When you have less than a day to communicate the benefits of effective sales planning to 300 sales management employees, and Neil Armstrong threatens to steal the show, there is only one way to ensure success: hook your audience with an engaging simulation to make your message stick. This is exactly the approach that IMS took at the major internal SFE meeting of a top pharmaceutical client – with impressive results.
Client Situation
A leading international pharmaceutical company was keen to take advantage of an important internal gathering of more than 300 members of its SFE management team - ranging from national sales executives to selected first-line managers - to explore the impact of effective planning on sales results. This included examining the role of different KPIs in assessing rep performance. The message was simple enough: ‘first-line managers should plan like business owners’, but given the number of participants involved, the task would be a challenging one.
IMS Solution
While the scale of the exercise was daunting enough, the IMS consultants knew that their biggest challenge would be delivering the message effectively – managers often feel the need to prove themselves so the team was prepared for some resistance. They quickly realized that the best results would be achieved through simulation. This meant developing a simulation-based course for hundreds of managers, each with their own established view of effective first-line management. Furthermore, the consultants were allocated less than one day out of a three-day meeting to deliver the program, in a slot that immediately preceded a guest appearance by Neil Armstrong – tough competition for participants’ attention.
In spite of the challenges, the program proved to be a great success, clearly demonstrating the positive impact of this type of training initiative. Participants were required to make a series of trade-off decisions about managing a fictional region using different KPIs. They learned how to do this better through coherent planning and then had the chance to put their newfound knowledge and enhanced understanding of regional planning to the test, in a second round of simulation. With the right KPIs and planning process in place, the results they achieved showed a marked improvement.
The process generated an intense atmosphere as the teams debated strategies, explored techniques and made their decisions. This interactive approach provided the opportunity for an honest and open exchange of ideas and experience-sharing - a key benefit of running simulations – and the chance for managers to see how their own approaches stood up to the latest managerial techniques.
Tangible results
At the end of the session, 300 managers came away with a finely-tuned appreciation of regional planning and the type of KPIs that help to guide it. Their new understanding coincided perfectly with the company’s implementation of a worldwide KPI initiative. One participant reflected the sentiments of many when he described the program as “the best sales management training I have had in all my years in the industry”. As a direct result of the initiative, the company experienced a tangible improvement in business planning by field managers: to quote the company’s SFE director, “a superb outcome, both in content and delivery”. And of the fifteen elements of the three-day meeting, the simulation was rated a very close second to Neil Armstrong. Not bad for a half day exercise.