Doctor Time. What is it worth and how does a sales rep earn more of it?

There has been a great deal of speculation over the past few years about diminishing access to physicians and how this development might alter the role of the pharmaceutical sales representative in the near future.  Change is indeed imminent and the reasons are evident.  Are you ready?

Physician time is becoming even more scarce as North America’s millions of baby boomers enter their retirement years with the health issues common to advancing age.  Pharmaceutical companies are squeezing from from the other side and competing aggressively for those precious minutes with the doctor.  Complicating matters further is the recent advent of multiple sales reps from the same company arriving in a physicians’ office on the same day, sometimes even simultaneously. Put yourself in the doctor’s shoes.  You barely have time to see the patient’s crowding your waiting room, let alone spend the appropriate time diagnosing and dispensing, consoling, counseling, commiserating, and all the other ings a doctor deals with and to top it off, the Getbettertoday Pharmaceutical company foists not one, but two shiny, happy people on you.  Hardly a recipe for a successful call and I certainly don’t envy the unfortunate sales rep who shows up at 3:30 in the afternoon.

These circumstances have led to a decrease in doctor availability in the short term and point to bigger changes in the long-term.  We may be facing a number of new realities in the near-future including:

More Closed doors: No-see docs.

Pay-for-access: A fee charged for sales rep time in the doctor’s office.

Government-regulated access: Legislation determines how much time a phsyician can spend with industry sales reps.

Medical Governing Body Access Rules: AMA or another body creates a code governing industry access to physicians.

And there you have it; a medical environment that simply will not continue to be the selling environment we’ve enjoyed since the 1930s.

The leaders in this new marketplace will be the companies that see the new opportunities and that have the courage to be first with new ideas that exploit the new conditions. An example of a big idea that might help a company into a leadership position would be to become the company famous for dispensing the one thing physicians do not have time to acquire for themselves:  PRECIOUS INFORMATION. Transform your selling force into your information force.

What if your sales rep were perceived as a literal fountain of knowledge by the medical community?  If I were a doctor and I had one or two reps that always got me information I valued, even if it was competitor information, that sales rep would always be welcome in my schedule.

I think that super-rep of tomorrow exists today, just not in a branded way.  No company owns that territory…yet.  Might yours be first?  Call us.  We can help.  Because while doing it is the first thing, quickly branding the idea and becoming famous for it should be part of the plan, and Commotion can help.