Healthy Skepticism Library item: 7846
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
Arnold M.
Flexible Forces
Medical Marketiing and Media 2005 Nov 1
http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/summary_0198-276304_ITM
Abstract:
Description While pharma’s biggest players continue to wear their poker faces in the game of sales-force contraction, Wyeth has boldly laid its cards on the table, announcing a creative solution to the glut of reps. The plan is to deploy a leaner, more flexible force with decentralized decision-making. Matthew Arnold explores the quest for efficiency over might in the field, and looks at the key trends and issues in pharmaceutical sales.
These days, when Wyeth president the Americas and global businesses Joe Mahady asks sales trainees what they’d like to change about the industry, he gets a surprising answer. “They look you in the eye and they say, ‘No more reps,’” says Mahady.
“Obviously,” he adds, “they say, ‘Don’t start with me.’”
You have to start somewhere, and after several years of increasingly strident complaints, from Wall Street to doctors’ offices, about bloated pharma sales forces, Wyeth is taking bold steps to realign its sales organization. While larger firms play a game of chicken, anxiously waiting to see who will fold first, and how it will impact their scripts, Wyeth is this month implementing a novel strategy. It’s a particularly thoughtful variation on an emerging, two-tier model for industry sales forces—more like that seen in telcoms, insurance or investment management—in which an elite detailing wing is supplemented by a more service-oriented force.
“Where traditionally, companies just carved the country into so many territories and deployed their sales forces to them, now they are aligning their best reps with their best customers,” says Subbarao Jayanthi, who heads Campbell Alliance’s sales practice. “So one tier chases your KOLs (thought leaders) and your most valuable customers, and the second tier pursues everybody else.” But where other companies might look to contract reps to reach secondary and tertiary targets, Wyeth’s plan, modeled on its consumer products sales force and piloted in several regions this summer, elevates this second tier to an in-house “flex-time” force, while devolving decision-making power from headquarters to the field rep.
Under the plan, Wyeth will reduce its 2,500-strong primary care sales force by around 15 percent by eliminating 20-30 percent of its full-time positions and hiring seasoned part-time reps to make up some of the difference. The company declined to talk headcounts, but back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest a reduction of 500-750 full-time sales positions and the hiring of 125-375 flex-time reps for a primary care sales force of 2,125 (Wyeth also maintains around 2,500 reps covering specialty and hospital products, vaccines and managed care sales).
“It’s not just a pare-back,” says Mahady. “We think we’re going to be able to attract some very experienced pharmaceutical sales people who are going to be there for the prime of the selling day.”
Wyeth isn’t looking for just any warm bodies to handle part-time sales. Rather, the company is holding prospective recruits for the new posts to a higher standard than it does full-time recruits, setting the bar at candidates with more than two years of pharmaceutical sales experience. “These are…
