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With networked sales, we can preserve “information with a high strategic value.” —Henry Visconde, CEO, Sydeco

Brazil’s pharmaceutical industry has grown increasingly sophisticated in recent years, but one area in which it has lagged behind its global counterparts is in the use of mobile computing. In fact, until a few years ago, computers were almost non-existent among the industry’s field sales forces. Henry Visconde decided to change that.

Visconde is CEO of Sydeco, the IT arm of Laboratorio Biosintetica, one of Brazil’s leading pharmaceutical companies. Historically, Laboratorio Biosintetica employed a field sales staff of 150 to sell its products to doctors and hospitals, with each salesperson making an average of 12 visits per day. The information they gained in these encounters was invaluable to the company. The problem was, it could take weeks for the salespeople’s paper records to make their way into the company’s central database.

“We needed to bring the sales force closer to the company,”
Visconde recalls. His solution: provide each salesperson with a wireless link into the company’s central network. Unfortunately, at the time, Laboratorio Biosintetica possessed none of the technical infrastructure needed to support such a change. For instance, none of the salespeople had a PC with a modem or any form of mobile computing device.

Visconde realized that, in these circumstances, if his approach were to succeed, he would have to work closely with the field sales staff in designing and implementing the proposed system. He therefore invited ten salespeople to test the company’s initial prototype. While the salespeople found the experience rewarding, they suggested a number of refinements to make the system easier to use. As a result of their comments, says Visconde, “we changed our prototype almost completely.”

The result? Within a few months, not only was the new system in place, but the salespeople had become so confident in its reliability that they had begun destroying their paper records, choosing to rely completely on the electronic versions.
Both sides gained in the process. The sales force now had a fast online link to the company’s central records—a key source of intelligence for increasing sales. And Laboratorio Biosintetica’s nearly instant access to field information gave it a huge strategic advantage in the marketplace, even while saving the company $120,000 in annual operational costs.

But the greatest gain, says Visconde, was in continuity. “Previously, when a salesperson left the company, he took the information about the history of his customer relationships with him. Now, the company has that information in a database—information with a high strategic value.”

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