Healthy Skepticism Library item: 11983

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Rost P.
How pharma sales reps fool the system every day.
BrandweekNRx (blog) 2007 Nov 9
http://www.brandweeknrx.com/2007/11/how-pharma-sale.html

Full text:

Today I received a very interesting letter about how pharmaceutical sales reps fool the system. Every day. Reminds me of Jamie Reidy’s book Hard Sell:

As drug reps, we have to fake about half of our calls on doctors because there are too many of us. Some kind of activity must be recorded every hour or so because our laptop entries are timestamped. Pharmaceutical companies pretend to believe these calls are real and we spend a good portion of our time fabricating them. If you try to be honest you’ll get fired.

Big pharma has taken this to a whole new level of insanity with ‘closed-loop marketing’.

In a nutshell, they’ve put all of our ‘Madison Avenue’ sales material on Tablet PCs & we’re
supposed to detail doctors with it. The laptop records the message we give physicians and
marketing thinks it can measure its effect.

“Once a rep completes a sales conversation, the data from the call that just took place is automatically updated in the sales reps CRM. The data is aggregated and can come back to marketing for us to better understand how our strategy is being implemented and what tactics are working.”

The problem is that this system is universally hated by reps as nothing more than a fancy tracking device, an ankle bracelet for drug reps. But we all play the game.

We still sit in our cars and fake calls, but now we use ‘screen taps’. Since the Tablet-PC records what page we use and how long we use it, our pretend conversations have to be faked in real time. Here’s a real life scenario:

1) Rep pulls into big office at 10:00 AM without an appointment.
2) There are 5 reps already in the parking lot and 3 in the waiting room.
3) No problem. Drive over to Starbucks for a latte, pop a CD in, crank the AC and open up your Tablet-PC.
4) Tap. Open up product introduction page. Wait 30 seconds.
5) Tap. Open up efficacy page. Wait 60 seconds.
6) Tap tap tap. Really go to town and open three graphs in a row. Wait 30 seconds.
7) Tap. Open up adverse event page (fair balance you know). Wait 15 seconds.
8) Tap. Open up summary page to close the deal. Close laptop. Wait 5 minutes because you are supposed to be walking back to your car.
9) Tap. Write up fake call notes like “Doctor loves the new sales piece and agreed to use Drug
X for Patient Y.”
10) Close laptop. Drive to next office. Rinse and repeat.
11) Company makes decisions based on fake call data.

You can find more info here: http://www.proscape.com/advantages.aspx.

And watch a video by Proscape, Microsoft and GSK on how much they love this system. BTW the rep is selling Avandia: http://www.proscape.com/media/GSKProscapeTabletCaseStudy.wmv

You just pass the Tablet-PC through the window for a signature and write up a fake call later. You may or may not see him sign it. You may or may not talk to him. He’s not going to remember who he talked to or what he signed for. He’s seeing patients every 15 minutes. Companies do audit physician signatures so not many reps are faking those.

The rule of thumb is that any signature is worth a call and a real call is worth two calls in order to keep your quota up. A lunch is worth a call on every doctor at the practice whether or not he was really there.

/End letter/

In the drug business everyone is clearly cheating everyone; pharma companies cheat the government to the tune of billions of dollars in fines and employees cheat the companies to the tune of fake calls.