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CRM For Pharmaceutical Sales
If you're any like me, you're guilty of downloading lots of pdf over the years, saving them to your hard drive, and never actually reading them! True?
So, we've broken down our "pdf" into six emails, a chapter per email. Each chapter should take a few minutes to read and can be your daily self-development guide for CRM. Or maybe not.
CRM FOR PHARMACEUTICAL SALES
Healthcare is a rapidly changing field, and for reps selling pharmaceuticals, it's more important than ever to be agile and creative in your work. Hospitals are seeing new pressures on cost control, so doctors are juggling the tricky balance of expenses and effectiveness when they make purchasing decisions. You need to understand the new demands of the market as you cultivate work relationships with these medical professionals.
The key to success is having the right tools in your arsenal. A great customer relationship management (CRM) system can take your game to the next level by making you more organised, efficient, and accessible. Here's how pharmaceutical sales reps can use the latest CRM technology to excel.
What a CRM can do for you
To kick things off, let’s go into more detail about what a CRM can do. It’s a system built to manage the data accumulated during business activities. CRMs store the details on your leads, prospects, current clients, past clients, and deals all in one central location.
Businesses invest in CRMs because they have products to sell, businesses to broker, and clients to contact. The memory alone cannot manage all of that information, so successful companies purchase CRMs to provide their reps with a solution that will. A great CRM will help you manage your leads and contacts, track deals through your pipeline, manage your work tasks, and analyze your performance.
Everyday uses of a CRM
- Contact management
- Lead management
- Sales management
- Goal setting
- Progress measurement
- Task automation
- Progress reporting
- Email management
- Document storage
- Reporting to management
If you're a successful salesperson, you have a slew of contacts to manage at any given time, and most likely, they all have special needs or interests that you'll need to juggle. Plus, they may be at different stages in their business with you; some might be first-time clients, and others might be long-standing relationships. To best serve all those different medical professionals and increase your chances of making a sale, you need a tool that helps you manage your contacts. A robust CRM can help.
It's easy to find groups of contacts.
With a CRM, you have all your contact information at your fingertips. It's easily fixable and can be grouped with custom tags you create. For example, you could easily search for all the doctors you met at the annual conference or find every surgeon with a specific speciality.
All customer information and interactions are in one place
A robust CRM integrates your email and allows you to see a single view of a customer and all interactions with that customer. For example, in Hubspot or Pipedrive, each customer has a contact card. This card contains details such as the customer's deal value, contact information and other notes you've left there. It also includes any emails sent to their account or received from them and any calls made to the customer. This means you could review your entire customer history in one place at any time.
Capturing more leads quickly and easily
The online world is an excellent source of new leads for pharmaceutical sales reps. Especially when you're working at a regional level, social media or Google searches can be a goldmine of information about doctors, surgeons and hospitals in the area.
CRM Information
Part of being at the top of your business is continually learning more about the latest news in the medical device field. A competent rep always stays abreast of research, conferences and new procedures.
Having important new intel in your CRM means you can always have the best information just a click or two away. Not only will this make you more confident in your understanding of the complex world of medical devices, but it will reassure your clients about your dedication.
One way to keep your information easily accessible inside your CRM is through notes. Any contact or deal can have notes attached. Say you read a research paper about a new approach to bone repair for osteoporosis patients. If one of your clients is an osteoporosis expert, you can add a link to that article as a note on his contact card so that you can reference it in your next meeting. Or you can email it to him directly from inside your CRM, just to keep the relationship active and engaged.
Additionally, a robust CRM allows you to upload documents to any deal in the system. Whether you have charts, articles, text files, or photos relevant to a particular client, you can access them easily from within the CRM. You can also email those documents as attachments or download them as needed.
If you prefer to keep your documents in an existing files management tool, another great feature of modern CRM is a full suite of integrations with those business tools.
For example, in most good CRM platforms, you can connect Dropbox and Google Drive to centralise all your files in a single hub. When all of the industry information you might need is at your fingertips, you can be of the most help to your clients and keep them feeling secure in your relationship.
A good CRM has many other features to keep you at the top of your game. Since a pharmaceutical sales rep’s day could involve travel, meetings, and phone calls about dozens of deals, it’s essential to keep track of all the tasks and follow-ups you must do.
Your CRM allows you to view your to-dos in a list or calendar view. Sort them by the due date to prioritise your daily activities or start long-term planning.
Your CRM also helps you work more efficiently by automating some of those regular duties. Automated actions streamline your job by creating alerts within the tool when new deals are created, deals move stages, or new contacts are added. This is a great way to further your business relationships and keep up with the fast-paced medical industry.
Suppose you collaborate with colleagues or report to a manager via your CRM. In that case, automated tasks can be a handy notification mechanism to stay on top of their team and spend less time calling and emailing you for updates.
Tasks can be attached to contacts or deals, so you can stay in the loop no matter what part of the CRM you’re in.
Plus, you’ll receive an email notification an hour before the assigned due date.
Medicine is known for pushing doctors and surgeons to be sharp, smart, and precise. With a robust CRM, your sales process will match that attitude.
Mobile capabilities are one of a pharmaceutical sales rep's most important CRM features. A mobile CRM packs all the information you’d find in your desktop databases into a mobile device, such as a smartphone or a tablet.
Mobile means you can work everywhere your clients are. In the busy world of medicine, that's crucial. Your meetings with doctors might take place in a quiet office, a bustling hospital hallway, or a loud conference floor. Wherever you go, your CRM should go with you.
But what makes a CRM mobile? Well, it isn’t mobile just because it has the word “mobile” in the product description. There’s a lot more to look for to earn that name.
Mobile CRMs should be easy to use. If the data entry on your device is cumbersome, it won’t save you any time. But it’s not just entering data that should be a breeze - getting data out of your CRM should also be intuitive. That is, looking up contacts, browsing the history of interactions with a particular doctor or hospital, seeing the pipeline worth over time and other important information you may need on the spot.
It should be lightweight, so you aren’t slowed down by load times. An easy way to test that is to download the mobile app for your chosen CRM and play around with it.
Look for automatic syncing as well. That means your data will always reflect the most recent updates, no matter how many team members use the programme, on what devices, or how frequently. Essentially, you want to ensure that you always have up-to-date data regardless of where you are and what you use to access the information.
Sales is a field for self-starters. You know what needs to be done; you only need the right tool to make the work easier and faster. For pharma sales reps, a CRM system can strengthen your relationships with medical professionals and make you a force to be reckoned with wherever you go.
Centralising all your tools in one place keeps you more organised. A detail about a valuable deal won’t slip through the cracks because you’ll track all the pertinent information in a single location. CRMs also make your work more efficient. Stop shuffling between Excel spreadsheets and other files and spend less time on administrative duties. Finally, with mobile tools, you can be available to your clients whenever they need you. Your sales work becomes accessible from any place at any time.
Using a CRM to have better relationships with doctors and hospitals means you’ll be able to close more deals. It makes your bottom line healthier and gives your customers the best sales experience possible. It’s a win for everyone.
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