating circumstances can only increase their engagement and performance.

Other articles that might interest you:

• Healthcare Sector: How to Facilitate the Digitalization of Your Promotional Teams?
• Healthcare Sector: Restoring Cohesion in a Post-Reorganization Context