Engage your salesforce with pharma gamification

In today’s fast-changing Pharma sales environment, influenced among other things by the latest salesforce cutoffs globally, workforce has shifted from official medical representatives to experienced healthcare spokespeople that assist medical professionals to their daily business practice.

Quite recently, Pharma companies have been massively adopting mobile solutions in sales and marketing, through the use of visual detailing aids, mainly as part of their multichannel strategy. The salesforce reaction to this strategy has created many questions:

Are your reps empowered enough to handle the new tools that are being offered?

Can they deliver personalized and targeted messages to HCPs, using their new visual detailing aids to their full extend?

Have your training programs risen up to this new reality?

The advent of CLM and mobile solutions have caused uncertainty and lack of confidence among the medical reps. The volume of available information given to the Reps through the new channels, is hard to digest. From a few-pages leaflet, a Rep today carries hundreds of pages of medical publications, literally at the tips of his fingers. At the same time, the Rep has to play an even more important role, as reference point for Pharma companies and the medical community. To overcome these challenges, Pharma companies must enrich the training procedure by using more interesting and interactive features. One crucial point to consider, is that after the training a Rep is required to answer a questionnaire. Once. There is no follow-up measurement on the improvement of his knowledge skills. These actions should be in concert with an HR strategy that can boost their morale.

According to the Sunrise Software Gamification Survey 2014, 13 percent of surveyed organizations already used gamification apps, while 71 percent had plans to introduce them in the future. Additionally, 86 percent of respondents said gamification helped them increase productivity and improve customer service.

How about a platform for professional gaming? Or a quiz-like application that brings users together to compete with each other?

Pharmaceutical companies may reap many benefits from adopting the gamification trend, in order to enhance learning and compliance. Smartphones and tablets could be the means to achieve the new goals.

A gamification app enhances employee engagement and positively impacts key performance indicators. What’s more, embracing gamification in compliance training & tracking will incorporate game-thinking in non-game environments.

Bonus tip: To overcome lack of internet availability, look for a solution that does not require internet connection to play. Moreover, the app should be equipped with a questions bank. Filled with an adequate number of questions for each topic, with varied difficulty (level) in order to avoid repetition. Feeding of new questions/topics will keep the interest up.

Find out what counts the most to the users and personalize the awards to fit. It’s important for Life Sciences using these incentives to take the time to tailor them to their employees.