Rising Cost of Retaining a Top Pharmaceutical Sales Rep: An Illustration

Last week Mark Herbert wrote up a great article on some of the difficulties facing the medical sales community. But also how some of the strategic sales incentives programs we offer can help solve those pain points. You can read that here. And you should, especially if you’re considering an incentive program to help you retain top pharmaceutical reps.

But the article’s a little on the hefty side. If you’re anything like me, a couple pictures might help. So I had the design team draw up a quick illustration:

See what happens next!

Of course, the full article is just slightly more detailed than that. But some of the key takeaways include:

• Good medical sales reps are in low supply and extremely high demand.
• Losing one of these reps is super costly for a sales organization.
• The cost of replacement is twice the cost of salary.
• Salespeople display more commitment for managers and directors they see as “emotionally intelligent.” More or less, that means leadership who make their medical sales reps feel valued and who are empathetic to the kinds of difficulties sales reps face.
• Strategic use of travel and reward-based incentives can be used as a tool to strengthen employee relationships and retain top talent.
• Reward-based incentives have a greater emotional impact than cash commission. (I already wrote about that in-depth here.)
• Incentive Solutions has great in-house tech to back it up! Of course, if you’ve ever worked with Incentive Solutions in the past or read about us, you already knew that.

But I think the most exciting part of the article is where Mark Herbert talks about Incentive Solutions’ commitment to making a bigger impact and adding additional partners in the pharmaceutical and medical device sales industries. This is something that he, Nichole Gunn, and I’ve been talking about for a long time. It’s something that we’ve worked on extensively.

We’re also excited to implement some of the talent retention strategies we’ve developed specifically for the pain points holding pharmaceutical sales companies back.

But if I keep going, I’m going to end up with an article as long as Mark’s. So check it out, and if you’re a manager or director who wants to talk strategy, you know where to find us!

Keep an eye on our blog for the latest developments.

Signing off,

Luke Kreitner

VP of Sales
Incentive Solutions