Perspective

Remote sales: Overcoming the challenges in healthcare and life sciences

Published: October 16, 2020

The year 2020 has brought new dynamics into play, especially in the sales force of healthcare and life sciences companies. Businesses are forced to adapt and rapidly change core functions without compromising efficiencies. Many organizations have transitioned to 100% or close to 100% remote working, drastically altering employee engagement and productivity. Sales reps are compelled to find new and creative ways to engage with customers and grow revenue streams. To augment such efforts, organizations should

  1. Leverage their entire Salesforce CRM investment as the common core platform that will accurately report data from the field and connect physically disparate teams
  2. Provide sales reps with a robust stack of tools to overcome any current or future challenges in the marketplace
  3. Have an agile and flexible system that is easily configurable with minimal effort to be at the forefront of innovation and an industry leader

Leverage the full capability of Salesforce

One of the first steps in improving a sales team’s productivity is to embrace a single and robust platform for all their needs. Suppose there are multiple opportunity tracking, revenue reporting, meeting scheduling, and ordering applications that are necessary to use. In that case, it will be difficult for a sales rep to stay on top of everything all the time. Errors, duplications, and redundancies are going to happen across multiple systems in addition to a significant loss of time navigating all systems. Additionally, onboarding in remote work environments becomes lengthier, depending on the number of applications employees need to be trained on.

But suppose an organization is leveraging a single platform, such as Salesforce, for all sales-related usages and more. In that case, a sales rep can utilize more time effectively selling while simultaneously increasing the accuracy of the reporting processes for a streamlined business. In a distributed working model, having accurate data is paramount to keeping team cohesion and deploying resources effectively. This data can become easily lost if it is scattered across spreadsheets, marketing systems, redundant platforms, or even individual reps. Salesforce, with its extensibility and flexibility, can be the sole and central platform that provides real-time view of the customer.

Provide sales teams with remote tools

When customer data is readily accessible, consistent, and up-to-date, the entire sales engine is a lot more powerful and effective across reps, managers, and business executives. With the new challenges that sales teams face, there are actions and tools that can enhance a seller’s effectiveness and respond to customer’s desires. One of these tools gives the ability to access and utilize the full scale of Salesforce in an offline and mobile environment. Having this ability to access the same data when connected to the organization’s network as when a seller is remote, offline, or directly visiting a customer is highly advantageous to understand the customer’s full scope and convey accurate data back to the rest of the team efficiently.

A frequent complaint negatively affecting customer satisfaction scores is having slow sales processes. Giving sellers all the tools to expedite the sales processes, even under unique challenges, can be a competitive differentiator by demonstrating the ability to adapt and deliver rapid results for your customers.

Harness innovation and agility

A third way to differentiate and improve the sales organization’s effectiveness is to have a robust and agile system that can adapt to innovations with minimal downtime during transitions. This is not necessarily a new challenge, but one that is augmented by the disparate team dynamic in the sense that sales reps rely extensively on the core applications running at all times. The ability to make alterations or customize the way an organization views data and metrics should not rely on burdensome, or solely external processes, which only delay the innovations from being adopted and utilized. To solve this, an organization should seek to start with a platform that can be easily integrated with both legacy systems and future innovations in the roadmap. This will give an organization comfort that their investments will carry them into the future as well as solve current challenges.

Conclusion: Strengthen your sales force

With a singular, dynamic platform that allows for continuous innovation, organizations can empower their sales teams to overcome any current or future hurdles in rapidly changing environments. Having a common platform improves the cohesiveness of sales teams while accurately documenting customer data. Since customers are increasingly expecting a more personalized and tailored experience, organizations need to continuously maintain real-time data that can be accessed at any point and rapidly. Equipping a sales rep with the latest tools innovations can be the singular differentiator over competition leading to winning additional business and growing revenue streams.

The Virtusa and Customertimes partnership

When Virtusa and Customertimes entered into a partnership, our primary goal was to help clients better utilize their Salesforce environment while also helping them grow revenue. By doing so, we could help our clients save costs in the short-term and navigate the future in a dynamically changing business environment. Organizations will be better suited to adapt to any future disruptions while also being agile enough to capitalize on the latest innovations to stay ahead of their competition.

Helping life science customers of all sizes optimize their Salesforce environments and, in effect, their sales organizations, is what we aim to do with our partnership. Virtusa and Customertimes are industry leaders having experience with all Salesforce-based solutions as well as deep Healthcare, Life Science, and Medical Device expertise to draw best practices from. The synergy between these two organizations drives positive transformation and end-to-end capabilities for seamless integrations and adoptions. We are determined to help customers thrive through any challenges in 2020 and beyond and continue to maximize their revenue potentials.

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