I love the art and the science of selling, and have always been a student of the sales process, finding new and better ways to reach and serve customers. But I have spent most of my time over the last fifteen years building and leading sales teams and administering strategic plans and incentive compensation programs– all great and fun things. However, the adrenaline rush that comes from pulling off great sales calls is a lot more exciting!

So, if you are a VP of Sales, or even a Regional VP or Director of Sales, and haven’t made calls on your own in awhile, I highly encourage you to do so, for five reasons:

1. You will remember why you got into sales in the first place.
2. You will gain a better understanding of what your sales reps are up against and how you can help them.
3. You will experience the thrill of performing well under pressure– it’s such a kick!
4. You will help your company grow by making some sales of your own.
5. Most importantly, you will inspire your team to sell more as they see that you’ve got what it takes.

I wish you much success in 2012. Go make some sales calls– you will be so glad that you did!

Bill Cook
VP Sales
BioPlus Specialty Pharmacy

For the first time ever, gene therapy successfully treated hemophilia B and even allowed some patients to give up their regular injections of clotting factor altogether. This landmark study spearheaded by researchers from the University College London and the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis injected six hemophilia B patients with a virus that expressed the blood clotting factor missing in hemophilia B.

Why does this study have so many doctors and their hemophilia patients excited? Because it’s the first to show (in actual people, not just lab animals) that gene therapy can bring about long-term expression of a blood protein in a large enough amount that treatment is no longer needed. Gene therapy uses a virus to replace a person’s defective copies of genes with an intact version. If additional research confirms the safety and efficacy of this gene therapy for hemophilia B, then prophylactic injections of clotting factor – which are incredibly expensive and burdensome to the patient – could be a thing of the past.

Hemophilia B, which is also known as Christmas disease, is the second most common type of hemophilia. In hemophilia B, there is a deficiency in clotting factor IX, which results in longer bleeding time, spontaneous bleeding, and joint damage from internal bleeding. One in 20,000 to 34,500 males worldwide have hemophilia B.

In this current study, just one injection of an adenovirus-associated virus vector that expresses clotting factor IX was able to treat patients for more than a year. Each of the patients in this study expressed clotting factor for more than six months and every patient’s prophylactic need for clotting factor was totally eliminated or at least reduced.

Imagine: our patients at BioPlus Specialty Pharmacy with severe hemophilia B may get three injections a week (that’s 156 needle sticks per year!) of clotting factor and if this gene therapy gets FDA approval, those patients could get the same level of treatment from a single injection each year. Who wouldn’t want to trade in 156 jabs for just one shot?

Patient quality of life could certainly improve, but how about we sweeten the pot with some cost savings to the health care system?

In the U.S., just one hemophilia B patient can incur a lifetime treatment cost of more than $20 million, since each year of on-demand therapy with clotting factor injection rings in at about $150,000 and it’s twice that per year for people who require regular prophylactic injections. Meanwhile, this gene therapy injection runs just $30,000 per patient, which obviously represents significant cost savings for payers and patients alike.

It can’t all be good news, though, can it? Unfortunately, the hazards of this gene therapy are not completely clear. One patient in this trial experienced rising liver enzyme levels (about five times the upper limit of normal) two months after getting the gene therapy. Prednisolone therapy normalized this person’s liver enzymes.

Certainly we need more studies about gene therapy and hemophilia under our belt, especially studies showing long-term outcome results. With this necessary scientific process, it will be years before hemophilia B patients can remove infusion from their to-do list.

In the meantime, there are many questions that remain unanswered in regards to gene therapy and hemophilia, including whether it can work with other types of hemophilia which have different sized clotting proteins (gene therapy may not be feasible with larger molecules). Nonetheless, this current study – which was published last month, in December – certainly brought the hope of Christmas to thousands of hemophilia patients.

Stephen C Vogt, PharmD
President and CEO
BioPlus SP

www.bioplusrx.com

Yesterday, I confirmed this when I went to see a clinical director to drop off a friend’s resume’. The director commented on an email that I had copied all company managers on. The subject line of the email was, “News from the Front Lines”, and highlighted last week’s sales and business development activities and gave specific direction to our outside sales team on what to do during this typically “slow” week in between the holidays. The clinical director commented that he liked the email and the direction I gave, and that he had “no idea” what it was like for the sales team and that the email helped him to understand not only what they do, but what I do to push and encourage them to stay at when others are taking time off.

