Associate Director, Commercial Training & Field Effectiveness

Role Summary

Reporting to the Sr. Director of Commercial Excellence, the Associate Director of Field Engagement and Effectiveness is responsible for gathering field insights regarding launch effectiveness requirements, developing commercial & sales training programs and delivering operational support to the customer-facing roles. This will include disease state, product/therapeutic landscape knowledge, compliance (OIG), and other commercialization processes and systems. The incumbent will need to collaborate across Medical, Marketing, Sales, Market Access, Legal, People and Culture, Regulatory, and other Partner Organizations.

Responsibilities

• Training (50% of the time)
  • Aligning to Akebia’s annual strategy for sales and marketing focus
  • Develop a sales training curriculum that motivates customer-facing personnel to achieve their goals and align with the strategy.
  • Establish a collaborative, clinical, sales focused learning environment with core principles of adult learning
  • Optimize curriculum that allows ongoing education for customer-facing teams to ensure consistency in disease state and product knowledge. (product/non-product training modules)
  • Lead and coordinate new hire onboarding and training programs for customer-facing teams.
  • Collaborate with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to create the appropriate learning content for the respective customer-facing role.
  • Direct Field Trainers who will be peer-to-peer trainers with their colleagues within the sales team.
  • Liaise with home office/field management about the development and delivery of training material.
  • Document and maintain proper records of training initiatives.
  • Collaborate with the administration of the Promotional, Medical, Legal, & Regulatory (PRC) process to identify the training requirements and the delivery of material for use.
  • Support efforts in Company meeting planning and execution, including agenda creation, workshop development, and delivery as well as overall meeting facilitation for POAs & NSMs.
  • Manage vendors and partners to produce meaningful curriculum within established scope and timeframes.
  • Perform additional responsibilities and participate in special projects as assigned.
• Field Effectiveness Insight Generation (30% of the time)
  • Work with Sales Leadership Team to review team effectiveness with the aim of identifying performance gaps and create sales tactics and/or training programs to address them.
  • Interpret sales data and KAM call information to develop appropriate training reinforcement and development plans.
  • Perform ride along with KAMs to provide feedback on promotional effectiveness, customer engagement and territory management.
  • Develop and implement KAM feedback tool to provide written feedback to KAMs to highlight performance attributes affecting promotional success.
  • Develop and manage feedback from sales organization on key initiatives
• Engagement Effectiveness Administration (20% of the time)
  • Manage Learning Management System (Akebia Learning) partnering closely with Compliance, Commercial and Human Resources
  • Participate in the implementation/deployment of technologies (Veeva CRM, Sales portal) to be used by the field force to increase efficiency, and effectiveness and determine the best way to train the team.

Qualifications

• Required: Bachelor’s degree.
• Required: 8+ years’ experience in a commercial role within a pharma or biotech company and at least 5 years in a sales/product training-focused role.
• Required: Previous experience in building a sales training continuum for a life science company.
• Required: Proficient in Microsoft Office Suite, including PowerPoint, Excel, and Word.
• Required: Proficient in sales reporting and analytics tools (e.g., Tableau), as well as CRM and Learning Management Systems (LMS).
• Required: Demonstrated experience with best-in-class means of training delivery including eLearning, self-study, assessment, audio/video, classroom, and experiential learning to ensure the sales force is trained and can deliver the attributes of our products.
• Required: Strong interpersonal, presentation and facilitation skills.
• Required: Previous field sales experience is strongly preferred.
• Required: Demonstrated success in managing numerous projects simultaneously.
• Required: Ability to challenge the thinking of an established customer facing team.
• Required: Requires 15-35% travel.

Education

• Bachelor’s degree required.