Performance Management and your Commercial Team, the Barriers and Benefits for the Life Sciences Industry

Performance management can be a tough skill for life sciences organizations to master, however, when the process is crafted strategically and carefully, it easily becomes a competitive advantage.

Excelling in performance management leads to increased efficiency and effectiveness for an organization as a whole. Assessing and sharing metrics on an individual, team, and customer level increases collaboration in achieving overall business goals. Whether it be through performance reviews or field coaching, a strong performance management system will boost a life sciences organization’s overall performance and productivity for commercial teams.

Barriers to Effective Performance Management

When evaluating your team or organization’s performance management processes, it is important to keep in mind the barriers that hinder them.

First, choosing poor metrics for assessment and reporting purposes can drastically hold a team back. Metrics should promote the level of performance the company wishes to achieve, so that they are attainable and motivate your life sciences organization’s commercial team.

Second, if performance management is simply viewed as a checkbox item instead of incorporated into a long-term strategy, it gives the notion to the commercial team as a whole that continuous improvement is not necessary.

Lastly, and similarly, lack of transparency also poses a barrier to effective performance management. Without consistent performance reviews and field coaching opportunities, performance is put on the back burner, further de-prioritizing it in the eyes of the commercial team as a whole.

Performance Management is Continuous

Performance management does not mean to have your standard annual or biannual performance reviews and have it end there.

Performance management means continuously reevaluating and assessing your team’s performance to make sure those metrics align with the overall goals and objectives of the company. This is where performance reviews and field coaching come into play and are essential to the role of the senior sales leader.

According to McKinsey, in a recent study, employee productivity improved by 15 to 20 percent due to better ongoing performance conversations and the increased understanding and utilization of team coaching. In the life sciences industry, constant field coaching will help boost sales team motivation and convey the level of importance that commercial team performance is to achieving overall company goals.

Measuring Performance in Detail

Opportunities for individual performance management will help the team excel if performance is measured granularly.

Measuring at a detailed level will help identify root causes and address them sooner so they do not snowball.

For example, a root cause in a specific territory could be due to a few sales reps having barriers to access with certain physicians. If this is identified early enough, then conversations with senior management will be proactive and helpful in solving the problem. As a result, field coaching will be much more productive as well.

Effective Performance Management Systems

Having the right performance management systems in place that are easily accessible will promote continuous performance transparency.

It is important that life sciences organizations have the right tools to facilitate regular discussions about commercial team capabilities and skills and how they relate to performance metrics.

TikaMobile’s CRM and BI capabilities promote continuous improvement and ongoing conversations about individual and team performance for commercial teams. Our solutions put important insights and performance-related data at the forefront and use a Field Coaching Report Module, so senior sales leaders can coach their field teams more effectively and drill down individual performance metrics.