Gartner Analyst: Sales Reps DO Save Lives
Earlier this week, I lambasted a fellow BNET blogger for implying that the only way pharmaceutical sales reps could keep their customers happy was by providing them with free coffee or free sex. To my surprise, a number of people (including a HR manager for a pharmaceutical firm) jumped to his defense, essentially agreeing that medical industry sales reps were largely a collection of schmoozers and sluts.
What a total crock. To prove it, here's some quotes from an recent interview I took with Dale Hagemeyer, a research vice president at Gartner, the world's largest high tech analyst firm:
Medical device sales reps are a critical element of today's healthcare system, an analyst who specializes in sales technology for the medical market at the market research firm Gartner. If it weren't for medical device sales reps, the ability of hospitals and doctors to provide effective healthcare would quickly decline and people will die. These are sales rep who definitely save lives.This is not to say that the reps are prescribing drugs or performing operations. Their contribution is limited to advising and demonstrating, making sure that the medical product is used in a way that is most likely to benefit the patient. Even so, there's no question that, without the help of the medical device sales rep, new equipment and new techniques would take much longer to fall into common usage.
The healthcare field has an enormous appetite for breakthroughs products that have an enormous potential to save lives. In many cases, the best-informed person about how the new products work are the sales reps, which is why the doctors want them right there where they can provide hands-on help.
In many cases, the sales rep provides the highest level of medical consulting that doctors are likely to receive from somebody who's not another doctor. They're really the bridge between the doctors and the scientists inside their own firms. Medical sales personnel are viewed, inside their organizations and out, as holding a position worth of both authority and respect.
To accomplish this, medical sales reps are often highly trained. At Genzyme Biosurgery, for example, reps must complete an eight week training program, starting with three to four weeks on basic anatomy, then moving on to all the different procedures that doctors do to address different diseases states. Reps must also medical vernacular - what doctors and nurses call things amongst themselves, and finally the clinical data and product features that they need to sell and support the company's offerings.
READERS: Please give me a heads-up via email when you see other examples of treating sales reps as if they're "schmoozers and sluts". I'll post the link on this blog and then tear whoever wrote it a new one.