The most important sales productivity tool since the company car

Over a decade’s worth of promotion response analysis by PBE has established that at least 40% of sales calls in the pharmaceutical industry are wasted. The HITS™ Call Planning System shows a representative how to erase such inefficiencies and generate double-digit productivity increases.

The HITS™ System is the representative’s personal planning tool. They use it to determine how to:

a. Place each sales call where the calculated incremental sales are the greatest.
b. Detail the right brands in the right sequence to maximize the productivity of each separate call.
c. Sample each doctor only enough so that filled scripts are being generated faster than they are being given away.

With the HITS™ Call Planning System, representatives access mathematical models that accurately** describe each territory doctor’s prescribing dynamics for each brand on the detailing schedule. Representatives use the System to easily access these models to create the most productive call plan that can be implemented given the realities of local conditions.

Only the representative knows what daily call average is feasible in the territory. The representative knows how many days he or she will be on-territory. The representative also knows better than anyone else how frequently each individual doctor in the territory can potentially be seen.

The representative inputs this information into the HITS™ System to create a framework for the resulting call plan. The representative’s information can be updated at any time and the call plan will automatically change as a result.

*Princeton Brand Econometrics, Business Results from Maximizing Sales Call Productivity, August 2001
**Princeton Brand Econometrics, Validation Case Study, August 2001

Primary Outputs

• The OPTIMAL CALL PLAN for each doctor specifies the sequence of brand details during each separate call and the number of samples for each of the detailed brands plus any others on the list.
• The VALUE ADDED INDEX shows the percent difference in expected sales or profits from implementing the plan vs. doing no detailing and sampling during the period.
• The NEXT CALLS CAPABILITY makes it possible for the representative to see which calls to make for any given town(s) or Zip Code(s) in the territory. With this capability the representative can create daily or weekly call plans in a minute or two.
• The WHAT IFFING CAPABILITY enables the representative to see how virtually any scenario he/she inputs will impact the Value Added Index. This capability makes it possible for the representative to examine age old issues such as whether it would be worthwhile to reduce the daily call average in order to see certain doctors more frequently.

Measuring Performance and Rewarding It

The HITS™ Call Planning System can and should be used to directly link the representative’s financial performance with the company’s. The underlying doctor-level models for each territory make this linkage possible. These models produce the most exacting possible measures of a territory’s true potential and the representative’s true productivity.

The HITS™ System creates the call plan that will produce the greatest incremental sales or profits from a given level of activity. By tying the representative’s compensation directly to the production of incremental (not total) sales or profits, the System motivates the representative to both work hard and implement the HITS™ Call Plan. This will maximize his or her bonus and the company’s bottom line.