For the 9th year, CRESCOMED, with the help of its associate Vom Stein Consulting, delivered an effective Commercial Leadership workshop for 11 High Potentials of a large Swiss pharmaceutical company focused on a rare disease. The participants from all over the world spend 3 intense days to expand their toolbox and to sharpen the tools they already used. Apart from good fun, there was a lot of positive energy flowing through the group. They all committed to practice at least one learning over the coming months. Round 2 of the workshop is in October. Looking forward to seeing all the progress these Commercial Leaders have made in the meantime.

We all know how it goes: A Super Rep gets promoted to the position of first line Sales Manager. Of course, "if you know how to sell, you know how to lead a Sales team", no? (Sarcasm). This is the biggest mistake many medical companies make: promoting the high potential Key Account Manager to Sales Manager without offering support. What people tend to forget is that this is a ENTIRELY DIFFERENT JOB! The skills of a successful Sales Manager may not be present at the start of this new role. This creates frustration in the newly promoted Sales Expert. On top of that, she now has her peers reporting into her! She can't make the difference anymore by selling, she needs to do it THROUGH other people. Quite challenging. It should be standard practice for companies promoting former reps to offer them a coach for 6 months. This will serve as a shock absorber. We enjoyed greatly to accompany a newly appointed Sales Manager on her new trajectory. We started by making sure the person understood her default leadership style, became very mindful about this, before she could start working on her rapport with peers, the team and her manager.

It looks like we are on a roll. We have again been invited by a Swiss pharma Client to conduct workshops based on our highly customised Commercial Leadership course. This course differs from others because: 1) we do not offer off-the-shelf training, 2) we do not offer high brow academic sessions, 3) we use a humanist, coaching philosophy, 4) we use 2 coaches who are still very close to the real life, 5) we make every single learning moment as relevant as possible by linking it to the Client's reality. A truly global programme now, we are expecting to see a lot of positive feedback in the coming months and years.

For our Client, Abbott Vascular, we developed a "Train-the-Trainer" Workshop to drive the adoption of a Therapy Portfolio Selling mindset among the sales people. Moving away from a product focus based on features & benefits, we created a framework for true value-based selling of an entire therapy offering. This consultative method not only motivates the sales team more, but will also engage prospects in a new way.