Close more sales for Life sciences

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hello Elton thank you for your participation in this year's Elton connect virtual event this session is titled three ways to help reps thrive in the next normal we're gonna talk about not just adapting to what we're seeing happen over the last few weeks but really what we think is going to come next knowing that none of us really know the answers yet at this point my name's Steve bowler I'm a market development director for Tier one performance very excited to be delivering this Learning Lab to you today I've been involved with L ten for the last gosh I think six years but this is my first year as a part of Tier one performance we are a strategy activation company we activate strategies through people do a lot of work in support of national sales meetings clinical training commercial learning all sorts of exciting stuff Tier one actually acquired my previous organization bottom line performance late last year we were an L ten preferred industry partner for several years I really value my time with L ten and I'm glad to be a part of this year's virtual event so we're not in Kansas right now we've not been in our offices for some time our reps or in most cases not able to be face to face with customers by this point you've probably already had to reschedule a national sales meeting or a launch event or rapidly turn it into a virtual event so we've been dealing with this reality for some time and we've been living with a lot of an uncertainty both in our personal lives wondering what's going to be going on with our kids with activities vacations you name it you know it we're all living it but we've also had a lot of uncertainty with our business and how we keep the business moving forward it's definitely a challenge that I'm hearing from a lot of life science commercial learning leaders of how to support reps during this time how to help them have effective virtual interactions and do effective virtual selling how to pivot activities like national sales meetings and new hire trainings that we're all supposed to be happening this spring and summer that uncertainty is still with us we don't know what's going to happen next but we know that we need to keep living with it and keep adapting and I know a lot of us have been wondering when can we get back to normal normal sounds pretty good a lot of days we're tired of being stuck in our homes we're tired of rapidly pivoting we're tired of sitting on zoom' calls all day but I think the reality is that normal wasn't working for a lot of reasons and that's true both for our businesses in the pharmaceutical industry in the medical device industry it's true for our society at large as well and this pandemic and all of the challenges that we're going through right now as a society and as an industry really give us an opportunity to stop and rethink and maybe do something better we know that innovation thrives with constrained environments the time is ripe to reimagine to really look at what we're doing what we're offering our reps in the case of our business lives and think about how to help navigate these changes so if you're attending this conference if you're watching this video I know you're probably in a commercial learning role within a pharmaceutical company or a medical device company and you've been juggling a lot these last few months keeping momentum on current priorities you've got drugs that are still launching that you've had to pivot to virtual you have new hires that you're still trying to onboard trying to keep continuity while helping people pivot to performing effectively as a remote team how to help them rapidly figure out how to get in touch with their customers with physicians with the hospital systems they need to reach figuring out how to upskill these individuals who are not used to an all virtual selling role while also strategizing for the longer-term picture and trying to keep the culture engaged all in the midst of this so it has been very challenging for all of us and hopefully this session will give you some ideas and inspiration to keep moving forward so here's a few facts these are tidbits I've picked up working with my clients over the last few months as well as what I'm hearing from the l10 community I attended an excellent webinar a few weeks ago put on by the CMR Institute sponsored by Elton and they had some physicians and hospital executives talking about what they were seeing during the pandemic and how physicians want to engage with reps during this time and they did a poll during the webinar and ing to the participants of this webinar most of their reps have not been able to connect with their customers during the pandemic now if that was a few weeks ago and it's possible that we could have seen some improvement there but the reality is a lot of reps have really struggled to know how to engage effectively while stuck at home while customers are dealing with his pandemic or while customers are kind of sidelined because their patients aren't coming to see them we know that Pharma reps typically come from outside sales experience it's typically an outside selling role where they're trying to go in person to meet with customers and a lot of our existing reps are not adept at inside sales techniques and digital messaging so both doing an effective virtual call but also effective virtual reach outs and interactions to get on the calendar to get those meetings another challenge we're seeing so many of our organizations over the last few months have had to rapidly make decisions and shift live events to a virtual format and while I think virtual has a lot of potential and we're seeing in designing some really effective virtual gatherings simply shifting the live event we wanted to have two virtual isn't going to lead to the outcome that we're looking for the other thing to watch here is where are our HCPs depending on the region they're in depending on their specialty they may or may not be actively working with Kovac patients they may have a lot more time on their hands it's also interesting to watch and see how their needs and what they prefer out of interactions with reps changes because of this pandemic there's a pretty strong chance that the virtual selling and virtual interactions is going to need to remain in our mix much more than it was before the pandemic and that opens up opportunities for sales and marketing to partner in new ways for the business to really rethink its strategy and its mix of using field reps versus others tactics so there's lots of change that we are navigating and we have lots of opportunity to adapt and I think there are three broad categories to consider how we align in the commercial learning space and I'm going to talk about those and give you some ideas for how to do that virtual selling which is all the different technologies and approaches that reps need to do those effective virtual interactions for us to effectively upskill reps to do that virtual learning adapting and looking at all of our programs and offerings and seeing how to improve what we're doing virtually from a learning standpoint and also how to effectively take activities training activities that have happened in person traditionally and move those to virtual and then also how to do effective virtual gatherings how to do a national sales meeting or a launch event it's really going to hit the mark and be effective so number one we need to help reps adapt to virtual selling and I think that the key to doing that is looking at lessons learn from other industries now other industries sell to high level audiences and have to interact with them virtually all the time there's other industries that have inside sales channels that are much more mature than what we see in the pharmaceutical industry this what you're seeing on the screen there is from a report that salesloft put out just an example of something where they have a lot of data on what type of subject lines are most likely to get opened in an email so in many cases a pharmaceutical sales rep is it's not something they typically have to worry about is is how do they how do they do their emails effectively as much as other methods of selling so this type of skill of knowing how to even get the meetings get on the calendar and navigate this is something that we can learn insights and glean those insights from other industries and adapt them just another stat I thought was interesting about how the