By Henry Gazay - CEO Medimix International
Who do you want as your sales rep? A Hunter or a Farmer?
Everybody has heard of the traditional division of the sales force into “hunters” or farmers”. We have bought into the belief that some people as “hunters” go after the wins even if it only brings short term results, while others, who are “farmers” and not as aggressive, can accept to maintain the status-quo and to sow their seeds of information with the hope of reaping future harvests. So who is the best for pharma and medical device manufacturers?
It’s more complicated than that!
When segmenting its sales reps, pharma is the exception to the rule and needs to be much more granular in how it classifies them. The process is complicated by the fact that the pharma field force is not “selling” per se, and the act of buying is not made at the moment of presentation. So for these reps, there is no immediate pressure to close and some can get away with just presenting and moving on. Others really enjoy building the customer relation and acting in a consultative manner. Some of these will also be good at the follow-up, understanding the markets and building ongoing relations, to make sure physicians promote the right drug to the right patient.
In the current context where management faces a lot of pressure to optimize sales, there needs to be a better categorization of the sales force and identification by a more detailed breakdown of sales styles.
NOT TWO BUT FOUR SALES TYPES
Based on cumulative interviews from 40,000 sales reps, Medimix promotes a model able to classify any sales force into not two but four types of selling styles or attitudes, represented in the image below.
By asking 60-70 questions of each rep, this very robust model plots each member of the sales force along two axes: their Selling Orientation or interest in selling and their Client Orientation (i.e., the reps interest in the physician). The four selling profiles obtained are classified as ‘seller’, ‘professional’, ‘presenter’ and ‘relational’.”
Benchmarking – The Best and the Worst
The sales people who bring the most to the table are the ‘Professionals’, so the ideal is to have the largest of your sale staff in the upper right quadrant. The actual number will vary by company, but benchmarks show that as a best practice we have seen up to 55% classifying as Professionals, or the ones who are and will continue to be your best producers.

On the other end of the spectrum, in the worse cases up to 43% are Presenters, or people who are not productive and either should be retrained or reallocated.
What Does It Mean? If we consider a sales staff of 1,000 people, this would translate to 430 reps who classify as unproductive, at a yearly cost of $200,000, which represents potentially a waste of $86 million!
A CASE STUDY
In the image below, taken from an actual case study within the United States, the segmentation indicated that 18% of the sales force was unproductive (Presenters) resulting in $168 million dollars wasted in direct operational costs, along with the loss of potential sales. Furthermore, 43% of the reps were underperforming (Relationals), which meant 479 M$ unoptimized.
For the “Relationals” group, the model also indicated specific needs in training and operational flaws that hindered their overall performance.
Corrective action was taken by reallocating “presenters” to other areas of the business and using a fraction of the savings realized to train the “Relationals” and to improve operations.
This successful strategy was confirmed by a new wave of reps interviews a year after.
Are you wasting your resources? Do you know how many “Professionals” are in your sales team ? What would you want to learn from your sales force?
Would love your comments about it...