Is Pfizer Signalling an End to the Sales Arms Race?
Pharma’s Cutting Edge
Vol. 3 Number 2 - February 2005
Is Pfizer Signalling an End to the Sales Arms Race?
Dr. Smith, a GP, has had a busy day, caring for 25 office patients after completing morning rounds at the hospital. Now as the day winds to an end, Dr. Smith looks forward to having a couple of relaxed conversations with two of his favorite pharmaceutical sales representatives.
This description of a typical day in the life of a private practice U.S. GP is far from today’s reality, where busy Dr. Smith perhaps allows one or two minutes to speak with a sales representative he barely knows in between patient visits. The representative just has time to introduce the drug(s) he/she represents and drop off some samples.
This more realistic description is also overly rosy, as it does not account for the increasingly high hurdles to getting an appointment and being granted permission to sample.
The forces propelling the recent evolution (devolution?) of the pharmaceutical sales representative-doctor relationship are fairly obvious—both parties are caught in the middle of an all-out sales arms race. Manufacturers know that face time with doctors and sampling make a difference in prescribing. Until very recently, they also once believed that more is necessarily better.
As the industry consolidated, sales forces grew and redundancy of territory coverage became the norm. No longer would Dr. Smith sees a single representative selling a major product, he would see five or more. Rather than building relationships and establishing trust, the majors, led by Pfizer, hoped that different reps selling the same product would prevent a backlash against any one unfavorably viewed representative, increasing the odds that a representative would get in the door to ply her wares.
A welcomed accompaniment of this redundancy strategy was that it was cheaper to train and retain sales reps who weren’t expected to become thoroughly versed in their therapeutic area. The bulk of today’s primary care force consists of this more flexible, less highly trained force than its predecessor of a decade past.
For the most part, big pharma has been compelled to maintain the pace of sales force growth. No company wants to be the first to break ranks and let a competitor dominate a primary care therapeutic target.
