Top Pharma Sales Teams Challenges Faced on the Field – How to Resolve Them?

Don’t rely on traditional methods to tackle pharma sales teams challenges. Upgrade to MR reporting software and leverage its schedule templates, pharma sales tracking, and ad-hoc task allocation to turn obstacles into opportunities.

Success in the pharmaceutical industry involves overcoming challenges, particularly for medical representatives who travel between sites to promote and sell products. On their way to task sites, they ensure all necessary documentation is in order. Moreover, long hours of travel to dispersed territories exhaust them from the inside out.

But, what if they automate the paperwork required in the field and are allocated to the nearby task sites? They will have more energy saved inside, letting them conduct tasks speedily. Looking for a way to make all these possible? With MR reporting software, you can let your employees automate mundane or manual tasks. Moreover, you will get a closer look at where your employees are currently located, thereby assigning them tasks at the nearby location.

What else does the software solution cover and how does it help revolutionize the pharmaceutical industry? Let’s cover it all by pointing out the pharma sales teams challenges resolved by the one and only MR reporting software.

Exploring Challenges and Solutions Within the Pharma Sales Teams

Read this section to see how MR reporting software effectively addresses pharmaceutical sales teams challenges.

Challenge 1 – Schedule planning takes too much time

In support of this challenge, pharmaceutical sales managers have pointed out the hassle of creating schedule templates from scratch to specify employees’ specific tasks, shift timing, and job details. Moreover, they talk about the struggle of constantly checking employees’ availability, if someone is out sick, taking a day off, or on vacation, unable to do their scheduled tasks for the day. Besides, they mention that they need real-time updates on employees’ locations and task status to adjust the schedules accordingly.

The Solution

All these make schedule planning a lot more time-consuming. This is where the MR reporting software comes in and gives you the room to automate everything, simplifying the job and shift scheduling process. The software provides a deep insight into how many employees are available in the field.

Additionally, it comes with an auto-generated shift template that you can access to fill in employees’ job schedules and details. To provide real-time updates, the software also shoots notifications for managers to assess the task status. This is how it brings ease when it comes to the job scheduling process.

Challenge 2 – Unclarity on total miles covered

Is it possible to efficiently track the total miles MRs cover? The pharma sales team often asks this question as they lack detailed records of the miles traveled across diverse locations–urban, suburban, and rural. This uncertainty complicates the process of reimbursing expenses and providing travel allowance. To tackle this challenge effectively, a strategic approach is essential.

The Solution

The solution lies in utilizing advanced software like TrackoField. It comes with a comprehensive distance and duration breakdown feature that lets you monitor how many sites MRs visited, how many tasks they have completed, and how much they have traveled during their working hours.

This visibility allows you to manage expense reimbursement and travel allowance more effectively. You can also assess if any employee is taking longer than expected to reach the specific task allocation. This lets you take necessary action to improve overall efficiency.

Challenge 3 – Hard to assign the right MR to each meeting

Effective meetings don’t happen by chance; they require careful planning. In the pharmaceutical industry, where MRs are assigned to sell specific drugs, it’s crucial that they have specialized knowledge about those therapeutic products. Sending a newcomer to pitch a complex drug may not yield the best results. Also, among the 100+ pharma sales teams, it is hard to choose and assign the right MR to each meeting.

The Solution

To address this, use a software solution like TrackoField. It provides access to each rep’s details, including their expertise and the status of their ongoing meetings. With this information, you can decipher the right MR for each task, meeting, and appointment.

On top of that, the software contains an employee dashboard, into which you can evaluate their productivity levels, past work, and target vs. achievement reports. Upon analyzing that they have maintained their productivity levels and completed the targets, you can send the appropriate MRs to each meeting. So, switch to the software to ensure every client interaction is handled by an MR with the right knowledge, improving the chances of successful meetings.

Challenge 4 – Losing time on administrative tasks

Every team in the pharmaceutical industry faces this issue. Both managers and executives have to take care of administrative tasks while playing their regular duties. This not only minimizes their time and makes employees overwhelmed, but also leads to missed deadlines and unfinished work. Even a study articulates that individuals spend over 300 hours annually on data entry and email handling, wasting up to 20% of their productivity.

