How Pharmaceutical Sales Have Evolved Since The Day I Joined In 1998

A brief walk down my memory lane in Pharma Selling

1998 is the year I joined the pharmaceutical industry as a medical sales rep. It was not the best time of the century because the world was in recession, but it was not the worst time either because I was employed by a Multinational (MNC) pharma company.

Generally, MNC offers better pay and remuneration package than the local counterpart. But that's not my focus here.

I want to walk you through the development and evolution of selling strategies in the pharma industry and highlight the emphasis of each sales strategy.

Related reading: What you know about pharma sales and why you're joining it?

1998: The Year Of FAB Strategy

FAB stands for Features, Advantages, and Benefits.

That was the year where the focus was given to what a drug was used for and how it differs from competitors. I remember the seven selling steps that a rep need to typically walk a prospect through. The rep needs to translate every feature to benefits, and the rep needs to keep a close eye on competitors.

And can you guess the most critical selling step?

Handling objection (did you guess correctly?) ...

Some of you might be got this one right. Handling objection was the highlight of selling steps. I believe it's still the highlight but smarter salespeople of today focus more on prospecting thus lowering the resistance to selling.

And that means less emphasis on handling the objection. The objection is one of the reasons why the sales rep becomes discouraged in this profession.

1998 was the year for products, blockbuster products to be precise ...

2003: Social Style And SPIN Selling

2003 was the year I changed the pharma company. I went to join the number one pharma company in the world (at that time) and was exposed to these two selling strategies.

Similar ideas were spread through a publication like Selling Through The Platinum Rule...

The current style selling strategies were based on the concept that customers are different, and they need to be approached just the way they prefer. The basis was from the Golden Rule that says "Do unto others as you like it done unto you." The Platinum Rule goes a step beyond and suggests you do unto others as THEY like to be done unto (eeerrr ...?)

That's the basis for an ideal style selling strategy.

Another thing that general style selling did was sort of matching the rep strength or preference to the prospects'. It sounds easy but believes me it was not. To respond to any opportunity at the spur of the moment takes lots of practice and understanding.

As you can see, selling strategies shifted from products to prospects, which should be the way from the beginning. But savvy companies learned this lesson earlier and rake in more sales revenue, leaving less savvy pharma companies guessing why their revenues were dismal.

Enter SPIN Selling

What interesting about SPIN selling model is that it was discovered by a psychologist turned salesperson (his name is Neil Rackham, and he was selling his Sales Program, obviously).

The model was distilled from fieldwork with thousands of sales reps, and years of studying their success factors. One prominent finding from this research was successful salesperson utilize a different type of questions and timing the issues differently throughout a sales cycle.

This is a sound approach to selling, but the hindrance to it at this part of the world was the number of available qualified trainers and training centers. I remember making my own purchase of the SPIN selling textbook and its field book companion.

So now you can see that the selling strategy had moved to a more detailed interaction between reps and prospects. The emphasis now was more towards opportunities.

2012: Patients Focus Selling Model

This model is known by many names, but the essence is focused on patients. Now the selling strategy has shifted once again to expand beyond prescribers.

In my opinion, what this particular strategy did was to shift the attention to the core of what prescribers do - to maintain the well being of their patients. By focusing on patients, indirectly, prescribers will want to work together with pharma companies to manage patients.

I believe that was the whole idea ...

So, selling strategies had moved from a product focused on common style-focused, and now to patients focused. The emphasis shifted from small molecules to human beings. And this trend is only going to be more prominent because selling sees more involvement of human than data or figures.

That's supposed to be the way from the start ...

Do you see how selling strategy evolve all these years?

Tell us about it!