3 Habits of Successful Pharmaceutical Sales Reps

The pharmaceutical sales industry is always changing. With the end of 2016 proving to be a challenging time for a few pharmaceutical companies, pharma sales reps are having to re-think the way they set goals and achieve success in the industry.

While this news may be a wake-up call to some, many pharma sales reps are still advancing in their careers and experiencing success. In fact, pharma sales salaries continue rising year over year, according to 2017 Pharmaceutical Sales Salary Report. This is good news for anyone looking to continue growing a successful career in pharmaceutical sales.

Top 10 Pharmaceutical Therapy Areas in 2017

Many new medications and treatments have emerged this year for improving the management and prognoses of patients suffering from serious diseases. Driven growing therapy areas such as oncology, anti-rheumatics, and anti-virals, the prescription drug sales are increasing significantly. Let’s take a quick look at the top pharmaceutical therapy areas in 2017:

Eli Lilly Will Cut 3,500 Jobs by the end of the year

Under mounting pressure in diabetes, Eli Lilly has just become the latest drugmaker to undergo a major shakeup. The pharma giant on Thursday announced plans to cut 3,500 employees by the end of the year as it shoots to achieve $500 million in annual savings.

The company said it expects most of the cuts to come from an early retirement program in the U.S. in which participants will receive “enhanced retirement benefits.” Lilly disclosed the program to eligible employees today and expects the retirements to be done mostly done by the end of the year. Altogether, the announcement is the first major restructuring effort by new Lilly CEO David Ricks since taking the helm this year.

Drug Patent Losses Worth Billions Seen in 2017

Major pharmaceutical producers threaten to lose $26.5 billion in annual sales this year, as 18 branded drugs are due to expire, analysts for investment bank Bernstein said in a recent note quoted widely by news agencies.

Bernstein analyst Tim Anderson has identified Roche, GlaxoSmithKline, Eli Lilly, Pfizer and AstraZeneca, among others, as being especially at risk. On the whole, he calculates that 2017’s potential patent expiry damage is is much more daunting than in 2015 and 2016, when respectively only four and nine drugs manufactured by companies in Bernstein’s coverage lost patent protection.

Patents due to expire this year are said to include Roche’s Rituxan, GSK’s Advair, Eli Lilly’s Humalog and Cialis, AstraZeneca’s Byetta, Pfizer’s Viagra and Merck’s Vytorin. Together, the 2017 patent losses and associated sales declines will continue to pressure growth in the industry under the investment bank’s scenario.

Some 45% of the sales identified as being at risk are for biologics, which will face biosimilar competition.  Bernstein expects Roche to to head the list of drugmakers facing biosimilar threats, followed by Sanofi, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Lilly.

In a look at potential patent losses through 2025 and including the potential value of pipeline assets, the analysis assumes that AstraZeneca will see the most growth of any drugmaker in the Bernstein portfolio, with gains averaging 5.6% per year, and that Pfizer will bring up the rear with only 2% annual growth.

Excluding pipeline assets, the analysts forecast that Bristol-Myers Squibb will see the most growth up to 2025. In a reverse of the first estimate, AstraZeneca is seen as trailing its peers.

Top 10 complaints about working in Biopharma

Most professional consulting groups have all commented about the serious shortfall of working for a biopharma company.  A biopharma professional developed a list of the most common complaints about working in marketing for pharma.  Here is the list…

1ne: Too many damn meetings!  By far this is the top complaint we have heard.  Pharma companies are matrix organizations which means meetings, a lot of meetings usually taking up employee calendars for days and weeks.

2wo Takes too long to implement programs.  This is a complaint I usually hear from digital marketers.  Digital marketing is about implementing with speed and testing new things. Unfortunately, pharma tends to move at a snails pace which frustrates employees.

The 3 most desirable skills in the ‘new breed’ of pharma sales representative

Medicine is changing from a mass market to a target market model, where doctors are increasingly incentivised by patient outcomes, treatment protocols are defined by integrated delivery networks and face-to-face access is becoming more limited. The role of the sales rep is changing fast, and in the next five years, teams are likely to become smaller, agiler and more focused, due to improvements in systems and technologies.

Top Medical Sales Companies to Work For – Best of 2017

Medical sales is an attractive industry – the autonomy, the money, the chance to work alongside doctors and make a difference. What’s not to love? But every medical sales professional knows that not all medical sales jobs are created equal. So where are the best medical sales jobs? Which employers are the most sought-after?

The Annual MedReps Best Places to Work in Medical Sales survey answers that question and more. After counting the votes, these companies came out on top: Medtronic, Johnson & Johnson, and Stryker. 

About the Survey

In Q4 of 2016, MedReps asked our community of medical sales talent to tell us where they’d most like to work. More than a third of the 1,200 respondents named their current employers. Others chose from a list of Fortune 500 companies and companies nominated by the Medreps community. Still others wrote in the name of their preferred employer. This gave us a long and varied list of potential winners to consider. In addition to the total number of votes received, we also factored in the number of employees voting for their current employer, as well as their comments, to determine the final list of winners.

Αντιδράσεις των Φαρμακευτικών Εταιριών στα Νέα μέτρα Κυβέρνησης – Θεσμών για τα Φάρμακα

Τα νέα μέτρα για το φάρμακο έχουν προκαλέσει την έντονη αντίδραση της φαρμακοβιομηχανίας. Ο Σύνδεσμος Φαρμακευτικών Επιχειρήσεων Ελλάδος (ΣΦΕΕ) δηλώνει την έντονη δυσαρέσκειά του κάνοντας λόγο για οριζόντια μέτρα. Σύμφωνα με τον ΣΦΕΕ, «τα μέτρα αυτά δεν αποτελούν διαρθρωτικές αλλαγές, αλλά καθαρά βαριά φοροεισπρακτικά μέτρα, τα οποία δεν εξασφαλίζουν τη μείωση του clawback κατά 30%, που είναι και μνημονιακή υποχρέωση. Μάλιστα τα μέτρα αυτά θέτουν περιορισμούς στην είσοδο των νέων καινοτόμων φαρμάκων ή και την καθιστούν απαγορευτική, γεγονός που θα έχει άμεσες και δυσμενέστατες επιπτώσεις στους Έλληνες ασθενείς». Επιπλέον, αναφέρει ο Σύνδεσμος, πλήττουν την υγιή επιχειρηματικότητα, χωρίς όμως να εξασφαλίζουν ούτε στέρεα δημοσιονομικά οφέλη ούτε, το κυριότερο, καλύτερες υπηρεσίες υγείας στους ασθενείς. Εξαντλούν, τέλος, τη βιωσιμότητα των φαρμακευτικών εταιρειών, απειλώντας τις 86.000 θέσεις εργασίας που στηρίζει άμεσα και έμμεσα ο Κλάδος του Φαρμάκου και δημιουργούν συνθήκες αποεπένδυσης. 

Τι περιλαμβάνουν τα νέα μέτρα

Η συμφωνία μεταξύ κυβέρνησης και Θεσμών περιλαμβάνει νέα μέτρα με στόχο τη συγκράτηση της φαρμακευτικής δαπάνης και «όχημα» την αύξηση της χρήσης των γενοσήμων, τις μειώσεις τιμών στα αποζημιούμενα φάρμακα, αλλά και την απελευθέρωση των μη συνταγογραφούμενων φαρμάκων. 

Restricting pharmaceutical reps’ marketing tactics changes physician prescribing behavior

New research shows that limiting how pharmaceutical sales representatives can market their products to physicians changes their drug prescribing behaviors.
A team, led by the University of California, Los Angeles' Ian Larkin and Carnegie Mellon University's George Loewenstein, examined restrictions 19 academic medical centers (AMCs) in five U.S. states placed on pharmaceutical representatives' visits to doctors' offices. Published in the May 2 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, the results reveal that the restrictions caused physicians to switch from prescribing drugs that were more expensive and patent-protected to generic, significantly cheaper drugs.
Pharmaceutical sales representative visits to doctors, known as "detailing," is the most prominent form of pharmaceutical company marketing. Detailing often involves small gifts for physicians and their staff, such as meals. Pharmaceutical companies incur far greater expenditures on detailing visits than they do on direct-to-consumer marketing, or even on research and development of new drugs. Despite the prevalence of detailing and the numerous programs to regulate detailing, little was known about how practice-level detailing restrictions affect physician prescribing, until now.

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