The sales model nobody changed

Everything in the world has changed. Since information technology arrived, and now AI, things have changed at a speed no one predicted. The one thing that has not changed is the way Indian pharma sells and markets its medicines.

It is the same model it was seventy-five years ago, with the same hierarchy. A VP of Sales and Marketing, then a GM of Sales and Marketing, then National Sales Managers, Zonal Sales Managers, Regional Sales Managers, Area Sales Managers and, at the end of the chain, the Medical Representative. On the marketing side: GM Marketing, Group Product Managers, Brand Managers. The structure has carried on, intact, for three generations.

No one has dared to change it. Very few have even tried an experiment.

Why it hasn’t moved

Part of the reason is comfort. The model works well enough in therapy areas where a reminder and a relationship are enough to move a prescription, and there is little pressure to question something that still produces numbers.

Part of it, I believe, is talent. For a long time pharma sales and marketing in India has not attracted the sharpest minds the way technology, consulting or finance have, even at the top of organisations. And the quality of people entering pharma sales has been slipping year by year. An industry that hires the same way, trains the same way and promotes the same way will keep producing the same model.

What a second model could look like

There is a revolution under way in AI and technology. The question I keep asking is how we can use it to rethink pharma sales and marketing from the ground up, rather than bolting new tools onto an old org chart.

I don’t think the answer is to tear the old model down overnight. A more sensible path is to run two models side by side:

• The traditional model, kept running, and phased out gradually if and when the new one proves itself.
• A new model, designed from first principles and tried for the first time in India, built around what doctors and patients actually need rather than around a reporting hierarchy.

In my own corner of the market, respiratory inhalation therapy, the old model has a particular weakness: it was built to sell tablets, not to teach behaviour. I have written about that in Deep pockets, shallow breaths and The breath India keeps losing. This is the beginning of a longer argument, and I’ll come back to what the new model should look like.