Healthy Skepticism Library item: 16204

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: Electronic Source

Wolfram H
Sales force - the historic error
Eyeforpharma.com 2009 Jul 30
http://social.eyeforpharma.com/blogs/hanno-wolfram/sales-force-historic-error

Full text:

Men do not stumble over mountains but over mole-hills Confucius once said and could have meant our sloppy usage of words as well. Some of these sloppily used words sometimes lead Pharma’s thoughts into terribly wrong directions. One of the words you, as an employee of pharma and their vendors, might want to think about for a few minutes is the word “sales force”.

The word “Sales Force” guided management’s decisions for the last 30 years and drove pharmaceutical industry probably into one of its most expensive errors: the monodirectional hammering of information into prescribing physicians exposing them to “selling” methodologies, executed by “sales forces”.

Pitifully language sloppiness has not been challenged very often, otherwise managers in pharma would have found out that no physician ever bought anything from pharma! That selling and buying belong together as antonyms appears to be neglected.

Following the nature of the word “sales force”, medical representatives have been put through numerous “selling skills” trainings in the past. Why did their managers send them there, if they don’t “sell” as nobody “buys” anything from them? Please note: “Buying in” is a very different expression!

No one counted the number of double visits and trainings when “negotiation skills” have been demanded from medical representatives. In this context the question arises: “What is it that they ever negotiated?” (assuming reps and their managers stay compliant with legal rules!) Many so-called “deals” closing with the sentence: “You give me your next 5 patients and I invite to …” have poisoned the climate, ruined the industry’s reputation and are subject to public prosecution in many countries.

Consequently the time of the sales force appears to be passing by. Not only pays Pharma and their employees high tribute for that sloppy usage of the word “sales force” by more than 32.000 layoffs in the past months (and I bet more to come), but physicians, who still are called “customers” have been neglected over years to a degree, that many do not want to see medical representatives anymore. NB: “A customer is someone who buys or purchases a product or service.”

Conclusion: A small but wrongly used word drove pharma industry into a defensive corner, created costly errors, caused enormous distress and kept departments inside the pharmaceutical industry away from working together and still are “departed in departments”. At the end they belong together: those in marketing who provide us with strategy, their know-how, business intelligence and valued assistance and those in marketing who work and strive to relate with, educate, improve, assist and communicate with physicians, delivering very good reasons that their product might be prefered – this is the Field Force!