If there’s one word that makes most medical representatives quake, it’s ‘Target’. In fact, the very mention of the ‘T’ word is something that makes most marketing professionals sleep less at night, but for medical reps, it’s a ‘daytime nightmare’.
“You will not believe the kind of targets that I was set as a fresher in 2002,” says a rather frustrated Arun Krishnamoorthy, who quit the pharma business after a decade. Having worked with a smaller pharma company, based out of the cotton city, he says that his first month’s target of `4 lakh was absolute hell to achieve.
“The irony was that, we had to hand out gifts from our own pocket for the first three months as it was something of a training period or a trial by fire,” he rants.
Once they settle into the rut of establishing their ‘list’ of obliging doctors, every medical rep has to sweat to ease out the competition. “The worst part is when a company, especially an international one, launches a new drug,” says Aloysius.
“That’s when the smaller companies start pushing us to keep doctors loyal,” he adds.
Keeping regular ‘high prescribing’ doctors loyal is easier said than done — he himself has had to hang around the clinic of certain doctors for hours, buy them dinner, even pay the electricity bills and phone bills in the hope that they don’t try out the new drug.
Though pharma giants like Pfizer and GSK have been involved in large scale payouts for bribing doctors overseas, most reps state that the companies are unaware of what they do with the ‘development’ fund. “Once we take the money out, we attribute it to ‘field expenses’. Only when there is a specialist involved or a large gift involved, we need to brief our immediate superiors and get it cleared,” he adds.
As the lucky few high performing reps make it to the higher echelons of the management, their biggest perk is that they don’t have to pay visits to doctors anymore.
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