Diary of a (Legal) Drug Dealer

Top 3 Ways to Get A Physician-Customer to Switch To Your Drug

What are the Top 3 Ways to Get A Physician-Customer to Switch To Your Drug?

One of the primary challenges sales representatives have in their sales role is getting a customer who is using their competitor's product to SWITCH to using THEIR PRODUCT. Every industry, product, and niche has their own process for getting a customer to switch. I will discuss the top 3 best practices for getting a physician customer to switch to your product in the pharmaceutical sales industry.

1. Establish a relationship built on trust with your customer: Just like Rome wasn't built in a day. Neither a relationship, nor trust can be built in a day. Both these characteristics are built over time with consistency and authenticity. Get to know your customer, find out what his interests are on a personal and professional level. Learn what his kids names are, when is his birthday? How does he take his coffee? What is his favorite late afternoon snack? When you know the answers to these types of questions chances are you have built up a very strong relationship with your customer. This relationship and trust that is built over time will give you the RIGHT to ask for his business in step 3.

2. Demonstrate your product's true, not apparent superiority over the competition. So, when the physician asks you a question about your product, answer him directly. Provide fair and balanced responses, meaning don't just tell him only the positives of your product. Also (gulp) acknowledge the areas of opportunity your prodcut has as well. This may seem counter intuitive, but this will earn you respect and trust, because not many reps are willing to admit their product's area of opportunity. Thats the essence of providing a fair and balanced presentation. Your customer will respect you more for it and will be more likely to switch to using your product over the competition.

3. Ask for the business! After you have followed step 1 and 2 consistently over a period time. You will have built up a solid enough relationship with your physician customer. You should be a trusted advisor at this point. You have now earned the right to ask the physician customer for the sale. Your close should sound something like this "So Doctor, I have been calling on you weekly for the past 8 weeks and discussing the benefits of XYZ drug over ABC drug for your patients suffering with ADD, you have mentioned to me several tumes that the clinical trial data for XYZ demonstrates clearly superior efficacy to ABC drug in patients with ADD, so based on this superior efficacy, for the next patient who you see that is on ABC drug, will you switch them from ABC drug to XYZ drug?"

 

 

To other pharmaceutical reps and sales professionals who just read this article, I am eager to hear: What are the Top 3 Ways You MOTIVATE Your Customers to Switch To Your Product???