Pharmaceutical Sales and Marketing Articles

Has the pharmaceutical and biotech industry overextended its signature sales model? Is the selling field now overgrazed and producing less bounty for all? Could the inaccessible-physician problem be customers' way of telling the pharmaceutical industry that the current state of personal promotion is not meeting their needs as well as in the past? Data from RepReview 2007, a study of pharma and biotech sales reps, conducted by G & S Research in partnership with Pharmaceutical Representative magazine, indicates ... maybe.

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Over the past three years as a columnist for Pharmaceutical Representative, I have written on many aspects of clinical selling aimed to help pharmaceutical sales reps establish meaningful dialog with their physician customers.

In this, my last column, I'd like to share a checklist critical for the quintessential clinical-sales professional.

Clinical trials competency

Know what a clinical trial actually is and how it contributes to available levels of scientific "evidence."
Know the principles of Good Clinical Practice (GCP) and why they are crucial in bringing a drug to market.
Understand how clinical trials are designed and the purpose that each phase of clinical development serves.
Know how clinical studies are interpreted (or misinterpreted), including data concepts involving statistics and p-values.

Diagnosis
Having doctors respect your science knowledge is no easy feat.

Prescription
Taking cues from medical-science liaisons are the first steps to equal footing.

I WAS WORKING AS A new sales rep, when a doctor I called on had some tough, high-science questions for me. My manager suggested that I bring in our local medical-science liaison (MSL) to meet with the doctor. The MSL (also known as a health-science associate) agreed to work with me for a day, and while we worked, I simply couldn't believe the instant rapport he had with the physicians! They seemed to lean forward when he spoke, listening intently to what he had to say, giving him all the time he wanted!

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The slow speed of uptake for innovative medicines in Europe has long been a bugbear for the pharma industry. While new drugs are available in the United States pretty much immediately after FDA gives them a green light, they face a whole collection of further regulatory and pricing hurdles to clear in the European member states. But there are signs in the United Kingdom of a political will to change the situation.

Sarah Houlton

Lord Darzi—professor of surgery at Imperial College London and also under-secretary of state in the Department of Health—has been charged by government to come up with a vision for the future of the National Health Service. While his final report is not due until June 2008, Darzi has released some early pointers toward what it will contain.

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It's that time of year again, when Santas everywhere take stock of nice and naughty in order to fill stockings—and magazines make up their lists of hits and has-beens. Here, at Pharm Exec, as we considered such weighty matters as which company's hot, which CEO's in the hot seat, and which ones are yesterday's news, we had to acknowledge the silliness of it all to an industry that makes lifesaving drugs and billion-dollar profits. Honest! Now let's dish.

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The proof is in the metrics. Last June, MarkMonitor sifted through 60 million e-mail messages and billions of Web pages to get a handle on how six major brand-name drugs were being touted and sold on the Internet. In the process, it found nearly 3,200 online pharmacies selling those drugs, according to the Summer 2007 MarkMonitorBrandjacking Index. But only four—count 'em—of these e-stores carried the respected Verified Internet Pharmacy Practice Site (VIPPS) accreditation.

Frederick Felman

There is no mystery behind the pharmacies' motivation. This year, pharmaceutical sales hit $305 billion in the United States and $609 billion worldwide, according to estimates by IDC's Health Industry Insights. Clearly, there is big money to be made in trading on someone else's good brand. What the buyers actually get for their money, however, is anybody's guess.

In August, eMarketer reported that Internet ad sales had officially displaced radio ad sales, nabbing the slot of fourth-largest ad medium. That was a huge blow to radio, which receives a sizable chunk of ad dollars from the pharma industry. Now pharma marketers have a new option—ReachMD, a 24-hour satellite radio station that plays content targeted at doctors.

With pharma companies such as Eli Lilly and Amgen on board as advertisers, satellite radio is looking to become the hotbed of custom-tailored information and a great place to drop some ad spend. Pharm Exec talked to Gary Epstein—a former executive at the American Medical Association, now CEO of ReachMD—about the changing face of radio.

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Sometimes surprises aren't all that surprising. Novelist and critic Walter Kirn put it nicely in the November issue of the Atlantic: "The abiding, distinctive feature of all crashes, whether in stock prices, housing values, or hit-TV-show ratings, is that they startle but don't surprise," he wrote. "When the euphoria subsides, when the volatile graph lines of excitability flatten and then curve down, people realize...that they've been expecting this correction. The signs were everywhere, the warnings clear, the researchers in rough agreement, and the stories down at the bar and in the office (our own stories included) revealed the same anxieties."

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The personalized-medicine bandwagon is on a roll, paralleling the death-knell for blockbuster-drug development. Strategies for identifying patients who will respond to a certain therapy, as well as those most likely to suffer adverse events, promise to improve healthcare quality while also eliminating waste and inappropriate spending. Interventions based on individual characteristics may have limited sales, but they may justify higher prices and reduce the high cost of clinical development.

The flip side is that personalized medicine means developing research and marketing strategies for therapies that work in maybe half the population. Diagnostics have to be incorporated into these programs, which adds to development costs and treatment expense. It's not clear whether personalized medicine represents the new frontier of biomedical development or is something that will never be more than niche products.

The pharma fates have had their nasty sport with AstraZeneca of late. Since February 2006, the British drug giant has had to bury four billion-dollar babies: Galida, its oral PPAR antagonist for diabetes; neuroprotector-wannabe NXY-059, for stroke; the anticoagulant Exanta, for thrombosis; and lipid buster AGI-1067, for atherosclerosis. Each one was a risky, push-the-envelope drug; each one bit the dust in Phase III. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to lose one late-stage drug may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose four looks like carelessness.