The utility of Six Sigma training in the sales process improvements of other sectors encourages the utilization in the pharmaceutical industry.

Six Sigma projects for the sales and marketing departments are aimed at bringing about effectiveness in the sales process and the increase in the efficiency of the sales team.

This is important in maintaining profitability levels and providing high quality products.

Effectiveness

Effectiveness in sales is the successful closure of the sales process. This means that the aim is improving the conversion of the prospects into sales, providing them with services of value and rapidly increasing order volumes.

Salespeople plan activities based on data - and with Six Sigma being a data-based methodology for decision making and control, undertaking the sales process improvement can bring about effectiveness of sales process-related activities for pharmaceutical companies.

By using customer profiling and segmentation techniques, the sales force can target prescription volumes.

Efficiency

The efficiency of the sales process is highly important in bringing about good results for organizations. It is often found that the existing systems is taken and diagnosed for variability and non value-added activities, which leads to misinterpreting the problems facing sales operations.

It may be assumed that bringing about a change in the compensation and quotas for each salesperson would be enough to bring about improvement in the sales results. To make the sales process efficient, proper study of the approach and the product mix is required.

The prioritizing of physicians by sales potential and spending actual talk time educating on the product can become part and parcel of the sales process. Using customer information, targets can be set for segments and territory, so as to take full advantage of the information.

Sales Force Effectiveness Projects

Six Sigma training also offers more rigorous tools, such as sales force effectiveness, to improve the sales efforts. Sales support technologies are the driving factors for effectiveness.

Salespeople have to deal with many customers and have to find customers (physicians) who have high potential to prescribe their product. The effectiveness of the sales force can be measured by improving the return on investment that has diminished with increasing costs.

The sales force has to play the role of educators instead of simply being promotional agents. They have to understand market conditions by interpreting information on physician's responses to various therapies. 

In the pharmaceutical industry, there are new IT solutions that can be put to good use to handle sales and related operations. These tools can help in bringing out the data that can be used for various purposes by sales teams.

They can correlate and manage the demand and supply of the products, such that the batches are not brought out too early – which may create a problem of products expiring.

Automated systems can be used by the sales team to keep the production process updated on their requirements, and they can plan their sales initiatives accordingly.

Six Sigma training helps bring about increased sales productivity by utilizing best practices in the pharmaceutical industry, and setting benchmarks for themselves every time they undertake the sales process.