Healthy Skepticism Library item: 15459

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

Rockoff JD.
Pharma Sales Reps Often Find the Doc Won’t See Them Now
The Wall Street Journal Blog 2009 Apr 16
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2009/04/16/pharma-sales-reps-often-find-the-doc-wont-see-them-now/

Full text:

If you’ve spent a day at the Motor Vehicles Department fruitlessly waiting to get new license plates, then you have an idea of what it can be like for pharma sales reps during a chunk of their time. New figures indicate drug reps don’t get in the door to see a doctor on 13% of their visits.

The 18 million wasted sales calls each year suggest the extent of a physician backlash against pharma’s marketing push, says Jaideep Bajaj, managing director of sales and marketing consultants ZS Associates, which put together the findings released today. The cost to pharmaceutical companies of those failed calls: $2 billion a year in salaries and expenses.

For a time, drug makers were sending more and more sales reps to doctor’s offices, repeatedly pushing the benefits of products. The onslaught has met resistance, however, amid economic pressures on physicians to see more patients, patients’ concerns about industry influence and doctors’ own mounting frustrations.

ZS Associates hasn’t been tracking the success rate for rep visits for very long but it’s clear that doctor access is getting squeezed for the drug-company detailers. Drug makers – most recently Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer before that – have reacted by slashing the number of sales reps.

Bajaj tells the Health Blog that drug makers might view the extent of wasted sales visits as reason for further job cuts. (ZS Associates predicts the number of sales reps needs to drop to 75,000 from the roughly 90,000 currently.) Companies could also use the findings to fine-tune their sales calls – to try to increase the chances doctors will see their reps.

To get the results, ZS Associates analyzed the call plans and activity reports from drug makers employing 35,000 sales reps.