4 Essential Skills for Pharmaceutical Account Managers

 

Developing key account management skills helps you become a trusted advisor for influential accounts and become a strong candidate for future executive positions.

Here are four key skills that every pharmaceutical account manager should be trained in, to successfully retain the most important accounts.

1. Developing a Value Proposition

How exactly do you convince a potential client to continue to choose your products and services over competitors’? By developing a convincing value proposition.

A value proposition is a statement that shows a potential client exactly how they will benefit from your products and services, and more importantly, why they should choose you.

An excellent value proposition will:

- Generate faster, more profitable sales

- Create a long-standing relationship with key clients

- Outline precisely what your company will do for its customers

- Speed up the client acceptance process

When you put an emphasis on customers’ needs, you’ll be able to create a value proposition that is hard to turn down.

2. Accessing & Integrating at Strategic Levels

In order to become a trusted partner of your account, you must be able to understand their needs and behaviors and leverage this information to boost mutual value creation.

To become an invaluable part of your customer’s team, you must integrate yourself at the strategic level. That means you must create relationships with key players within your account’s organization and position yourself as an integral part of the strategic process, rather than just a replaceable supplier of products and services. This will allow you to grow and profit with that account indefinitely.

3. Gap Analysis

In most organizations there is a gap that separates where they are today and where they want to be. Account managers need to understand this gap and evaluate how they can assist the Key Decision Makers (KDMs) to bridge the gap.

Typically, key problems that most businesses face fall into one or more of these four categories:

1. Strategic

2. Financial / Operational

3. Products and Services

4. Marketing

Account managers should become a trusted advisor to the KDMs by devoting time, effort and energy in helping them overcome their most pressing business challenges and reach their long-term goals.

4. Executive Level Presence

Executive level presence is the ability to show confidence and competence that earns you the respect of colleagues and clients alike. Learning how to maximize your executive presence, exemplify confidence and project competence will drive your success in any professional environment.

Knowing who to talk to about what in an organization is only half the battle. By developing an executive presence, you are guaranteeing that clients and colleagues alike will stop, listen, and seriously consider what you are offering.

Gain These Skills and More with Excellence in Account Management

With The Brooks Group’s Excellence in Account Management program, you’ll learn how to understand and predict the complex needs of your clients so that you can become an invaluable part of their organization

Become a respected part of your own organization by retaining influential accounts and becoming a key component of value creation. Contact us today.

More:

Read about the signs suggesting your account managers need training here

Interested in created a custom learning experience for your account managers? Learn about our instructional design capabilities here

This blog was originally posted on https://thebrooksgrouponline.com/2021/03/4-essential-skills-for-pharmaceutical-account-managers/

Gamification of Employee Onboarding - Is it Helpful?

 

Traditionally, onboarding process consisted of a classroom like environment with presentations and tons of documents that the new employee would go through to learn the policies and procedures of the new employment. The typical process is tedious and boring, and it didn’t lend itself to full knowledge acquisition, or long term retention. 1 in 4 employees leave within 180 days of onboarding.

Gamification of the onboarding process utilizes interactive gaming techniques to engage with the new hires, by using their competitive nature and desire to win. But is there a benefit to gamification over the traditional methods of onboarding? The Brooks Group’s customized interactive instructional design services offer far more benefits to employers than traditional classroom learning. As stated in the demo video found HERE, a few gamification benefits include:

- Increased long term engagement

- Longer knowledge retention

- Increased business goal success

- Employee enjoyment leading to the desire to learn more

The New Employee

The world is changing, and as younger people enter the workforce, they expect more interaction and a sense of accomplishment from their employer. This is true during the onboarding process as well. Transitioning into a new position, a new role or a new company isn’t always smooth. Understanding the company, the rules, and employment expectations are essential for both the employer and the employee, but the traditional knowledge sharing methods are no longer a viable way of learning new information. Employees retaining the vast amounts of information given to them in the first few weeks of employment is crucial for long term productivity and success. Attention spans have globally been narrowing down in recent years, so it is important to present information in an engaging manner. Having interactive onboarding training for new employees increases their chances of retaining the data by 50% and leads to greater productivity once the workflow begins.

Retaining talented employees who work hard and produce results is arguably the most important driver to success and growth for any company. According to studies, having a structured and interactive training program is a positive experience that results in a 69% increase in new hires staying with their new company past the first six months of employment.

Gamification of the Onboarding Process

The world is changing, and younger employees who grew up with gaming consoles and digital technology readily available are entering the workforce in droves. It’s crucial to keep up with the change in worker attitudes and remain competitive by retaining the best of the best. This means every aspect of the job needs to be engaging, helpful, and give employees a sense of accomplishment, including the onboarding process.

Using games, fun, or sometimes even silly interaction to keep a new employee engaged in the process is smart. When employees feel motivated through personal accomplishment, they will strive to work harder and keep getting better. This, in turn, keeps morale high and productivity moving at a swift pace. If an employee realizes, through a fun and engaging onboarding process, the company they’re about to work for will set challenging but reachable goals, they will stay, and the company will retain top talent in their field.

The Brooks Group

The Brooks Group has done extensive research into interactive onboarding and training programs with proven results. In addition to our onboarding programs, the company offers an array of training programs to set up your new employees for success, including:

- Sales and Account Management Training

- Healthcare Executive Leadership Training

Contact us today to learn how you can create a fun and positive learning experience for your new employees that produces long-term success for your organization.

This blog was originally posted on https://thebrooksgrouponline.com/2021/03/gamification-of-employee-onboarding-is-it-helpful/