I'm a sales person in a very niche business unit of a midsize company. I have connections to layers right below the C suite.
The C suite, Marketing and Sales VPs are currently experimenting with marketing taking over some role of sales. They are conducting a large amount of virtual programs with known KOLs with very tepid results. We had a live video presentation in a disease state that has about 7000 specialists last week and only 180 attended.
A few weeks before that we had another virtual program, and marketing sent out 13 emails to providers to build attendance over a 3 week period. Attendance was reasonable, but not spectacular and the amount of spam sent to providers did quite a bit of damage.
So in my business, which is hospital based, we are conducting as many zooms as we can but almost no reps anywhere in the country are doing live in hospital meetings.
The thing is I could manage 2 territories virtually or by zoom because window and airport time is zero, but my business is super niche (15 reps in the US) and connections make a huge difference. The VPs fired a rep a few months back before Covid and the rep they replaced this person with is dead last.....dead last...and 14% to goal for Q2.....has no connections.
In a niche role like mine, relationships matter, so they are basically paying for my connections from the pre-covid world.
I started in primary care 20 years ago. I imagine there will be massive changes in those roles, especially in the 'me too' categories. Contracting will take over. I have a bunch of friends in the business who have been going into non-hospital based clinics lately and not a single one has seen a provider. All closed.
I think this will change the business. The C suite will experiment and cut some territories and compare the sales performance of the non covered territories with the covered territories. If the covered territory more than pays for itself then sales will still be key, if not changes will occur.
Basically...it's TBD by drug, territory, company, stage of the drug in it's life cycle ect.....but yes, for sure substantial changes are coming.......
