Pharmaceutical Customer: Creating Value

How can we determine what they pharmaceutical customers consider valuable? And how do you develop a sales strategy that incorporates this? Huthwaite’s research has found that this shift in mind set is achievable and repeatable. First we need to recognise the buying mode of your customers.

With clinical information being more and more widely available on the internet, the old rule about the role of the sales person has changed. Customers who want to know about a particular drug or check a particular fact, can do so online. What is more, clinicians are getting more and involved and sooner in the clinical trials of drugs, the role of the sales representative have undergone fundamental and permanent change. The unique research that Huthwaite has done has shown that healthcare customers can be divided in into 3 categories, depending on their buying mode.

Successful sales organisations have recognised this new shift and are engaging with customers with different sales approaches tailored to their preferred buying mode. Of course customers will have different buying modes for different therapeutic areas and products.

Transactional buying mode: These prescribers make purchasing decisions based largely or entirely on the lowest cost. When they make purchasing decisions, they are armed with all of the product information they need. They view products as commodities and they resent the time they have to spend with sales people. Face-to-face selling provides very little value to them and access will be hard to achieve.

Consultative Buying Mode: In every therapeutic area, there are prescribers who are willing to go beyond a purely transactional relationship, provided the sales representative can offer more than just quality products and good customer service. A sales representative who can deliver a unique blend of experience, insight, knowledge and training will be a valuable asset to the customer. However I haven’t seen many pharmaceutical company fully recognised the opportunities that these customers offer, nor have they decoded exactly how to create value beyond their services and products. In our white paper “Creating real value for Physicians” we examine skills that can be employed to become a value creator.

Strategic Buying Mode: Beyond the level of expertise demanded by the consultative prescriber, there is a class of customers who want access to the full array of capabilities of the selling organisation on an enterprise-to-entreprise level. This kind of selling is often well beyond the scope of a single salesperson and may require the involvement of non-sales resources within the selling’s organisation. These are considered complex sales and the sales representative needs to have the skills and capacity to navigate their way around complex sales.

Once organisations and sales representatives can identify customers’ preferred buying modes they can adapt their approach to the engagement to their changing perception of value throughout the course of the relationship and are one-step closer to becoming value-creators.

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