There are multiple ways a great LMS can assist the pharmaceutical industry. When it comes to new or even existing employees, there are many regulatory compliance issues and constant changes that an LMS can make easier.

What about a great PMS platform? There are several reasons why the right PMS platform can be extremely beneficial for the pharmaceutical industry.

Having the right PMS in place can work wonders for every level of a pharmaceutical company. This includes new and existing employees, all the way up to the management level. Let’s examine some of the most important roles a PMS platform can play in this particular industry.

How Can a PMS Help the Pharmaceutical Industry?

Why is Performance Management Important in the Pharmaceutical Industry? 

The pharmaceutical industry is an extremely regulated sector. Pharmaceutical organizations within the industry are heavily monitored for regulatory compliance by multiple organizations.

Using performance management can provide insight as to whether employees are following protocol when it comes to regulations in the industry. Failure to adhere to these regulations can spell a potential disaster for a company. These are some of the consequences of failing to follow regulatory compliance regulations:

  • Fines can be levied against a pharmaceutical organization for different violations and infractions. These fines can be incredibly expensive.
  • It’s possible for pharmaceutical organizations to lose certain licenses and privileges completely if the violations are serious enough. The loss of any license or privilege is a potential kiss of death for any organization within this industry.
  • The organization can be viewed negatively within the industry or the public eye. This can make it difficult to build relationships with vendors, future clients, and future employees.

How Can Performance Management Benefit the Pharmaceutical Industry?

In the past, performance management was seen as a once-per-year evaluation filled out by employees that didn’t garner specific information. However, by today’s standards, the data that a quality PMS platform can nail down is laser targeted and has incredible benefits for an organization.

Over the last decade, the pharmaceutical industry has seen a slowdown in terms of growth. There are several factors behind this slowdown.

  • New pricing policies have lowered profit margins for many pharmaceutical organizations.
  • New regulatory rules regarding medication formulation and development have also led to a substantial decrease in profit and growth.

Many changes have also been made regarding sales reps in the pharmaceutical industry. In the past, sales reps were able to offer certain benefits to clients that included promotional activities like cruises, paid vacations, educational conferences, and seminars.

However, the government announced a uniform code of conduct regarding these promotional activities, which led to a curb in these programs. This is one of the largest reasons for the slowdown in the growth of the industry.

Because of these slowdowns, this has made performance management that much more important. The effectiveness of these promotional activities is no longer being experienced, so the performance and productivity of sales reps are more important than ever.

Competency assessments and development must be adopted to ensure the levels of revenue needed to maintain a healthy organization. Let’s examine how these assessments and development techniques can be adopted to ensure steady profit generation for a pharmaceutical organization.

Competency Mapping and Performance Management

Creating a culture that is based on competency is the only way to ensure the future growth of a pharmaceutical organization. This is also needed to enhance skills and constantly upgrade the knowledge of current and future employees. What exactly does competency mapping accomplish?

Competencies are defined as the knowledge, skills, and behaviors that lead to high performance. When these competencies are assessed, a manager can gauge exactly where a sales rep is at as far as their ability to garner sales and revenue for the organization.

The bottom line is simple. If a sales rep isn’t competent in an area of certain products or items that must be pushed, the necessary revenue isn’t generated for an organization in that department.

This allows the higher-ups to pinpoint exactly why a sales rep isn’t achieving the expected level of success. There are essentially only two potential reasons for this lack of production. The rep either isn’t taking their position seriously, or instructors aren’t doing a good job of teaching the material. This brings us to our next point of management assessment.

Assessing Management and Instructor Performance

In any sales position, there are always team leaders or sales managers. It is the duty of the sales manager to instruct sales reps and provide them with the appropriate material to sell a product efficiently.

Using a quality PMS platform can pull data that can provide insight to upper management regarding how well managers are instructing sales reps. Polls and questionnaires can also be included in the assessment to engage reps about their satisfaction with learning material.

It’s also entirely possible that in some cases, the problem lies within the LMS and not the instructor or sales rep directly.

Using a PMS Platform to Assess the Effectiveness of your LMS

LMS platforms can be used to educate sales reps on certain products and the methods involved with properly handling clients and teaching regulatory compliance.

If instructors and sales reps are putting the proper work in and following organization protocol. It’s possible that the current material isn’t being digested properly. Data provided by your PMS platform will allow you to make small changes to your LMS, or in severe cases. Scrap your current LMS platform altogether.

Takeaways

As stated previously in the article, the topic of regulatory compliance is crucial in the industry. The proper PMS platform will ensure that sales reps and other employees are efficiently following industry protocol.

Using a PMS platform to measure sales rep performance in the industry. Combined with data regarding sales and trends, can be beneficial for the growth of an organization. It’s important to have a quality PMS platform that properly measures and breaks down the appropriate data in order to implement changes that can lead to long-term growth.