How Can Marketing Support The Sales Team’s Success?

A pharmaceutical company’s sales force is an ongoing, expensive investment that can cost as much as tens to hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Company executives want to maximize their ROI, achieve higher productivity, optimize efficiency, and boost sales while spending as little as possible.

Sales managers are under pressure to meet sales targets while also onboarding, training, and mobilizing new sales reps. Continue reading to learn how marketing provides expert help to enhance your sales team’s performance and lessen some of your day-to-day pressure.

How Does Marketing Support Sales?

A contracted pharma sales and marketing company can solve many problems for a pharmaceutical company, including helping to improve the customer experience, tapping into markets that field sales reps cannot easily reach, increasing reach and frequency, and expanding and growing sales.

An effective sales support marketing strategy will help you to move prospects from the initial awareness stage and on through to the final stages of the conversion funnel. This will help you to improve sales execution, achieve faster sales cycles, and increase sustainable, predictable revenue.

So, how can marketing support your pharma sales team? Let’s look at 3 key ways.

Marketing Can Be Scalable & Cost-Effective

One of your marketing goals is likely to execute efforts that are scalable so you can grow revenue in a cost-effective way. One solution is to work with a contracted inside sales company to achieve that growth.

Inside sales companies can offer cost-effective options like field force supplementation, multi-channel marketing programs, and hospital and pharmacy programs.

A multi-channel marketing approach (phone, video & tele-detailing, direct mail, email, fax, digital storytelling platform, etc.) makes it easier and less costly to identify, qualify, and direct leads toward a successful sale in today’s challenging sales environment.

Marketing Can Help You Make Inroads Into Untapped Territories

Vacant territories can cause gaps in your coverage that can make it tougher to meet your sales goals. As a sales leader, you are still responsible for that territory’s performance, regardless of coverage status. So this means that not only will you need to be covering these areas in the interim, but you will also have to figure out a way to fill these vacancies. This is obviously a lot to juggle on top of your existing workload.

Marketing efforts of a contract-based inside sales team can be the answer for filling these gaps, providing coverage and service to your key accounts while allowing you to focus on recruitment and onboarding. Once your new hire is up and running, they will receive a full activity report, allowing them to pick right up where the inside team left off.

In addition to vacancy coverage, a contract-based inside sales team can efficiently cover non-targeted prescribers in covered territories as well as your whitespace. Using a multi-channel marketing approach (phone, video & tele-detailing, direct mail, email, fax, digital storytelling platform, etc.) will get the message across clearly and consistently, breaking through the noise of the competition and helping you make progress in previously untapped areas.

Today’s Hiring Market Is A Challenge

The reality is that hiring, training, managing, and coaching field sales representatives can be a complex tactical undertaking. And in today’s hiring environment, it’s more challenging than ever.

However, utilizing a contract inside sales company can be a solution. Inside sales agents from a pharmaceutical marketing and sales company can cover any vacant territories you have, allowing you to focus on recruiting and training rather than covering offices. By allowing you to focus on the hiring process, you can fill those gaps quickly and efficiently while still ensuring your key targets receive coverage.

Many pharmaceutical company executives are finding out that inside sales agents are far more cost-effective, flexible, and scalable than traditional field reps. Pharma marketing support agents are already trained, situated, and ready to move to help you fill in the gaps, allowing you to focus on recruiting.

Healthcare Providers Are Overwhelmed

Hospitals, physicians’ offices, dentists’ offices, pharmacies, and other health care facilities are understaffed already, and many of them are increasingly limiting public access to their in-person staff. That makes it that much tougher to reach these prospects. 

Contract inside sales solutions is exploding in popularity. Professional inside sales representatives are already trained in the nuances of the pharmaceutical industry and ready to go now.  Contract inside sales solutions can be a direct replacement or effective supplement to field reps, and with the ability to scale up as needed, will take your marketing efforts to the next level.

The healthcare industry is changing fast, and the last few years have accelerated the pace even further. Forward-thinking pharmaceutical company executives understand the need to maximize revenue and minimize expenditures and liabilities. While there will always be a need for in-person field sales representatives in the pharmaceutical industry, contracted inside sales companies can help in this landscape of limited access and increased competition.