As discussed earlier, apart from a person's incompetence there may be various other reasons for the poor performance of a territory, for example, distribution problems, questionable integrity of the team member, motivational problems (lack of interest or willingness to perform or lack of involvement) or some organisational constraints.

If the lack of required knowledge or skill is the cause of the poor performance of a territory, you may apply the appropriate method discussed in the unit ‘on-the-job training’. However, despite your putting in efforts if the team member is unable to communicate the right message or fails to handle the objections raised by doctors, the sales of a particular territory may decline. This could be due to one of the reasons given below.

• poor communication

• difficulty in speaking English

• fumbling while detailing

• getting stuck if an objection is raised

• lack of confidence inside doctor's chamber

Once again, you need to train and coach your team members to overcome these limitations. In contrast, the sales in another territory may be declining because of some serious family problem a team member is encountering. Questionable integrity, or motivational problems could cause poor performance too. These issues can only be addressed through counselling. In order to conduct a proper counselling, you must know the exact reason for the poor performance of the territory. In addition, there may be other issues related to the personality of the team member which need to be addressed through a counselling session.

While writing my book, Why My Horse Doesn't Drink, I interviewed a number of managers and their team members. The objective was to find out the reasons why these people were dissatisfied, ultimately resulting in their leaving the organisations. One of the reasons given by most of the respondents was that if the role they are playing in the organisation no longer offers them any challenges or excitement, it leaves them dissatisfied. Another common reason given was the behaviour and incompetence of their immediate superiors.

The root cause for both the problems is one, that is, the manager's insensitivity towards their team members. This makes people feel that someone is using them rather than helping them develop. This also gives rise to a feeling in them of being manipulated and undervalued. Consequently it brings down their productivity.

Here is a strategy to utilise your team members' productively.

Getting Along

The first and foremost prerequisite to keep a person productive is to get along with him. More often than not, people do not get along because they do not agree on certain issues that may or may not be related to the job. Getting along does not mean always agreeing to what the other person feels or expects from you. Getting along is to value each other's opinions. Therefore, it will be appropriate for you to find out as to what might irritate your team member. At the same time, express explicitly to them what might annoy you.

Ideally, no territory should be vacant. However, vacancies do exist due to the high attrition of sales personnel. People keep on changing organisations due to restlessness, job dissatisfaction and various other reasons. The young generation tends to find security in their own abilities. They are more loyal to themselves than to the organisation. Today, for career growth people opt for a change of job or organisation instead of hard work. Increased availability of jobs due to the opening of speciality divisions by most of the organisation is one of the important reasons for the high attrition rate. Mobility is another problem; many a time, people leave the organisation if they are relocated. Because of these reasons one or more of your territories may remain vacant.

Under these circumstances, you have to become proactive. Do not wait for a territory to be vacated before searching for a replacement. Be on the lookout for good prospective candidates in each territory. This issue will be discussed in detail in the next section on Recruitment.

Remember that the management of a vacant territory is one of your important key result areas. Therefore, till a suitable replacement is selected, you need to maintain the sales of the vacant territory.

In order to do that, ensure the regular coverage of all the key or VIP doctors of the vacant territory by you or by one of your team members.

Meetings are a means of exchanging ideas, views, feedback and strategies. They are also the meeting ground for the field force and the management representatives, that is, you, the employees of the Head Office (members of the Product Management Team), the Zonal Office, and the Regional Office. As Field Manager, you are the most important representative of your team. To share the company's viewpoint, strategies, to review performance or to get important feedback, you need to conduct various meetings. In addition to these meetings you will also be conducting the doctors' group meetings or symposia. Therefore, organising and conducting successful meetings is an important responsibility of the Field Manager.

The strength of these meetings will range from two or three persons of a pool territory to six or eight people of your full area. Remember that the success of such meetings depends upon how your team members participate in them. Do they do it out of compulsion or do they enjoy your company and that of the other members? Hence, in order to have meaningful discussions during these meetings, create an environment wherein every team member contributes freely without any hesitation.

