First of all, why should we need this “cost per call” information or estimation? No matter you use this information to estimate your brand’s education efforts, budget, formulating manpower deployment or evaluating if your company should invest in Multi-Channel Marketing (MCM) approaches, this piece of information governs all these decisions.
To formulate an appropriate answer, a few assumptions have to be made:
First, we are talking about medical sales representatives from Multi-National Company (MNC)
- Annual investment for a medical sales representative=RMB360K
- Each representative makes 5 deep calls and 10 light calls on each field working day
- 5 light calls are equivalent to 1 deep call in terms of time spent
- 200 field working days per representative a year
- The estimation is based on the cost per representative per day divided by the number of calls he/she made.
Here comes the calculation:
Each light call cost =(RMB360,000/200)/(10+(5x5))
= RMB51
Each deep call cost =(RMB360,000/200)/(5+(10/5))
= RMB257
So, you got the base case now, you may further figure out the amount of investment in representative calls needed to make a difference in your customers’ perception and behavior. Your channel productivity can also be figured out once you got your revenue data. The same approach applies to other channels such as email, WeChat and meetings as well. Finding a quantitative way to make calculated guess or solution is always a delightful experience as you can let the fact speaks for itself.
