While life science companies are some of the most innovative organizations, it’s been said that the healthcare industry is typically five years behind technology trends. Although it’s usually the end user or regulatory requirements that hamper adoption and onboarding, it doesn’t mean that Marketing and Sales need to suffer from a lack of technological advancements for their own purposes.
Life science companies are not just about promoting the features of a product; they’re about communicating the benefits that inevitably affect patient lives and safety in a highly-regulated landscape. Pair that with today’s buyer consuming an average of 14 pieces of marketing content before making a buying decision—creating and utilizing such content to make sales more effective can be challenging.
To best address this challenge, the life science industry must move away from traditional methods, instead utilizing technology and mobile sales enablement solutions to ensure the greatest level of success in this space.
Here are 3 ways sales enablement is improving Sales in life sciences:
Enhanced Relationships
In this industry, sales reps are lucky if they’re able to capture ten minutes of a physician’s attention. With a sales enablement solution, however, sales reps can present content at both a regional and business unit level with version control in place to keep them compliant and on-message. This allows for effective, personalized content to engage more intelligently, and more efficiently.
By focusing on a prospect’s needs rather than searching for blanketed content, it takes the “salesy” tone out of play which is imperative when trying to establish a trusting relationship in this industry. As mentioned in our previous blog, we know that trust drives revenue, thus increasing win rates. One should never underestimate the power of a strong relationship.
Increased Win Rates
Sales reps typically spend about 30 hours per month searching for and preparing sales materials. But, now that Sales is spending their time selling and supporting their physicians with a sales enablement solution rather than searching for content, the sales cycle becomes less strenuous.
Enterprises are increasingly realizing that properly managing content accelerates the sales cycle, so much so, their enabled sales reps are experiencing:
34 percent reduced search time for content
20 percent more time spent in front of prospects
28 percent increase in win rates
Since sales reps are the primary revenue generators for any organization, sales enablement ensures that the strategy, resources and support are in place to optimize both the sales force and, subsequently, ROI. By directly aligning with revenue goals, sales enablement efforts become less of a cost center and more of a revenue driver.
Competitive Advantage
Back in the day—think the Mad Men era—Marketing was focused on increasing brand awareness and Sales was focused on wining and dining potential customers to establish strong relationships. While the relationship factor is still important today, it’s now all about the approach, especially with several statutes, like Anti-Kickback and the Sunshine Act, being strictly enforced.
In the healthcare industry, medical discoveries occur daily, and medical regulations are constantly changing. To remain competitive in this market, a life science company must be one step ahead of the innovation curve. This not only refers to the actual product, but their sales approach as well.
Think of it this way: physicians and other key decision makers are constantly being prodded by other sales reps for ten minutes of their time, so why would they choose to listen to one company’s sales rep over another?
An enabled sales rep isn’t wasting time; they’re able to guide complex conversations more efficiently and propose up-to-date content on the fly within those time-sensitive moments on an offline, mobile device. A non-enabled rep is still searching in their car for the right piece of printed content that could potentially be non-compliant and deliver the incorrect message.
Who do you think gets the sale?