personalization of those messages and taking the time to really tailor it to the person being sent can really impact those open rates when we're trying to send digital outreach so a few ideas to consider I think this is a great time to look to other industries and look at partners who maybe don't only specialize in pharmaceutical selling but specialize in sales training for other industries and look at how they're doing virtual selling and virtual virtual training I think this is a good opportunity to be part of that conversation with sales leadership about the strategy and the shift of the mix of virtual versus in person and look at how we best enable our existing workforce of reps to adapt to these new techniques and upskill upskilling is going to be a major area to focus on over the coming year because if we need to keep doing these virtual interactions which we think we will to some extent we're gonna have to really support and who are who are still getting comfortable doing those and lastly the approach that you take to mixing in the virtual selling is going to be highly localized depending on the country the region the kovat activity going on and the mix of hospital systems that might be in that area so this is also a time to rethink our virtual learning so many pharmaceutical sales reps start their career coming to an in-person new hire training maybe it's a week maybe it's a few weeks they're also of course doing home study modules but there's been a big component traditionally where reps are coming in to headquarters to do that that type of onboarding they're coming together for national sales meetings it really is an opportunity for us to look at what we're offering for home study and consider how we could make that better so what do I mean by that in this virtual environment there's a new set of skills that become even more important and those are empathy emotional intelligence the ability to tell an effective story tech literacy knowing how to use zoom or whatever tool they're using to have their interactions and all the old stuff all the call planning and account planning and all these other skills that are still it just as important these new skills empathy storytelling emotional intelligence those were important and are important in person as well but to really bridge that virtual divide they become even more critical so one example of a solution that we created for one of our clients a patient journey for major major depressive disorder this is an interesting case study because we actually initially created it for an in-person training using a web app setting up a room with augmented reality going around to different stations picking a patient and following their story and listening to audios audio of patients and their family talking about their journey and then interacting with a chat bot after the experience so we created this experience to be done in person but we also designed it to be effective as a virtual learning experience we wanted to build that flexibility in so that if I'm at home on my iPad I can go through that experience and have the immersion so we designed it to be in-person and virtual I can't show you much of this but I'll show you one screen here just to highlight the non-event mode that we'd built in and this ended up really working in our clients favor and in our favor after Coe bid because they were able to after the initial use in person continue this virtually with some new hire training classes and actually got really positive feedback from those reps going through this individually on the iPad the experience of selecting the patient and listening to the audio stories and seeing the images and really taking these pulse Mendte meter pulses of how they would respond and how they feel about that patient journey was very effective virtually and opened up a lot of new possibilities and ideas around how home-study longer-term should have experiences like this that are designed to generate empathy and better understanding of patients so a few ideas that come from this case study for me even when we are hoping to do live training having that contingency plan built in the ability to shift to virtual is going to be critical using creative media formats in that virtual setting a web app audio driven stories augmented reality there's so many different tools that when we design an experience that is meant for virtual that we can help build empathy and other soft skills while people are at home taking training and I think it really causes us to think about home study and about how we can make that more connected to the patient journey and really a more impactful experience virtually so the last category I want to talk about is how to not just replace the events that we've done that we always do in our industry our national sales meetings are poa meetings with virtual but to really think about how to plan a virtual gathering that's made up of effective virtual moments so when we design a virtual gathering we start with the human at the center and we look at the world from her perspective and we look at all the different experiences all the different types of mixed Media that we can incorporate to create an experience that isn't just a bunch of webinars or sitting on calls but is really going to include all sorts of different things so a box of stuff that's mailed to them gift cards to get food while they're having going through that day getting on different devices walk and talks with connecting with other peers and of course really effective interactions and engaging interactions that are happening during during the webinar portions so this design lens is a great way to think about a virtual gathering so we have to think about how we're going to entice our participants before the event how we're going to set the stage and get the right intention set when they enter how we're going to engage throughout the experience what impact and what memories do we want to instill as they exit and then how are we going to extend an active a whole through the right behaviors after our virtual gathering so we use a design canvas this is a great tool to kind of sketch out the high-level experience that we're looking to create for many of us national sales meetings product launches when we're in search of the right platform to do this internally sometimes that right platform may actually be right under our nose so Microsoft Office 365 Microsoft teams Yammer these tools can be used very effectively to host a large gathering a large event within an organization so for example you can see this screenshot we put together just for fun to show how the l10 conference could be set up via Microsoft teams many of our organizations already have teams and it's great to be able to use these tools that we already have but to design an experience that really takes advantage of them some other ideas this is a tool called coffee talk that we developed at Tier one that matches people to have one-to-one conversations and connections it integrates within Microsoft 365 building off of SharePoint for things like a hub for our event so lots of ways we can use these tools that you may already have to create an effective virtual experience so a few ideas to consider if you're planning an all virtual national sales meeting in the near future look at it as an opportunity to really focus on teaching virtual selling virtual interactions all of these related skills emotional intelligence when interacting virtually use the virtual format to focus on on those new skills that you need to build and another tip don't just replace the old format it when you remove the constraint of everyone needing to come together for two days and fly in it really opens things up so what if the national sales meeting was a month long experience with just a few hours of activities planned every week to really extend the learning fit more into the flow of work provide enrichment and just a new a new type of experience and build along connectivity over a longer period of time and even when in-person events return I think this is a great opportunity to be looking at how the national sales meeting might be a hybrid event maybe people come together for just one day bookended by some virtual learning before and after but then still bringing people together to have some camaraderie building so that's all I have for this learning lab thanks for tuning in very happy to be a gift be a part of L ten please reach out if you have any questions and I hope to see you soon