2020 Virtual advisory board
5 key take-aways: How to ensure remote engagement excellence
What does it take to deliver great remote engagement? Get answers from the Agnitio Virtual Advisory Board where pharma marketing, sales and IT leaders from 10 companies – including Algorithm, Bayer, Bial, Danone, Heel, Orion, and Recordati – highlighted best practices in light of learnings from COVID-19.
Read the five essential take-aways below from their discussion or download the pdf.
1. Insights
Understand your current situation
The COVID pandemic forced companies to experiment with remote engagement – often for the first time. The task now is to make the right long-term decisions by mapping the opportunities, best practices and gaps across your organization. What worked? What didn’t? What were the problems?
Many different engagement activities took place in 2020 – all of which produced valuable insights that can be studied and refined. With this understanding, you can build a remote go-to-market strategy that’s future-proof – incorporating detailed needs for content, tech, training & coaching.
2. Speed & flexibility
Re-think your content for remote
Remote is a different beast. It’s often expected that the conversation will be more to the point and engagements shorter. Consequently, the value that reps provide must be clear from the very start.
To address the specific demands of remote calls, brand teams need to consider how to equip reps with content that’s engaging, interactive and personalized for the individual HCP. And it needs to be flexible, so that reps can highlight new and different things on each call – or adapt to how the conversation flows.
3. Simplicity
Start simple then scale
The technology needs to be simple and appropriate for healthcare settings and regulations. Some technologies are tricky to use in hospitals and clinics due to firewalls. Other systems require downloading software that HCPs are unable to use, just don’t have time for, or don’t meet compliance standards.
What’s important is that technology shouldn’t be a barrier but rather an enabler – providing simple solutions that are easy to use and appropriate for life science communication.
4. Training and coaching
Build remote selling excellence
Prepare your reps to engage. Remote technologies that are simple and intuitive will build rep confidence, but getting the best results requires a well-structured and planned approach to training and coaching.
Skills and capabilities are different in remote, but these can be taught, and reps will adapt well with the right guidance. Technology can play a useful role here – especially in these times – as specialized remote sales training and coaching software can build competences at scale and speed.
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5. Measure success
Set clear remote KPIs
Decide what you want to achieve from remote engagement and make sure it’s easy to measure. KPIs should be relevant to remote engagement specifically and your situation in particular.
Don’t just measure what everybody else does or copy over KPIs from face-to-face engagements. Consider what’s most important to meet your business goals – and bear in mind that qualitative factors (e.g. customer satisfaction) might be as, if not more, important than quantitative measures like the number of meetings.
Take remote to the next level
Talk to us about accelerating your remote engagement strategies – or to experience a demo or free trial of our remote systems.