Sales Operations

The commercial ecosystem of the medical device industry is an intricate one. Medical device sales teams constantly watch out for opportunities across the sales process, beyond the overarching life sciences commercial protocol (salesforce structure and deployment, sales activity design, incentive compensation, and operations outsourcing). These intricacies arise from various factors, like the heavy dependence on sales reps, mechanics and scale of the products being sold (sometimes complete health solutions), diversity of the stakeholder entities involved (from market influencers to centralized purchasing teams), and back and front-end supply chain fallouts. Here are some examples.

Effective roster management has long been an overlooked topic in Pharma commercial operations. In fact, in our 2016 Commercial Excellence Survey, we found that 46% of Pharma organizations still don’t have integrated processes to manage their sales rep to territory mappings. At any point in time, it is critical for the Sales Operations business processes to have access to the latest and distinct set of sales personnel that will need to be accounted for.

Sales crediting and eligibility are two of the most common challenges that organizations face in managing their Incentive Compensation programs. Traditionally, these processes have relied on accurate alignment and roster data to determine the right individual to get sales credit, the absence of which causes incentive compensation & other downstream systems to wonder ‘what happened’ well after ‘it happened’.

In continuation with the three earlier PMSA Webinars delivered on Commercial Operations, Axtria delivered its fourth insightful webinar on Sales Targeting & Call Planning, which shed light on the detailed tactical steps undertaken as a part of sales and marketing execution. The session conducted by Axtria experts covered typical approaches and techniques, key decisions involved and typical benefits of Call Planning exercise in an environment increasingly impacted by parameters like shrinking sales forces, reduced physician access, influence migrating from physician to system/payer contracts, etc.

While my colleague posts that bio-pharmaceutical sales operations staff are working too hard, I think managed markets operations and analytics staff members are simultaneously more over-whelmed and under-resourced. For too long, too many bio-pharmaceutical firms have under-invested in analytics and operational infrastructure to support their managed markets organizations.