In medical device and pharmaceutical sales, sales reps often struggle to capture and hold the attention of a fairly limited market of target customers. To this end, many teams brush up on selling tips for keeping top-of-mind so that when a potential customer has a problem, they’ll think of the products and services the sales rep’s company has to offer.
However, finding the right ways to stay top-of-mind without accidentally souring business relationships can be challenging. Today, we’ll examine the importance of brand awareness in sales and how medical device and pharmaceutical salespeople can build and maintain it.
So, why does brand awareness matter? How does it impact your sales process and success? It’s kind of hard to objectively measure the real impact of brand awareness. Even when people are surveyed directly, they may have a hard time articulating just how much brand awareness impacts their buying decisions.
However, the complexity of modern buying options demands businesses stay top-of-mind to be competitive. For example, as noted in an article by Forbes, “73% of today’s consumers confirm they use more than one channel during a shopping journey.” In other words, shoppers are comparing deals and offers across multiple channels before they make a final choice. If your company isn’t top of mind, they may get skipped in the research process.
This makes sales techniques that keep the business at the forefront of potential customers’ minds vital to securing closed deals. Even in the medical sales industry, where prospects are much more likely to be pressured to do extensive comparison shopping and might be getting directly approached by a different salesperson practically every other day, maintaining brand awareness is critical.
Wondering how to sell products or services as a pharmaceutical or medical device rep in a way that keeps your business top of mind with prospects? There are a few sales tips and tricks that you could use:
Everybody and their brother has an elevator pitch—that short little sentence or paragraph that they can rattle off to every sales prospect to give them their company’s value proposition in 30 seconds or less. However, that doesn’t guarantee that the prospect will remember the elevator pitch more than five seconds after the salesperson leaves.
This is why it’s important to focus on building a relationship at least as much as you would on actually selling a product. Simply contacting a prospect and firing off the elevator pitch isn’t enough—to get a prospect to remember you (and your company), it’s important to earn their trust and respect.
The challenge is that building a relationship is a time-consuming process. It requires actually listening to the prospect—often for long periods of time over multiple face-to-face meetings—and learning what makes them tick, what their specific challenges are, and how they prefer to communicate.
It also frequently requires putting in the effort to provide assistance outside of simply selling products and services to the customer. For example, if a prospect has a problem not immediately answered by a product or service the sales rep’s company deals with, then the sales rep might recommend another vendor who does or provide a quick tip that doesn’t rely on proprietary company resources.
In this way, a salesperson can easily build a rapport with a prospect and keep themselves and their company top-of-mind whenever the prospect has a problem that needs solving.
Here’s a basic bit of advice, but one that bears repeating as often as needed to ensure it isn’t overlooked—carry extra business cards and give them out to prospects as often as possible.
This is especially important during a first meeting. You can’t expect decision-makers in a medical or pharmaceutical industry business to remember every random salesperson, rep, or company that drops in uninvited (assuming the sales rep can get past the gatekeeper on an initial visit).
Giving out business cards provides an easy reminder of your name and contact information just in case the prospect needs it later. Who knows? They may eventually have an issue that your product or service answers perfectly and use the contact info on the card to reach out!
Alternatively, they may pass along your business card to others in the industry who may need solutions like the ones you provide—helping to build or reinforce your patient referral program.
What are the pain points your prospects are facing? How do they prefer to communicate? Who is the gatekeeper between them and sales reps, vendors, and other external agents? These are some basic questions that every sales rep needs answers to before reaching out to prospects.
Taking the time to do some due diligence and research might not sound important for being top-of-mind, but it can help you identify the best ways to build a relationship so you can get (and stay) there.
As the saying goes, “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” Well, neither is a good long-term relationship with a customer—especially not in a B2B-focused company. In fact, as reported by Forrester, the average “number of buying interactions during the pandemic jumped from 17 to 27.” In this instance, “buying interactions” references communications between a customer and a company before the final purchase decision is made.
In other words, it’s important to be persistent, as it will take numerous interactions for a sales rep to close a deal with a customer. However, it’s important to do so without being annoying (as you don’t want to be remembered for the wrong reasons)!
HubSpot offers some basic advice for keeping in touch without being a nuisance, such as:
Following a few simple selling tips and tricks can do wonders for enhancing your sales skills and results.
Aside from it taking multiple interactions to close deals with prospects and build a relationship with them, there’s another reason to reach out frequently: the “forgetting curve.”
The forgetting curve is a concept in education that explains how learners forget new information over time if they don’t make an attempt to retain it. In essence, the less memorable something is and the longer the delay between learning something and trying to recall it, the easier the information is to forget.
According to sources like Growth Engineering, “when you first learn something, the information disappears at an exponential rate, i.e. you lose most of it in the first couple of days.”
This is a problem not just for training sales reps, but for getting prospects to remember your brand after a sales interaction.
In sales training circles, the best way to fight the loss of information after training is to:
The same two pieces of advice apply to sales techniques as well!
By keeping sales information relevant to a prospect’s needs and maintaining frequent contact with them, sales reps can have an easier time maintaining awareness of their company’s brand in the prospect’s mind.
Another piece of advice for improving information retention in prospects is to give the prospect something to do during the sales interaction. If all a prospect does is sit and listen while the sales rep rattles off a speech about their product or service, the prospect will be disengaged. This reduces the chances of them remembering (or caring) about the product or service offered.
By getting prospects involved in the conversation, a salesperson can get them to think more critically about the product or service offer. One way to do that is to ask questions. For example, a sales rep could ask something innocuous such as “how are you doing?” This question isn’t super-specific to medical sales/operations but could trigger a response about the prospect’s pain points (which the rep could use to move the conversation forward).
Or, a sales rep might provide a demo of the product or service that is interactive—saying something along the lines of “try this out” or “see how this works.” This gives the prospect something concrete to do during the sales interaction.
Some hands-on time with a product or service (if applicable) can do wonders to improve how well the customer remembers it later.
Need help building a sales team with the knowledge and skills to reliably build brand awareness and close deals? Reach out to Axxelus today for more information!
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