Is Field days a relevant KPI for Pharma even for the Hybrid Rep model?

Last week I posted a question on Field Days as a KPI – whether it was good or obsolete KPI?
Seems that still many at least most of the survey respondents felt that number of fielddays is still a relevant KPI for managing the sales force.

As vacation time is approaching and physical calls are somewhat returning – it might be a good time and reason to review your time off territory (ToT) process for Veeva CRM?

Link to ToT article: https://promeasure.dk/2019/08/13/tot-case-study-data-polution/

I think the discussion is much like the discussion about working from home or not? Should we track the field days or just trust that results are optimized by all by default?

The main argument as I see it to keep tracking field days or actually tracking the time spend on non-field related activities is the fact that time is the most evasive resource applied in sales. The time not utilized today cannot be recuperated tomorrow. Therefore, keeping a keen eye on what non-sales activities time is spent on becomes important.

Tracking field days is a difficult matter and 100% accuracy is probably not obtainable without invading privacy beyond the law, but what can be done is to meticulously track the time off territory for the activities we do know, such as

  - Internal meetings
  - Public holidays 
  - Vacation/personal 
  - Time off and time spend on admin activities. 

Most of these activities are well known by managers and can be tracked.

What about the “hybrid rep” and the real versus virtual world activities? For the Hybrid rep the same core truth persists, the amount and quality of the engagements made with customers, is what drives sales. With the expansion or widening of sales channels the focus on output per time unit remains equally relevant.

One can prepare and plan the best engagement ever but without execution it does not matter and the same is true for endless execution without preparation and planning. To strike a meaning full balance the engagements per time unit becomes valuable to identify outliers and to provide a reasonable level of expected activities within the sales teams.
Read How to Structure Time off Territory Data

From a managerial perspective the time required to follow up with sales teams to complete the required tracking can seem overwhelming. Changing the culture or data quality mindset is a tough task but doable. The shortcut for managing larger field forces is to provide administrative support via automation of data registration.

What can be done ?

Using the Field Day Admin app for Veeva or Salesforce.com, local admins can provide the update of records in a matter of minutes for entire sales teams. By creating company specific activities internal meetings and trainings can be updated for all attendees and personal and public holidays updated by a few clicks. This vastly improves data quality of the Field Day reporting in CRM and provides a high-quality granular data feed for your business data warehouse.