For any pharmaceutical company, being able to sell products effectively is vital for ensuring continued profitability and growth. New product launches help ensure that your company is able to enter new market segments or maintain an advantage with existing segments.
However, maximizing sales for a new item can be tricky to handle. To ensure success, pharma companies need to have the right elements in place. One of the most crucial aspects of any new product launch is having a strong pharma sales team.
As important as having a strong pharma sales team is, it’s still only one aspect of a successful new product launch. There are numerous other essential steps in launching any new product in the pharma industry that need to be completed as well, including:
Before a new pharmaceutical product can be launched to the public, it first needs to pass U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations. This includes submitting a New Drug Application (NDA) under the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) Title 21 Part 314 (21 CFR 314) Section 314.50 and demonstrating compliance with Current Good Manufacturing Practice (CGMP) standards.
As the FDA notes on their website: “Federal law requires all new drugs in the U.S. be shown to be safe and effective for their intended use prior to marketing.” While there may be exceptions for some “medically necessary” drugs where the unapproved drug is “subject to an open drug efficacy study implementation (DESI) program” or there isn’t enough of an FDA-approved drug to meet the demand for a specific use case (or no FDA-approved drugs exist).
For example, some patient-specific medications, where the drug has to be prepared on a 1:1 basis because it requires cells or tissues harvested from the patient or a compatible donor, might fall under an exception—though the process for manufacturing the drug still needs to pass CGMP requirements.
Not having FDA approval would severely limit the marketability of a new pharma product—and potentially open the manufacturer to fines and other legal challenges if the product is marketed without approval.
Why should the target customer use your new pharmaceutical product? It’s important to understand your target audience—including who they are, what their pain points are, and how your new product addresses those needs better than the competition.
In pharma sales, it can be a bit tough to establish a unique value proposition—especially for products meant to help with more common illnesses and ailments that will reach a larger portion of the market. On the other hand, pharma products that address conditions that other companies aren’t targeting might make for an easy-to-win, but often more limited, market.
If a market is too limited, the product may not be sustainable. But, larger markets mean dealing with more competitors. Either way, it’s important to know your target audience for the new product.
For example, if you know that your costs for R&D, manufacturing, and other overhead puts your product at a cost that only 1% of the population can afford for a condition that only one in a million people will experience, then that product may not be sustainable.
On the other hand, if your new product is affordable to 95% of the population and treats a common condition, but there are 100 other products that address the same condition, you may struggle to gain traction. Here, knowing your audience could help you establish some key differentiators from other products—things like having fewer (or less severe) side effects compared to other medications, being more affordable than other medications, or even something like having eco-friendly manufacturing methods could help differentiate the product from the competition.
Marketing is key for any new product launch—especially in pharma sales. Unless you’re selling an over-the-counter product, odds are slim that customers will see your product on a store shelf and just give it a try.
Many pharmaceutical products rely on prescribing physicians to recommend them to patients over others. However, it can also help to assemble marketing materials to educate the public about the benefits of a new product and get them to ask their doctors about alternatives to commonly prescribed medications. This can also help to raise awareness of the new item amongst prescribing physicians.
Assembling a marketing campaign that explains the unique benefits of a new product is a must for any product launch to build awareness and make things easier on the sales team.
Here’s a hypothetical scenario: Your company is launching a big new pharmaceutical product. The marketing team has spent months building up ad campaigns to promote the product launch. However, shortly after launch, actual sales results are lackluster—far below your projections.
The problem? The pharma sales team doesn’t really know how to sell the product to your customers (new or existing). Alternatively, there may simply not be enough sales reps on the team to effectively follow up with every lead that they need to talk to.
This is why it’s so important to build a pharma sales team that has both the right skills and the capacity to handle a new product launch. Even with a strong marketing campaign, detailed insights into your target audience, and top-notch product, if the sales team is lacking, then results will suffer.
This is where using a contract sales organization (CSO) can help.
Outsourcing your sales force by using a CSO’s services can be a convenient way to build your pharma sales team. However, it’s important to consider all of the benefits of outsourcing sales over building an internal team before contracting with a CSO.
Some of the key benefits of working with a CSO include:
CSOs typically have access to a large network of skilled sales talent that they can tap into to fill your sales needs. This gives you near-instant access to a large pool of sales reps of all skill and experience levels to meet your specific needs.
Do you want to have a larger team of sales representatives and are willing to work with less experienced reps? You could recruit a large number of less experienced salespeople to build your capacity fast.
Need highly-skilled reps who know the industry inside and out? A CSO can focus on recruiting more experienced reps who have already worked with other pharma companies in the past.
CSOs have extensive experience in the medical and pharmaceutical sales industry. With this experience comes in-depth knowledge of various types of pharmaceutical product consumers.
Whether your product needs to be sold to other companies in the pharma/medical industry, hospital administrators, or individual doctors in a private practice, the CSO has the relevant experience to help craft the sales message and can provide sales talent who know how to approach those types of customers.
Training is a critical issue in medical and pharmaceutical product sales. This is especially true when dealing with a new product launch, as there are many rules regarding the claims that sales reps can make and how the sales reps can interact with prospects. To make things even more challenging, the rules can change from time to time.
To keep sales rep knowledge on industry regulations and best practices up to date, it’s important to provide comprehensive training. However, maintaining an internal training program can be difficult and time-consuming. Here, using a CSO who provides ongoing training to the sales reps they bring to your team can be a life-saver.
Instead of having to manually sift through different training courses, update course materials, and arrange training time yourself, the CSO can handle these aspects of training for you. This helps you save some time and resources on sales training management.
Of course, not all CSOs provide this service, so it’s important to find the right one!
How much money does it cost your organization to put together a campaign to recruit new sales talent, conduct interviews, run background checks, onboard new employees, and provide ongoing education and training so they can avoid potential liabilities?
The cost of hiring sales staff internally can vary from one company to the next depending on the size of the sales team, the level of experience needed, and other factors. However, by leveraging a CSO to help with recruitment, companies can significantly reduce their costs.
However, there’s more to cutting costs than simply minimizing initial recruitment costs. It’s also important to consider the cost of employee attrition amongst the sales team. Each time an employee leaves (voluntarily or otherwise), that has an impact on the organization’s costs as someone new needs to be brought on to fill the gap.
This is why it’s important to hire the right sales reps. For example, Axxelus has a “Hire-Right Guarantee” where if a sales rep leaves or is terminated, Axxelus’ clients do not have to pay for the cost of recruiting a replacement. Axxelus offers this guarantee because, as a business with years of experience in matching motivated sales reps with the right medical and pharmaceutical businesses, we are confident in our proven processes for getting the “right fit” sales reps.
What constitutes a “right fit?” This means more than just having relevant skills and experience (though these qualities are important). It means that the sales rep has the right motivation and attitude to succeed in your organization and drive results. Having the right sales rep minimizes the risk of them leaving or having to be terminated—which helps keep your recruitment costs down in the long run.
Building a pharma sales team is crucial for any successful product launch. If you're ready to build a great sales team, reach out to Axxelus today!
