What to Look for in a Contract Sales Organization

Many companies struggle to scale their sales operations, especially when they’re in the ever-changing healthcare industry. Pharmaceutical manufacturers have to continuously develop and market new products; care providers have to keep up with the latest products and procedures to provide top-quality care to their patients; and health insurance companies have to stay on top of an always-evolving list of products, services, and regulations when creating and marketing insurance products.

Finding and retaining a team of salespeople who can keep up is difficult even during the best of times. This is where contract sales organizations and outsourced sales teams can help. What is a contract sales organization (CSO)? What are the benefits of outsourced sales solutions for the medical sales industry? And, what should you look for in a superb contract sales organization?

What Is a Contract Sales Organization?

A contract sales organization is a company that provides outsourced sales and marketing services on behalf of your company. These services may include full-time or part-time sales staff, specific quotas for marketing activities and sales goals, and even recruitment of dedicated medical sales team members. There are a wide variety of CSOs with various strengths and market expertise.

Top Benefits of Partnering with Contract Sales Companies

Why should a pharmaceutical manufacturer, medical software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, health insurance provider, or even an individual healthcare clinic work with a contract sales organization?

There are tremendous benefits to partnering with sales outsourcing services for your medical marketing and sales efforts. For example, partnering with a CSO helps you:

1. Save Time and Effort on Recruitment. Recruitment in the medical sales industry is not a simple task. Attracting, vetting, and onboarding and retaining qualified medical sales representatives takes a lot of time, effort, and money. Outsourcing this responsibility to a contract sales organization helps reduce the recruitment burden and allows you to focus on other priorities.
2. Build Your Sales Team Quickly. Because they focus so heavily on building their contract sales teams for a variety of clients, CSOs frequently have a large network of contacts that are “ready to go.” This means, by partnering with them, you can build out your sales team extremely fast—often in a fraction of the time it would take to handle recruitment yourself.
3. Reduce Your Sales Team Overhead. Using a “part-time” contract sales team where sales reps are all the CSO’s staff instead of being on your own company’s payroll, you eliminate numerous costs such as:
   1. Benefits (because the sales team is not part of your payroll);
   2. Recruitment (because the CSO is responsible for it);
   3. Training (because the CSO will handle this); and
   4. Office Space (if relevant).
4. Reduce Risk for Your Business. Being able to minimize risks is crucial for any business in the medical sales industry. Using outsourced sales teams helps companies in the medical industry reduce risk by eliminating the need to invest in and maintain a permanent infrastructure.
   
   For example, this year a mid level pharma company partnered with a CSO to augment their internal sales for a new product launch. The drug was showing great promise and in the final Phase 3 review. Unexpectedly, the FDA did not approve the drug due to a side effect they considered a heavier weight than the benefit of the drug. This was completely unexpected. Because the company had not hired a national sales team, they were able to quickly respond to the situation, trim costs and minimize the stock price loss. Imagine if they had to sit on a 12-month lease of new office space!

6 Things to Look for in an Outsourced Sales Team

What should you look for in a contract sales partnership? What are the critical elements that will help you find a trustworthy, reliable, and effective outsourced sales solution? Here are a few of the most important factors to consider:

1. The CSO’s Experience in the Medical Sales Industry

How much experience does the sales outsourcing company have in the medical sales industry, specifically? Are they focused exclusively in medical sales, or are they a general sales outsourcing service that works in every vertical?

There is a lot of regulatory nuance to consider in medical sales—and a vendor who simply provides outsourced sales teams will not have the right expertise to sell your medical products and/or services.

In particular, you may want to verify that the CSO you’re considering has experience working with companies in your specific medical sales vertical. For example, if you’re selling medical software-as-a-service (SaaS) products, you’ll want to verify that your CSO has helped sell SaaS products in the past.

2. Whether the CSO Provides Ongoing Education to Their Outsourced Sales Teams

Products, regulations, and even industry best practices are always changing. Working with outdated information can cripple a medical sales team—leading to poor performance.

It’s critical to verify that your CSO provides continuous post-hire training. Ongoing training and education is vital for keeping sales team members current with the most recent regulatory requirements, the most effective sales strategies, and the latest products that will best fit a particular situation or need (or may be the best alternative to a competitor’s services or products).

A well trained sales team will be more effective than a sales team that relies on the “brute force” approach of blindly plugging the same sales script over and over without understanding the benefits of the product or the customer’s needs. They’re also less likely to run into regulatory problems.

3. How the CSO Handles Reporting on Sales Goals and Results

Every contract sales organization should provide a tight sales reporting solution. If a CSO can’t deliver a simple report showing how their outsourced sales team has responded to your pre-determined metrics, their understanding of your plan moving forward, and the desired results on your time frame, then you shouldn’t work with that CSO.

Top-tier CSOs will provide you with reporting tools that show you, in real time, the sales data that you need to properly assess whether you’re on-track for meeting (or beating) your sales goals. Truly great CSOs will use extensive data analysis to constantly refine their sales efforts to produce better results—studying what is or isn’t working and making changes as needed.

4. The CSO’s Track Record for Compliance in the Medical Sales Industry

Has the CSO worked with other companies in the medical industry before? Have any of their past clients encountered regulatory problems while working with them?

These are critical questions to ask before working with a sales outsourcing service. If the CSO is using undertrained sales reps who cause compliance problems, then you shouldn’t work with them. After all, the point is to save time and money while avoiding risk, not to introduce regulatory compliance risk!

5. How the CSO Communicates with You

If you ask your CSO partner a question, how long does it take them to reply? Are their replies comprehensive (meaning that they fully answer the question you asked)? Or, are they evasive? Does your CSO proactively reach out and bring important issues to your attention?

In any business relationship, communication is key. Aside from providing frequent updates and reports on sales efforts, it’s important for your CSO to keep you up to date with any developments and provide prompt support whenever you have a question or concern.

If there’s ever a major concern that could affect your sales results, your CSO should proactively alert you and help develop a resolution. Otherwise, you might encounter a wholly unexpected (and unpleasant) surprise while having no strategy for dealing with it.

6. Does the Outsourced Sales Team Develop Relationships with Customers?

The old way of handling contract sales—wherein faceless sales reps simply dial up as many phone numbers as they can and recite a trite old script to someone who really doesn’t care—is dead. And that broken old sales method should stay dead.

It’s important to have a medical sales team that can build relationships with prospects. While becoming a trusted peer or resource takes a lot more time and effort, it can produce much better long-term results. By building rapport with consumers and becoming a trusted resource, sales reps can create a more valuable relationship that encourages repeat business (and thus, recurring revenue).

One of the hallmarks of a truly great contract sales company is their focus on relationship-building.

Do you need help scaling your sales efforts? Axxelus is here to help! Reach out to our team to get started on improving your medical sales.