Sales and Marketing Management Magazine
May 1, 2005
by Sara Calabro

Excerpts:


“When AmeriSource Health Corporation and Bergen Brunswig Corporation merged in August 2001, the combined entity, AmerisourceBergen, faced the task of making sure all customers stayed satisfied. So executives at the Valley Forge, Pennsylvania-based pharmaceutical distribution company urged the sales force to use relationship reviews.

But the salespeople felt overwhelmed by the process of building presentations for these reviews, because getting client information required going through the company’s data warehouse which meant a 24-hour lag in obtaining it.

Last November, the company rolled out E-Business Reviews, which allow AmerisourceBergen reps to create PowerPoint presentations with client-specific data in no time.

E-Business Reviews are available through Sales Asset Manager, a proprietary online platform developed by The SAVO Group, a sales and marketing consulting firm based in Chicago. Now, AmerisourceBergen’s 400 salespeople can request a predesigned relationship review for a client, and within minutes, they are e-mailed a custom presentation.

‘Instead of spending time building slides, salespeople want to talk about what they see when they look at the data,’ says John Aiello, managing director for The SAVO Group. ‘Automating relationship reviews allows salespeople to do what they do best.’

When the process is easier, salespeople are more likely to perform relationship reviews. At AmerisourceBergen, fondness for performing relationship reviews with the new tool is spreading quickly. In the first month E-Business Reviews were available, about 50 AmerisourceBergen salespeople used them. The next month, usage was up to 285 reps. And compared to the number of salespeople who bothered getting data from the warehouse, usage has tripled.”