DIAGNOSIS
Developing your trainees' knowledge and communication skills is always difficult

PRESCRIPTION
E-learning can help put them in real-world situations

In my experience, your product doesn't work as well as your competitor for my patient population."

"The generic costs half the price and works just as well as your product."

"Your product requires prior authorization and costs my patients the top-tier copay."

Sales representatives face objections like this every day from physicians, nurse practitioners and pharmacists. As a pharmaceutical sales trainer, part of your job is to equip your trainees with the knowledge and communication skills to respond in ways that overcome these types of objections.

Responding to objections requires two overarching competencies. The first is knowledge – a command of the science, competitive marketplace and managed care issues impacting sales of your product. As trainers, we have many familiar solutions to choose from, in a variety of media, to provide this knowledge piece to sales representatives (e.g., workshops, text-based modules, e-learning programs, etc.)

The second competency is communication skills. Providing sales representatives with communication skills can be a bit more challenging, and the options available to effectively teach these skills are fewer than those available to teach knowledge. Conventional wisdom argues that you have to bring people together, face-to-face, if you want to teach a soft skill like effective communication. However, conventional wisdom is not always correct. At one time, conventional wisdom said the world was flat.

The world is not flat

The world is not flat. We can all agree on that, I hope. And by the time you finish reading this article, hopefully you will also agree that self-study e-learning simulations can be used to teach effective communication skills in general, and objection handling in particular. Through e-learning simulations, learners can be placed in realistic conversations with typical customers – which, after all, is what they spend most of their time doing. Graphics used to display these conversations on screen can be as simple as scripted text with still photographs of a sales representative and a customer or as complicated as videotaped scenes with accompanying audio.

Simulations typically start by having learners observe an initial exchange of dialog that culminates in a decision point, like an objection, before choosing how to respond. The way in which learners are able to respond depends on design preferences and program capabilities. One option is to have learners explore a variety of alternative response paths, effective responses and not-so-effective responses alike. Another option is for learners to follow a path based on decisions they make about what to do next. Their decisions on which responses they choose may lead them down fruitful paths, or not-so-fruitful paths, where turning back is not always an option. With either option, the program can highlight the salient characteristics of each option to make explicit the lesson to be learned from each.