So, take the time to communicate what you are doing and why. Here are the benefits:

1. Disclosure will build understanding and trust. Your peers in other departments will have a better idea of what sales and sales management is all about. If you think about it, selling is really just a transfer of trust anyway, so why not build trust and respect with other managers? They will appreciate it.

2. Senior management will know what you and your team are doing. I cannot stress this enough. You know from your days as a sales representative that you must be proactive to build relationships, and it’s no different when you are a sales manager. One of your jobs is to make sure that those leading the company have the opportunity to see firsthand what you are up to, should they choose to. Reports are one thing, and they can get their hands on all kinds of reports, but it’s far better to show your stuff by citing actual occurrences and your specific direction to your team.

3. Organizational culture will bend towards being sales driven. The more every department head and senior leader knows what’s going on in sales the more likely the company will have a sales driven culture. Most health care companies are operationally driven, and sadly, the sales team takes a back seat to operations. Company cultures in these organizations tend to have what I call “operational inertia”, a tendency to avoid risk and to keep old processes in place because “that’s the way we do things”. Opening up a better understanding of the sales effort helps to break down processes that are not customer friendly.

4. Sales reps will pay more attention to what they are accomplishing. For competitive types like reps, there is nothing like seeing one of your calls in an email that company leaders are reading, or seeing another rep getting kudos for doing something well. This drives friendly competition and spurs reps on to find a big win for the next email that goes out.

So, share what’s going on and what you doing to direct your team. The benefits are worth the effort. Have a great New 2012!

Bill Cook
Vice President, Sales
BioPlus Specialty Pharmacy

The poem is called “Do it Anyway” and was written by Kent
M. Keith as “Paradoxical Commandments“.  It was promoted by Mother
Teresa and is known as Mother Teresa’s “Do it Anyway” poem.

Do it Anyway -
An Inspiring Poem by Mother Teresa

People are often unreasonable, illogical and self
centered;

Forgive them anyway.

If you are kind, people may
accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;

Be kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true
enemies;

Succeed anyway.

If you are honest and
frank, people may cheat you;

Be honest and frank
anyway.

What you spend years building, someone could destroy
overnight;

           Build anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness, they may be
jealous;

Be happy anyway.

The good you do today, people
will often forget tomorrow;
 
Do good anyway.

Give
the world the best you have, and it may never be enough;

Give the
world the best you’ve got anyway.

You see, in the final analysis,
it is between you and your God;

It was never between you and them
anyway.

The Pilgrims made seven times more graves than huts. No Americans have been more
impoverished than these who, nevertheless, set aside a day of thanksgiving.
~H.U. Westermayer

If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, “thank you,” that
would suffice. ~Meister Eckhart

Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence. ~Erma Bombeck

Bill Cook

Here’s what happened: my wife and I walked from Union Station to Washington Square to grab breakfast at Mama’s, a fantastic restaurant by the way, with a line of people down the sidewalk each day waiting to get in.  As we walked toward the end of the line, a young boy, about ten years old, raced by us and took a spot in line right in front of us.  At first we were a bit surprised, and then annoyed when his four other family members, mom and dad included, sauntered up next to him.  To top it off, this young boy’s father leaned down and said, “good job, son!”

My wife and I really did not know what to say.  We looked at each other and shook our heads.  We would never dream of teaching our children manners like this.  But, perhaps we are just old-fashioned.  Once we got into the restaurant and were eating our food, we met a nice couple with two young children.  We relayed the story to them, and they actually admitted to doing the same thing!

So, please comment about this.   What do you think?  Should parents teach their children to cut in line?  Should they congratulate them for doing a “good job” when they do?  Do manners matter at all anymore, and aren’t they learned from mom and dad?

Bill Cook

Arthur Miller’s Death Of A Salesman has been one of my personal favorite plays for years.  The tragic figure of Willy Loman has always been inspiring to me in an “anti-hero” sort of way.  Someone as sharp as me can easily spot Willy’s weaknesses and flaws of course, and avoid them!

