The second step of Personal selling process (sales cycle) is sales call planning. Salesperson (medical rep) must analyze his prospect need according to information he gathered. He may use another sources of information to avoid false assumption about prospect.
The self-confidence of medical rep increased by acquisition of knowledge so he must increase update his knowledge. Medical rep can perform sales call planning in two sub-steps:
1. Setting call’s objective
In setting the call’s objective medical rep should set an objective to sales call. Call objective is: What medical rep or sales person wants customer to do as a result of sales call.
Objective must be SMART it means Specific, Measurable, Ambitious or Attainable, Realistic, Time bound. Medical rep must put SMART objective for every sales call.
For example he needs the physician to write the promoted product in certain indication with a certain quantity during a certain period matching with customer’s potentiality and his sales relation with customer. SMART objective is not only applied in sales it applies in all strategic planning and you can also apply it in your life & career progress.
Look at the basketball player what this man wants to do in every minute of the game. He is concerned in putting the ball inside the basket of the other team, his success measured by the number of goals he will achieve in certain period of time (game time). This is a challenge to him so he tries hard to achieve his objective.
2. Planning the call.
Second step of sales call planning medical rep must detect best approach to meet the prospect that might be: personal visit and this is more common or a phone call. Salesperson must detect best time to meet the prospect. Salesperson must analyze his product benefit well and select one selling point which match with prospect needs (will solve his problem).
Salesperson analyzes the competitor’s product strength and weakness against his product to be able to compete with it during the call. Sales person also prepares visual aids which he will use in his presentation. He can anticipate possible questions and objections will arise from customer.
Many medical reps visit their customers without aim run the sales call without objective and leave them without commitments. Be careful in this step sales call planning because if you fail to plan you plan to fail.