The Solution

All these make it possible to rethink the approach to administrative tasks and automate the procedure with MR reporting software. From attendance management to task allocation, pharma sales tracking, expense reimbursement, payroll distribution, and order management, managers can automate these all with the right software.

Moreover, they can let their sales representatives mark their attendance, apply for leaves, request expense claims, generate payslips, take orders, and get travel allowance, all digitally. This empowers them to reclaim valuable time and focus on what truly matters to achieve the sales targets.

Challenge 5 – Difficulty in maintaining effective communication

Using different channels like emails and messages for communication can fragment the flow of information. You may lose important information, leading to delays in responses and inefficiencies. Consequently, it shapes pharma sales teams’ challenges and makes it difficult for them to stay informed and updated. So, it is essential to centralize communication, especially in busy or noisy operations like in the pharmaceutical industry.

The Solution

With regular updates provided regarding the job details, clients, ad-hoc tasks, and shifts, your team can limit the back-and-forth of excessive questions. Moreover, it minimizes the need for unnecessary visits to offices by allowing space for a flow state. Centralized communication also takes out the guesswork and obstacles while adjusting to last-minute changes.

TrackoField levels up the communication game by providing attachments to share relevant documents, bills, and invoices over the software. Besides, it has a voice note feature for employees to ask crucial questions instantly without wasting time on typing a huge message.

Challenge 6 – Getting high overhead cost

Rising overhead cost demands preventive steps to secure business’ financial assets. So while making strategies, the pharmaceutical sales team must get a proper insight into where the money is going. Is it moving to salaries, administrative costs, travel allowance, and expense reimbursement? But, manually recording and reporting all these expenses is not possible. Implementing a dynamic solution that exposes pressure points and provides opportunities for businesses to save cash is crucial.

The Solution

Therefore, use software that records employees’ accurate working hours, leaves, overtime, etc., and seamlessly sync this data with payroll for fair salary distribution. It also lets you automate routine tasks to cut costs, track mileage for allowances, and streamline expense reimbursement by recording employees’ daily, weekly, or monthly expenses.

With all these on your plate, you will spend less and evaluate where the company’s finances are going. Thus, successfully reducing overhead costs.

Challenge 7 – Insufficient training for reps

When a pharmaceutical sales team is not trained well, they feel less confident while presenting drugs to clients. It can significantly affect their productivity, confidence, and effectiveness, preventing them from performing to their best level. Without having much information about the drugs, reps struggle to explain drugs’ benefits/side effects and answer clients’ questions. This can compel clients to lose trust or interest.

The Solution

As a result, the pharma sales team struggles to meet sales targets and ultimately feels less confident. Therefore, investing in comprehensive and ongoing training programs that equip team members with confidence, product knowledge, and skills is required. However, for that, you need to assess whether employees are completing their targets.

The MR reporting software generates employees’ productivity reports, detailing how many targets they have completed, their actual working hours, and the number of client visits made. With this insight, you will learn where reps excel or need improvement, making informed decisions related to initiating training programs.

How Does TrackoField Help Resolve the Pharma Sales Team’s Challenges?

TrackoField, MR reporting software, has all the solutions that we spoke about concerning the challenges above. So, no matter which challenges you are facing in the pharmaceutical industry, the software will help you overcome them with its effective modules and features.

With its scheduling templates, you can intelligently plan and create job schedules for your employees. Its pharma sales tracking helps you locate employees’ current task site and with its task-related updates, you get notifications every time employees complete the target.

For other challenges like ineffective communication, TrackoField provides a centralized communication channel. Using this, pharmaceutical sales managers and representatives can exchange information, and collaborate on tasks, thus maintaining a cohesive and responsive environment.

Accessing all these features will bring you closer to what you’ve dreamt of– smooth pharmaceutical sales operations. However, for that, you need to replace your mundane with automated tasks. So, are you ready to take the ride that will drop your operations exactly where they belong– at the peak of efficiency and success? Get in touch and start using TrackoField for free.

You will see how the software can help you create employees’ job schedules, enable ad-hoc task allocation, assess employees’ productivity, and do more. Automate the way you track, manage, and monitor your pharmaceutical sales team and overcome all challenges efficiently.