Why Sales Representatives Should Deviate from Call Plans
One of the functions most critical to maximizing the productivity and efficiency of the sales force’s efforts is call planning—how often a physician target should be seen by a sales representative. However, oftentimes, call plans are not strictly adhered to by the sales force, raising the question by Sales Operations as well as management of whether sales would have been higher if the sales force had followed the call plan more closely. In this blog post, we explore why sales representatives do not follow call plans and why this more often than not is good for a company’s bottom line.
Why Don’t Sales Representatives Follow Call Plans?
We at The Marketing Advantage have been designing call plans based on sales, opportunity, potential, maintenance and growth for the biopharma industry for over 30 years. However, early on, we found that a number of sales representatives who did not strictly follow our call plans performed better than how we forecasted they would perform if they had followed our call plans.
So we wondered: how and why did this occur?
When we spoke with the top performers, we learned that they had not followed our call plan because of information (i.e., soft data) they had regarding the relationships and attitudes of the prescriber targets in their territory. So although our call plan provided the frequency at which to call on various prescribers based on hard data such as sales data and managed care data, the sales representatives had knowledge about office staff relationships, the prescriber’s personal relationships, the prescriber’s prescribing prejudices, and other information that was not in the data. In fact, in one case, the prescriber was the spouse of a competitive sales representative.
Thus, we learned that there is a great deal of soft data that is not present in the hard data we do not have access to—and thus could not be considered by our models—that dramatically affected the frequency at which the prescriber should be called on. Setting call plans based on hard data alone is setting call plans based on an incomplete set of information.
Call Plans Should be No More Than a Guide
Because call plans are set based only on hard data, call plans should be considered a guide from which the sales force has the freedom to follow or deviate based on the information they uniquely have regarding their territory. If sales representatives believe that following the call plan will generate the most sales, then they will follow it. If sales representatives believe that following the call plan will not generate the most sales, then the sales force will not follow the call plan as closely.
Perhaps the clearest way we have seen this behavior play out is through our Dynamic Targeting™ methodology, an overlay to existing targets that identifies 5-8 super prospect prescribers for each territory each month with whom the sales representative is asked to make a special effort. Part of Dynamic Targeting™ is giving sales representatives the freedom to make or not make that special effort as they see fit. However, what we find is that in about three months, representatives who received only 5 or 6 super prospects wish that they had gotten 8. The message is clear—if sales representatives believe that following the call plan will generate the most sales, then they will follow it.
Conclusion
Rather than enforcing strict adherence to a call plan, call plans should instead be a guide to the sales force—the result of insights that have been gleaned from the data. The final decision must lie with the sales representatives as they have additional knowledge beyond what can be discerned from the hard data. Sales representatives will follow call plans that they believe will help them generate the most sales, and will not follow call plans that they believe will not. Request a free consultation with us today to get started on ensuring your targeting and call plan strategy maximizes the productivity and efficiency of your sales force.