There are various objectives for conducting a meeting, such as:

• to review the promotional plan of the last quarter or cycle and plan for the next quarter or cycle

• to discuss the performance (rupee-wise and product-wise) against targets and objectives for the year-to-date (YTD) period

• […]

Performance and action go hand-in-hand: performance is the result, or the outcome, of actions directed toward a specific task. As a Field Manager, you are ultimately responsible for the performance of each of your team members. Performance management is not just a periodic review to make sure that people are doing what they are supposed to do. It begins the moment you communicate the specific job expectations to your team members. It continues in the form of feedback, which you need to give regularly, clearly, and as objectively as possible. The process will be completed only if you conduct periodic, one-to-one sessions with individual team members, where you should:

• set sales expectations

• review performance

• provide solutions to some of the problems

• discuss rewards and career development opportunities.

Performance management means investing time and effort to ensure that each of your team members is working to his optimum potential. Performance management involves various processes, such as:

• objective setting and action planning

• monitoring

• counselling

• appraisal

Each of this calls upon your skills of observation and communication. If you follow these steps correctly, you will ensure a high level of productivity from each of your team members. To facilitate a better understanding of these processes, we will cover them one by one.

We have discussed that the most important role of a Field Manager is to lead a team towards the achievment of planned objectives.

A newly appointed MR is an important asset for the whole organisation. The induction is like the arrival of a new baby in your home. Developing and grooming this vital human resource is one of your most important responsibilities. You are the guide, counsellor and friend for him. The newly recruited team member needs your support and confidence. Only the Right Observation And Direction will lead him towards the ROAD to success. To a great extent his success depends upon how you induct him into the field.

During the training programme at the Head Office, care should be taken to impart all the basic information your team member may look for, such as the organisation's history, plants or facilities and the basic organisational philosophy. Apart from these details, information would also be given about his responsibility towards the organisation, the organisation's responsibility towards him, his working conditions, requirements, benefits, personnel policies, procedures, rules etc. Your role, however, is much more important. You are the one who has to ensure that the newly recruited team member becomes integrated functionally and socially into your organisation and its environment as soon as possible. This will instil confidence and pride in your team member, and make him feel he is a part of the organisation.

To do this in an organised and structured manner, ensure that you go on fieldwork for a minimum of six days with a team member who has not attended the training program at the Head Office.

Performance evaluation is a continuous process. You need to do it at different intervals during the year. Depending on your organisation's policy it should be conducted on a quarterly or annual basis. Although the procedure may be to fill this report quarterly or annually, you need to evaluate your team members on a monthly basis. These monthly evaluations allow you to measure each person's sales and activities against the projections set jointly in the planning stage.

The quarterly and annual performance appraisal sessions will provide you with an opportunity to review what happened during the previous quarter year and plan for what needs to be done in the subsequent period. Though, performance appraisal is an important tool for salary revision its scope is much wider. Performance appraisal provides you with an opportunity to evaluate, coach and train your team members on a regular basis, on objective parameters.

The objectives of the performance appraisal session are:

• the assessment of sales performances of the team members against the targets

• the assessment of the implementation of the activities of the team members against the standards set in the beginning of the period

• the assessment of the skills (related to sales, planning etc.) of the team members based on the observations made during joint fieldwork

• the assessment of the knowledge (with regard to product and competition) based on the observations made during joint fieldwork

The success of a plan depends on its implementation. To ensure that the action plan designed is implemented successfully, you need to undertake 'joint fieldwork’ During joint fieldwork, you may have to demonstrate how to implement the actions suggested by you, for example, how to effectively communicate with the doctor and highlight a particular point. You need to carry out the joint fieldwork every month. It gives you an excellent opportunity to:

• help your team members perform better

• assess the level of implementation of strategies

• establish your leadership

• train and develop their professional competence

• assess their activities

• assess the movement of different products

• assess the availability of different products

• develop rapport with key customers

• find out about your competitors' activities

• assess sales trends in different markets

You need to observe the number of times you conduct joint fieldwork to help your team member. Field Managers mostly check what is not being done or done wrongly instead of observing what is done correctly. So first ask yourself the following questions:

• What is your attitude towards joint fieldwork?

• How often do you insist on the implementation of strategies?

• How well are you accepted as a leader?

• How much emphasis do you give on ‘on-the-job training’?

• Do you assess the movement of different products, especially new and key products, during your visit?

• […]

As mentioned earlier, 80% of the sales are contributed by 20% of the customers, and the remaining 80% customers contribute to just 20% of any territory's sales. While updating the list of doctors, your team members should identify the 20% customers. The performance of a territory largely depends upon how well your team members can persuade these doctors to generate prescriptions.