Then I read Have We Been Witnessing The Death Of Professional Selling? on Jonathan Farrington’s blog.  He and I exchanged perspectives, and now I’ve got this “Death Of All Sales Reps” theme banging around in my head.  The more I think about it, the more I become certain that sales as we know it is about disappear – evaporate – go the way of the dodo bird.  And it’s going to happen in the not too distant future.  Like over the next three to five years.

While the examples in Jonathan’s post refer to items toward the commodity end of the scale and are B2C, it doesn’t take much imagination to see the trend.  (…and trends tend to pick up a lot of speed quickly!)  Ten years ago not one of the transactions described would have been possible.  More and more stuff can purchased online every day.  You could easily add 10 or 20 examples of your own.  The B2B examples are pretty easy to dream up aren’t they?  (Assuming of course you’re willing to take your head out of the sand!)

Want to scare yourself?  Take thirty minutes.  Think about your biggest, best customer and begin to list all the products and services they buy.  Put a check-mark next to each item that could potentially be intelligently purchased with nothing more than information made available on the internet.  It’s not the least bit outlandish to check virtually every item.  Especially if you consider the use of not only text, but also images, audio and video.

Right now, I see only two intelligent paths for sales professionals who intend to survive and thrive to pursue.  (The best and brightest will pursue both!)

• Become a trusted, respected (albeit honorary) member of the customer’s senior management team
• Create, maintain and continuously improve an electronic version of yourself, an “e-Rep” (i.e., Get out in front of the inevitable trend.)

To achieve the first, executive-class strategic planning, leadership, financial, communications, political and analytical skills are required.  Most times a lot of practical business experience will also be a prerequisite.  It’s one heck of a tall order; and one that to a significant extent leaves younger folks out in the cold.  Ouch!  I won’t go so far as to say that a formal MBA will needed, but MBA-level knowledge and a commitment to ravenous, continuous learning are different stories.

Achieving the second is easier, but entails development of a whole range of non-traditional talents.  Writing heads the list.  (Writing skills, at least in the US, are generally abysmal.)  “King Writing” is followed closely by the ability to very succinctly articulate extremely highly customized value propositions not only in written form, but also in recorded audio and video.  Obviously, audio and video production skills (including talk radio style interviewing skills)  will be essential, along with the information systems savvy to publish it all.  That in turn implies a deep understanding of blogs and the growing range of social media tools.

Too extreme a view?  I don’t think so.  What do you think?

Thanks again, Todd.  Don’t forget to check out his blog, and please feel free to comment!

Bill Cook

Posted by Dr. Stephen Vogt ⋅ October 17, 2011 ⋅

Sales Training Self Assessment

Rate yourself on the following questions by writing a number between 1 and 10 after each one. A 10 is the highest score, indicating that you are really strong in that area, or that you strongly agree with the question.

Sales Planning and Organization

1.  I am comfortable creating a territory business plan
2.  I currently work my plan and revise it periodically
3.  I know how to organize my time and resources to maximize selling time
4.  I am able to make the required number of calls to be successful

Sales Skills

1.  I understand our company’s sales process
2.  I know how to move a customer through our process
3.  I have a methodology that I use to be successful in sales
4.  I know how to handle objections and have a process for handling them
5.  I know how to listen well and to ask good questions
6.  I know when to close, and never forget to do so

Sales Knowledge

1.  I know our products and services, and can speak fluently about them
2.  I know the customers we serve and the needs they have that we meet
3.  I know the marketplace in my territory and generally
4.  I know our company well and our unique value proposition
5.  I know the competition in my area as well as related partners

Sales Attitude

1.  I really enjoy what I do and am generally very enthusiastic
2.  I get along with my peers and coworkers
3.  I like my company and strongly believe in what we do
4.  I enjoy the challenge of growing the business in my territory
5.  I handle the inevitable service issues in a positive manner

Bonus Question

My sales results are consistent with the scores I gave myself above

Let me know how this helps your team!  Bill

Bill Cook

Vice President, Sales

BioPlus Specialty Pharmacy

407-697-2709

http://www.bioplusrx.com