Citation
(2005), "Sales partnership makes a healthy profit for Mölnlycke", Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol. 37 No. 7. https://doi.org/10.1108/ict.2005.03737gab.003
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2005, Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Sales partnership makes a healthy profit for Mölnlycke
An international health-care products company has achieved a tenfold increase in sales in the UK wound-care market, thanks to a training partnership.
Mölnlycke Healthcare (MHC), of Dunstable, Bedfordshire, had limited experience of selling and marketing its products into the home-care sector of the National Health Service. It therefore teamed up with Ashfield Healthcare Ltd, a UK pharmaceutical contract-service organisation, which recruits, trains and provides field-based staff, including medical sales representatives, for pharmaceutical and health-care companies.
Ashfield and Mölnlycke developed an induction programme, which recruited and trained a sales team of three managers and 19 salespeople in two months. Their success has seen the team expand to 33 since then. Sales trainees have an average age of 38 and only half of them have previous medical knowledge. The course covers anatomy and physiology, product knowledge, therapy and clinical data, trial data, NHS and industry knowledge, selling skills, presentation skills and territory management. The contract sales team has proved hugely successful – exceeding daily contact targets and sales targets.
Phil Cooper, MHC’s vice-president (custom sterile), said: “We have achieved all our commercial goals – this has been done and surpassed every year we have had the partnership. It is fair to say we would never have dreamed that the project, started in September 1998, would have now developed into one of the leading success stories of MHC Health Care globally. If we had laid down the objectives as per the results we would have been advised we needed to swallow a pill of reality”.
MHC UK is so pleased with the results that it has endorsed a new partnership between Ashfield and the MHC operation in the USA – where Ashfield is recruiting and training wound-care representatives in its first US contract.