Know-How Exchange : Strategy

Each call must have a set of objectives, (or one objective at least), and each objective must have an outcome, whether it's an order, or to move you a step closer towards an order.

If you know that on average it takes two or three calls before a veterinary practice starts buying from you, and you know the average order a practice makes, you can apportion some value to each call.

On the other hand you might want to have two kinds of valuation:

1. A Percentage towards an order value - where the first sales call might be worth 30%, if it achieved its objectives, the next call 30%, and the third call 40%...

2. A value based on the incremental margin generated by the sale.

You could then compare the cost of the sales operations versus (2), while managing the sales force activity through (1).

Hope this helps...

ChrisB

Dear Dr Tanweer

No quick fix appears possible from the information you have provided. If the veterinary practitioners do not place orders either at the time of a sales visit or at a later time, then you will have to infer the value your reps produce as a result of their calls.

This is a classic case of utilising activity analysis over a period of time to link your reps performance to the results you are able to measure – your unit sales. We have done this before for the OTC cosmetics industry and for photographic supply manufacturers.

Fortunately, you have almost all the pieces of the jigsaw in place (Though perhaps not the technology to make it easy) to be able to do this. Additionally, it will be imperative to work into your sales rep’s call routine a question or series of questions concerning the number of prescriptions or scripts that the vet feels that he will be writing as a result of the sales call or presentation

Firstly, in marketing speak, you are selling into a “Defined Universe” This is the exhaustive list of all veterinary practitioners in your sales area. Presumably these are on a database or CRM system of some kind. If they are not, the rest of my suggestions become very bureaucratic, time consuming and counter productive, so load them onto a CRM system – preferably one which will synchronise with a laptop or can be accessed (Depending on your access to high speed broadband) over the web. Personally, I prefer sales people to use synchronised laptops because they are not dependent on an ISP, a connection and a central server. (Please see my suggestion at the end)

Of course, all your sale people will need a laptop or access to a PC at home into which they can enter information from a simple form which they will fill in during or at the end of a sales meeting.

Next, in the CRM system you must create a data entry form which will allow the rep to enter all the relevant data pertaining to the call. This will be logged against the record of the company visited and the staff present in the meeting. It is usually unwise to do this on a laptop during a sales meeting as it distracts from the selling effort – a simple copy of the PC form on a notepad will suffice for the face to face part, unless your sales team are PC wizards.

These are the kinds of things which need to be recorded in each call:

Products discussed
Presentations made
Samples left (I’m guessing here!)
Estimates of prescriptions likely to be written (By product and volume)
Timescale over which this will occur
Client base product is relevant to

Also log the miles travelled to the visit
Time spent in the call
Expenses incurred

The list can be as exhaustive as you wish, but it should be as easy to complete as possible. We do it by opening the record, opening the data-entry form, ticking about 12 boxes, entering a couple of comments from drop-down menus, entering a free text comment, entering a financial figure per product discussed and a date when an order / prescription is likely and entering a follow-up date for the next action or the next visit. The process takes about 1 minutes 30 seconds and the information enters the database on closing the data-entry form.

On synchronising with the HQ server, all the changed or added information is downloaded and analysed, giving the call metrics or statistics

As the sales information comes in from the accounts system, it is separated by Zip or Post Code to the relevant rep and where it is known to the contact on the database or, more likely to a group of contacts on the database who are within a reasonable travelling distance according to the cartography – this bit is tricky, but it is a once off exercise. Sometimes the accounts information is integrated into the sales database record, but from your model, this would not be appropriate.

Over a period of months, the sales figures by area and by product can be compared with the sales visit statistics for the same areas and products. There should be a correlation between the sales visit numbers and the sales achieved, albeit that they will be separated by some months. Strong anomalies can be taken up on an individual basis – it may be that a significant customer of a given rep always places a huge order with a wholesaler 300 miles away from his territory because he wants an excuse to visit his aunt or his mistress. Seeking out this kind of information over the year will strengthen your sales position because you will be building up your understanding of your customer. That’s what CRM should be all about. What we have been talking about to this point is sales force optimisation!

Further analysis of the two sets of information can be quite sophisticated and I would suggest that you employ the services of a commercial statistician or consultant, though the use of spreadsheets and pivot tables will be very revealing in breaking down any patterns which might emerge. If you end up doing a lot of this, try Tableau Software which will crunch thousands of sales and activity figures into some very meaningful sets of information.

If you need a low cost CRM system which will do the data recording job and synchronise a few hundred reps, try Maximizer Enterprise – it will do the job at a fraction of the cost of some of the larger CRM systems. I have to admit that I’m biased in that recommendation as I am a Business Partner for Maximizer, though I also consult in a number of other leading packages. My speciality is sales analysis, forecasting, sales management and training.

Hope that this helps

Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions