Pharma Marketing for Newbie UX Designers, Part 3: Sales Reps
A 4-part series sharing my experience as a UX designer in the world of pharma marketing
Meet The Sales Representatives
When working on a sales material project, our main user is the sales rep. Sales Representatives are the people who go into the fields and talk to physicians in person.
When I started this job, a colleague who used to work as a pharma sales rep told me that the movie Love & Other Drugs showed the rep’s life pretty close. There are obviously fictional plots, but the movie did show some common scenario a sales rep can encounter in the first half. It became my starting point to paint a picture of their day-to-day life.
When it comes to understanding the sales reps as users, I usually try to first organize interviews with sales reps through our clients, who are the marketing manager. Depending on the relationship between the client and the sales team, sometimes it can be tricky as they don’t work in the same team and the sales reps work flexible hours in the fields (different schedules and time zones). It will require some of your persuasion skills if the client is not familiar with the benefit of having a user interview.
Researching Sales Reps Experience Online
Secondary research from online sources can be useful too, depending on the disease area (less information for rare diseases). Online sources can range from publications, conference talks, patient forums, or support group websites. Since it’s informal research, it provides information more for anecdotal references and less about specific user pain points of your project.
Below are some surprising places I found useful to get started:
- Reddit: search “pharmaceutical sales” and you will find conversations about their experience, mostly to answer questions for people who want to enter this field.
- YouTube: search “a day in the life pharma sales”, you can find videos for career guidance like this 5 minutes interview
- An informational interview on jobshadow.com
- This talk in a Tableau Conference includes some data and a glimpse into sales reps’ pain points, which I hope I discovered earlier
In general, sales reps need to be on the road quite often, so people who take on this job are usually more extroverted and don’t like to be confined in an office space. One common pain point is limited access and time with physicians. When they get to talk to physicians, they have 90 seconds to make a strong first impression and only a few more minutes to deliver the message. They might need to walk with the physician while talking and be ready with any question the physician asks. After the conversation, they might need to record this in their CRM system of choice and follow up with the physician via email. All of this is assuming that the sales rep is very familiar with the sales materials and product information, e.g. the science of the drug.
Shifting From Print to Digital
In the past, sales reps would use a print brochure, sometimes called “sales aid” or “detail aid”, when talking to their customers, usually physicians. The action of educating physicians about product information is called “detailing”.
Nowadays, with the popularity of the iPad, more and more sales teams started adopting digital materials or go completely digital-only. Digital materials come with the benefit of having interesting animated content and tracking analytics. The digital version of the marketing materials can be called iCVA (core visual aid), digital sales aid, or electronic sales aid. There are no standards on the naming as it all depends on the client’s preferences.
There can be an interesting dynamic between the marketing team and the sales team. The marketing team produces strategies, guidelines, and materials for the sales team to follow and execute. Because we are in the most regulated industry, there are many guidelines or requirements that a sales rep might find it limits their talk track too much. It’s really important for the marketing team and the sales team to work closely and collaboratively. In an ideal situation, the marketers would understand the sales rep’s first-hand problem or most common questions from physicians, and the sales team should learn the marketing strategy behind the key messages and sales materials.
CRM Platforms — Veeva
Since there is more and more iPad usage from the sales reps, there is a demand for a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform to build around this. One of the biggest companies in this area is Veeva. Roughly 90% of my digital sales aid projects are designed to be used in Veeva system. The Veeva platform provides tools around customer management such as having all your customer’s profiles in one place, having a conversation record with timeline, space to include all PDF materials that are downloaded and available offline, and rich-media content to spice up the content.
The rich-media content is where digital sales aids live. They are actually HTML-based content hosted in Veeva. Using rich-media content, the sales rep can make the conversation more interesting or grab physician’s attention better. The challenge becomes designing with:
- great visual attraction to grab physician’s attention at first, and then show critical data in a clear way
- easy navigation so the sales rep can quickly jump around different topics depending on the physician’s interests
- compliant with regulations such as showing safety information to balance the claims
Speaking about regulations, we will need to work with the regulatory team throughout the process to ensure we are doing things right. To learn more about working with the regulatory team, keep reading on to the next and last part in this series!
This article is one of my 4-part series sharing my experience as a UX designer in the world of pharma marketing. See the full list here:
