death of the sales rep are greatly
exaggerated,” he said. “The sales
rep remains the highest ROI tactic
in many instances with many
brands. For those doctors and
offices that will see a sales rep, that
relationship still is the linchpin
around which you can build other
capabilities.”
He values the rep largely because
HCPs value them. “There is noth-
ing like when a sales rep goes on
vacation, and as the president of a
multi-billion dollar pharma com-
pany, you get a call from a doctor’s
office saying ‘What happened to
our rep?’ That tells you that our
people are eminently involved in
assisting physicians in caring for
their patients.”
Still, he acknowledged that access
is an ongoing problem, even if
not as bad as some of the statistics
suggest. He indicated that leaders
of sales forces have to be extremely
disciplined about assessing the
access levels and making tough
decisions. “Our team [at Lilly]
actually did an experiment where
we were able to build for a brand a
suite of interactions; sort of a 360°
package of interactions that we
wanted to test to see how influen-
tial they could be. And we took
doctors who were ‘white-spaced,’
we’d call it, who had never been
called on by one of our sales reps.”
There is nothing like
when a sales rep goes
on vacation, and as the
president of a multi-billion dollar pharma
company, you get a
call from a doctor’s
office saying “What
happened to our rep?”
That tells you that our
people are eminently
involved in assisting
physicians in caring for
their patients.
These were the toughest targets,
according to their writing behav-
iors. Lilly engaged with them over
six months through peer-to-peer
videos on Medscape, WebMD,
direct mail, e-mail, and actual post
office mail, “Which, believe it or
not does get opened,” he said. “We
were actually able to convert 18%
of those physicians, who never saw
one of our reps, from the bottom
tier of belief and writing up to our
top tier of advocacy. So that tells
me that it can work. But I don’t
think it replaces the rep,” he added.
On the subject of Key Account
Management (KAM), he said
that he sees it as a behavioral and
organizational challenge. “
Behaviorally I have always believed that
the best sales professionals actually
act as major account managers.
They don’t do the short sell, just
the pushy old style, but actually do
long-term relationship building
and value adding over time. Behaviorally everybody ought to be
moving into that kind of a space.
“Organizationally we tried something modeled after the U.S.
military in how one approaches
a theater. When you think about
the Iraqi theater, we have an army,
a navy, air force and Marines
responsible for training up, equipping, getting everybody ready.
But when you go out into the field
there’s actually a theater commander in charge of the ground.
And they pull all those different
strands together. They know the
game plan. Well, we did the same
thing and tried that with major
systems in big areas trying out different styles of integrated systems.
As you know, if you’ve seen one
integrated system, you’ve seen one
integrated system.
“So we tried different approaches.
But the key was having a major
account leader there with the sales
reps under them, with dedicated
medical staffing to be on call and
available for appropriate medical
interactions, with the payer major
account people also a part of that
team. And I’ll tell you, it worked.
It really worked. You brought all
