We’ve talked about active listening in the previous three entries. For the final one of February, I think that a good way to wrap up our theme is to provide practical, real-world examples of how our active listening benefits our buyers. For us at Broughton Pharmaceuticals, it’s about finding the small wins in every conversation.

What that means is that we’re always on the lookout for ways we can make our buyers’ lives easier, ways that we can add value. Yes, part of that is the product we ship and sell, our prices, our commitment to ETAs and communication throughout the shipping process. And all of that is important; what is just as important, though, is knowing how we can help our buyers while staying in the background.

The two examples here had big effects for our buyers, even though they may seem small at first.

1. A buyer of ours absolutely hates packing peanuts. We hear it in almost every conversation, “Can’t stand them!”. After our shipping team got wind of this, we made changes internally to use alternative packing materials when possible for her orders. We do our best to make sure she gets no packing peanuts at all in BP packages. And when she does, it’s better to get packing peanuts than run the risk of fragile drugs being damage or broken in transit.

2. Another buyer manages dozens of facilities, along with four warehouses. She’s been buying from Broughton Pharma for years and our reps have built a deep understanding of how product flows through her warehouses, ultimately ending up where it needs to be for patient use.

So we took it upon ourselves to add more information and attach it to her purchase orders. Here in our office we know not only the facility a PO is shipping to, but also the warehouse it needs to go to first. We use that notation and work with our shipping partner to make sure that her orders flow easily where they’re supposed to go.

That’s the key for us: not only do we do our best at the big responsibilities — working with buyers to fill needs, bridging shortages, and coordinating shipping and communicating through each step of the process — we take the small things just as seriously.

We see those wins just not as wins for us and wins for the buyer, but most importantly a win for the patient at the end.