Goal
A large pharmaceutical company had a tenured, knowledgeable oncology sales force. They wanted to launch a new product in a truly unique way in a national sales meeting workshop. The challenge: help sales professionals establish viable space for the new product in their target customer markets, sell effectively against an established competitor, stay motivated to win as a second-to-market entrant, use competitive differentiation strategies to accelerate product adoption, and understand how to effect change by enabling customers to identify unmet patient and customer needs.
Solution
Proficient Learning created 4 separate experiential environments—each centered around a distinct theme and business case study—using live activities. Each environment was designed to immerse the sales professionals in the case study’s products (both pharma and non-pharma) and create a learning opportunity that no typical training or hotel meeting room could provide.
Each environment was based on 2 competing products and addressed how the second-to-market product established itself as the dominant product (or as prominently as the first-to-market product) using specific strategies that each participant could also employ.
Each case study demonstrated how the identified strategies affected the success of the product. The sales professionals discussed and recorded how to apply the strategies to their upcoming selling environments, customizing the workshop to their own product. Each case study included strategies that could be applied to new product promotion to achieve the targeted launch objectives.
“In my 25 years of selling, I have never been in a workshop this good before!”
-Tenured Oncology Sales Representative
Outcome
- Sales professionals identified and verbalized the possibilities of various strategies to use at launch
- Created highly motivated sales force for launch of the product
- Effectively applied “non-pharma” competitive strategies to new business opportunity
- Generated high levels of interest among other client business units and provided visibility of our main contact’s successful work across the organization
