Number of pharmacies in Egypt has exceeded 60,000 according to latest statistics. It is very clear that the main difference among pharmacies is the way how they are managed. Pharmacies managed in an efficient way survives while pharmacies with poor management loses much of its capital. We are not defining capital here money-wise to include physical assets only; the pharmacy’s capital also includes reputabation and human resources.
Upper medic presents five important tips on how to manage your pharmacy in a different positive way.
1. Never compete with price!
Read also: Integration between Marketing and Sales forces
When you are trying to USPs (Unique Selling Prepositions) in order to be differentiated among your competitors, you may think initially about pricing strategies! And this will actually lead to rapid results as you are presenting better prices for your audience. But you have to note that medications sales profit margin is small to be used in competition. Another drawback is the positioning of your pharmacy among your clients to be the: “Cheaper Pharmacy” that would lead to negative results as most of patients would not choose the cheaper alternative medication when it is related to his/her health. Also we should remember that medications are compulsory priced so it is unethical to increase your sales depending on decreased price offering regarding drugs.
2. Take care of your human resources
It is clear that the number of employees within a pharmacy is majorly not big, it may range from 2 to 5 personnel at small and medium sized pharmacies. However, it is very important to take care of your working force, you need to notice how do they cooperate, discover their needs and identify their problems and complaints. You also need to analyze each one individually in which he is suitable for the job or not in order to exclude him or promote him with being more responsible of more managerial duties. You will not believe how caring for your working personnel will affect the general performance of the pharmacy!
3. Do not underestimate your loyal customers
Everyone defines business growth process as the process of gaining new customers but they do forget that most of daily sales are made by your loyal repetitive customers! Underestimating your loyal customers during your pharmacy expansion campaigns would lead to a huge non compensated loss.
Always try to create different loyalty programs that would help you retaining your current customers; you can follow them up using direct phone calls, send them presents and provide them top healthcare consultations. You can use whatever tactics in order to keep your current customers loyal.
4. Welcome technology
Read also: Marketing Basics for Veterinary Institutions
Pharmacists that convenient with paper documentation methods will be afraid much of how technology is nearly surrounding our everyday lives, but technology is not emotional. You will either welcome the new technology through using and getting benefited from or refuse it and you will lose much!
Welcome the new technological tools and do not be ever afraid of using it in pharmacy’s different managerial tasks including marketing, recruiting and others.
5. Watch, listen, analyze and change!
Having an active mind, opened eyes and good listening ears to your customers’ complaints would help you to analyze all of your problems and to conclude the right modifications to your path. Do not ever think that there is a best solution for all of your problems! Listening, watching, analyzing, modifying and development are continuous managerial processes for maintaining your business so do not get fed up with them!
We do believe that you can get benefitted using our smart marketing system where we focus on visual and read media production added to accurate audience targeting services that we provide to healthcare professionals using economic budgets that would fit small and medium sized pharmacies marketing budgets.
