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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18392

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

Staton T
For Eisai in China, the sales rep's the thing
Fierce Pharma 2010 July 8
http://www.fiercepharma.com/story/eisai-china-sales-reps-thing/2010-07-08#ixzz0tLWlX7E0


Full text:

Every drugmaker has its own peculiar strategy for dipping into the Chinese market. Japan’s Eisai started with a joint venture with a local company, then moved on to operate on its own, adding one drug to its arsenal at a time. Sales reps have been key to the company’s strategy, even when deciding which drugs to field first in China: Which drugs would attract sales people?
Eisai is now fielding its own sales force to sell its Alzheimer’s drug Aricept and stomach drug AcipHex, along with its best-seller in China, Methycobal, which treats peripheral nervous system troubles. And it markets other drugmakers’ meds as well. “They identified a core product . . . working out what other products they would need to have as well [as] to attract quality sales people and identifying the support system they needed,” analyst Pelham Smithers tells the Financial Times.
But despite the progress, Eisai is still spending lots of time worrying about sales reps. It has no problem hiring sales folks. It’s keeping them that’s the trouble. About a third of the sales force turns over in any given year. So, Eisai’s China chief Yukio Akada is thinking about setting up a tiered sales force, with some 300 “experts” who have deep knowledge of the company’s drugs and therapeutic areas, the FT reports. These experts will get paid more than lower-level reps, who’ll do more routine work and won’t need much training. “If these [reps] are going to run off anyway,” Akada says, “I need to have a model in place where it doesn’t matter if they go or not.”

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909