Pharma Sales Skills: Info You Need To Describe Customers' Point of View When Selling

Whose point of view matters, you may be asked?

It's your customer's.

Selling works best if you can combine 2 things:

• Your product knowledge
• Your customer's knowledge

Now, you've already equipped with all info. You get them from the right source, you know what the info means generally, and now you want to get to the details.

You want to see it from your individual customers.

There's this whole array of complex systems on how you categorized and classified your customers.

You probably will encounter that later as you move along your sales career but for now, let's just keep this simple.

Go back to all your info and create a simple organizing system.

Basically, you want to classify the info into two categories:

• What you know - this information is evident and apparent.
• What you can surmise - this is the info that you conclude or read between the lines.

The areas that you'll be looking at are:

• special interest area
• circle of influence
• another area of interest
• frequent contact or referrals
• affiliation - private or institutional

From there, you can determine:

• another type of information which you might need
• where to get the info
• how to get the info

That's all for now.

I'm sharing with you all these lists in case your pharma company doesn't already have a working document for customers database. 

My experience tells me that many companies have their database, but you'll see as you look into them that most data are not up to date.

You then, have to go out and look for these data. 

The above list can be your starting point and your landmark for how far you've come and how now you still need to go. 

You'll find it useful when you know what you've done and what to do next. That's the use of that list.

A word of advice:

Once you have carried out the updating database exercise, do not copy the mistake of your predecessor and stop revising the list every now and then. 

Your customers do not stay static and neither does their database. 

A regular review twice yearly is ideal. 

Or you can just stick to an annual report. 

That'll work fine too.

So, now you know how your customers perceive your business, where do you go from there?

That's the subject of the next post and for now, just remember to record what you already know about your customers, what you can surmise about them by looking at 5 areas, and then determine whether you have enough info or you need to dig for more.

And that summarizes our subject on the information you need when describing customers point of views in selling.