Advantages of Meeting VIP Doctors

To ensure continuous achievement of objectives

Once the VIP doctors of any territory start extending their support, the achievement of objectives will never be a problem. These VIP doctors alone will complete 80% of the task.

To cash in on trendsetters

Being the most important doctors of the territory these doctors would have a good reputation not only in the local towns but also in the nearby areas. Once they start prescribing the product/s, the other doctors of these areas too will follow his prescriptions. This will give additional opportunities for business.

To ensure the optimum utilisation of resources

You know already that 80% of sales come from 20% of customers. If this 20% of doctors are given special attention in terms of time, efforts and inputs, it will be reciprocated by an increased support from them.

To ensure continuous support

In case one of your team members is promoted or transferred, till the time a new person is appointed these VIP doctors (if covered regularly in the past) may sustain the sales of the territory at a particular level.

The pharmaceutical industry across the globe is undergoing a metamorphosis. Mergers and acquisitions have become the order of the day. The competition is becoming fiercer day by day in India as well. In order to stay ahead, pharmaceutical organisations are adopting all possible methods that can help them sustain their operations. Thus, in the present-day industry, a Field Manager's job is not easy. A Field Manager is the extended arm of the management. He is the one who will have direct exposure to all the challenges faced by the industry. And these challenges are by no means insignificant.

In order to protect their business interests, post-2005, most Indian organisations are launching new divisions and new products. This has heightened the competition in the market. The number of medical representatives meeting a particular doctor or a chemist has increased considerably. Consequently, the time available with a medical representative to promote his products to a doctor or to take information from a chemist has reduced. This has put pressure not only on the medical representatives, but also on doctors and chemists. Doctors have to remember the names of more products while chemists have to stock them. The availability of ‘generics’ at an economical price has worsened the situation. Above all, the advent of new organisations, the BPOs (business process outsourcing) and ITeS (information technology enabled services), as well as the launching of new divisions by pharmaceutical organisations have increased the attrition rate of the field force.

A Carnival of Reading

The Seventh International Training Programme in English (ITP 7) at CIEFL was inaugurated on 15 January 2001. Dubbed “English for Professionals,” one of the thrusts of this twelve-week course was on access to information: i.e. learning to use resources from a variety of media in order to engage in lifelong learning. A subgroup of twentyfour learners from a variety of countries was identified as being at the Advanced (as opposed to the Basic or Intermediate) level of proficiency in English. I met with this group three times a week for six weeks, for an hour a day on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays, to develop their reading skills in intensive reading (as opposed to extensive reading).

My group included learners from Cuba, Guyana, the Ivory Coast, Kazakhstan, Laos, Oman, Panama, Syria, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam. The interests of these professionals ranged from foreign affairs through law, mathematics and computers to language, culture and tourism. The heterogeneity of the group was not limited to the variety of their interests and backgrounds. They differed as well in their classroom interaction styles: the Hispanics tended to be vocal and interactive; the Asians preferred to work individually with bilingual dictionaries. I therefore decided to introduce an authentic text with a different theme each time for each hour of class.

Scope

This study arose from the belief that successful second language learning can result when the power to choose their learning materials is vested in the learners themselves. It reports longitudinal and crosssectional data concerning the English reading choices of second language learners at various stages of proficiency. The longitudinal data pertain to fifteen children, fourteen girls and a boy, all of them first generation learners who continued to work for a wage while studying. (Two children were at the school-leaving stage, three at the class VII stage, and the rest at various stages between beginner and class VII stages, during the study. Since these are not mainstream learners, their age profiles do not match the typical values for these classes.) The cross-sectional data are from a comparison group of adult foreign language learners of English with non-Indian languages as their L1.

This book has been envisioned primarily as a narrative of these learners' learning. The methodology is mainly that of the diary and the case study. In this introductory chapter, however, we shall set out some of the philosophical, psychological and pedagogic motivations for the project that give rise to the narrative.

Autonomy and Authenticity in Language

Learning Language learning is currently perceived as tied in with two sets of variables, which both vest in the learner rather than in the teacher:

1. (i) motivation and attitude;

2. (ii) ‘unconscious acquisition,’ as opposed to overt, consciously controllable learning.