Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman (17 page)

Eight

THE PAPER CHASE

I
N ADDITION TO REQUIRING RECEIPTS FOR EXPENSES,
the system of checks and balances had another mechanism to ensure that reps were actually working. Let’s say I had left Bruce my standard Competitive Activity Story voice mail and had submitted an American Express receipt for gas. There still existed a way for me to get caught playing hooky: the sample sheet signature.

By law, all pharmaceutical samples had to be accounted for, meaning physicians had to sign a sheet of paper acknowledging receipt of ten cases of Drug X. This requirement was fairly new, borne out of necessity. In the 1980s, a number of physicians and reps got busted for selling samples on the black market. With no system in place to provide a paper trail tracking who had what drug when, it was fairly easy for a rep to say he had dropped off two cases of Drug X to Dr. Smith, when in fact those cases were actually sold to Mr. Slimy Sam in a back alley.
Likewise, a physician could remove two cases of Drug X from his sample closet and sell them to the aforementioned Mr. Sam. If asked about the missing samples, Dr. Smith could say, “I never got those. Prove that I did.”

The government accepted the challenge and, voila, physicians had to sign in order to receive drug samples. Instantly, shady characters had a large window of opportunity slammed shut. This legislation’s impact stretched far beyond the black market, though, as it gave pharmaceutical companies—for the first time—a concrete means of monitoring their reps’ activity. By doing so, it spawned the very culture of the industry today.
How many signatures did you get today?

With the new law in place, each company printed up its own personalized sample sheets. Basically, these were a receipt of a different nature, proving not that the rep had purchased gas on Tuesday, May 6, but that he had actually seen a doctor on Tuesday, May 6.

Members of Pfizer’s Pediatric Division were required to make a minimum of eight calls per day, meaning we had to “detail” at least eight physicians. Under the old system, a rep would enter these calls into her computer with appropriate notes (“Discussed Zyrtec with Dr. Potts; he wasn’t sure about the dose”). It didn’t take Lex Luthor to figure out that there was no way to tell if the rep had actually seen Dr. Potts, let alone discussed Zyrtec’s dosing with him, or simply typed that information into her computer. A friend of mine liked to say he made a “BTSA
call,” meaning he had visited a physician’s office and failed to talk with him, but had Breathed the Same Air as the doc had breathed sometime that day. The law requiring sample sheet transactions gave the pharmaceutical companies a tangible way to monitor work activity, and to be sure their employees weren’t illegally selling drugs.

For those of us who were brand-new to the pharma game, it took awhile to catch on to this cultural paradigm shift, and we were in for a rude awakening. The dose of reality was injected at a district meeting outside Detroit in January 1996. Bruce began innocuously, walking around the conference table with a nonchalant air.

“Do you guys ever have a day when you don’t leave any samples?” he asked. Ten heads shook left and right.

“So, there’s never a day when not even
one
office needs
one
sample of something?” he probed, leading us closer to the slaughter. Again, universal head shaking.
No way. We have great drugs; somebody always needs something.

“You would never leave samples without getting a signature, would you?”
Are you crazy? Isn’t that illegal?
Bump, set, spike. Bruce went for the kill, handing each of us a single sheet of paper displaying a table of some sort.

“Then, can somebody please explain all the zeroes next to your names under the column ‘Physician Signatures’?”
Cricket, cricket, cricket.

Apparently, somebody at HQ (undoubtedly a former rep who had forgotten where he came from and decided to foil all our tricks for getting out of work) had thrown
together a little spreadsheet, outlining the frequency with which the reps in our division sampled physicians. Judging from Bruce’s reaction, zero was not the frequency for which he was striving. The source of his anger and disappointment was predictable: His fellow district managers had made fun of him. As happens with anything in the sales world, a contest between the DMs had developed concerning the number of signatures per day. Once this happened, life as we knew it was over.

A manager would rather have made $20,000 less in bonus than lose to a peer in
anything.
If I only had a nickel for every one of these voice mails: “Hey, team, I know you’re all working as hard as you possibly can and we’ve made huge strides in the number of signatures you’re getting, I mean,
physicians you’re seeing
each day,” he corrected himself, since the priority was actually selling our drugs, not just calling on docs who are easy to see and will give signatures. “So, I’m not going to ask you for any more effort.” Pause. “The Pittsburgh team just pushed their average to thirteen-point-two per day, and I just
know
we can top that. So, I’m asking for a little more effort. I know you can do it.”

I could not. More accurately, I would not. Thirteen calls per day? During my most productive week with Pfizer, I averaged nine calls per day, and that was only because Bruce bribed me.

At the end of a field visit, he initiated a conversation that seemed innocent enough. “How many doctors did
we see today, Jamie?” A cardinal rule in pharmaceutical sales was to work your boss till he dropped, thereby making him think you were a “worker” while also making him think twice before coming out to work with you again.
Oh, no, Jamie again? I don’t know if I feel like making calls till five-thirty. Maybe I’ll skip him this time.
Being a religious zealot when it came to cardinal rules, I knew exactly how many docs we had seen that day.

“Eleven,” I sang, oblivious to the trap being set.

“Eleven,” Bruce repeated. “If you did that every day, that’d be fifty-five signatures in a week.” We both kind of scoffed at that.

“Dude,” I said professionally, “there’s no way I could get fifty-five sigs in a week.”

He nodded in agreement. “Carl gets forty-five, at least forty-five, every week. You couldn’t get forty-five, do you think?”

Carl in Toledo.
A former navy pilot, Carl carried himself with a lot of swagger. Appealing to my unhealthy competitiveness over all things pointless was a smart move on Bruce’s part. There was no way I was going to let Carl beat me.

“Forty-five? Oh, yeah, I could,” I nodded, my eyebrows scrunched to show how easy that would be.

Even though he had me, Bruce decided to go over the top. “I tell you what. If you get forty-five signatures next week, I’ll let you expense a pair of Revos.” Until that morning, I hadn’t actually seen a pair of Revo sunglasses
on someone I knew. Driving directly into the sunshine, Bruce and I reached for our shades simultaneously; he smoothly pulled out a pair of cool, stylish black ones, while I fumbled for my latest $8.99 discount-rack specials. The unique font in which the brand name “Revo” was written on the arm of the glasses mocked me every time I looked to my right for the rest of the day. When Bruce challenged me to get as many signatures as Toledo Carl, I would have done it for pride alone, but a new pair of shades clinched the deal.

I got forty-five signatures the next week and headed straight to the Sunglass Hut in the mall on Friday afternoon, where I spent seventy-five agonizing minutes trying on every pair of Revos the store had to offer. Finally, a friend from my undergrad days who had kindly accompanied me to provide guidance said her husband needed her home to cook dinner, so I picked a sleek, gray pair of metal rectangular shades. I wore them out of the store, just like I did with new basketball shoes in grammar school. I could not believe I had just purchased
sunglasses
that cost $189. Neither could Bruce.

“Uh, Jamie, didn’t we say you had a limit of seventyfive bucks!” he stated more than asked. I had called him that night to thank him for upgrading my cool factor exponentially, though it had been tough to see the numbers on the phone while sitting on my couch wearing my prized possessions. I informed him that, no, there had been no mention of money at all, or I would
never have exceeded the limit and spent my own money on something I would certainly lose or break within the next ninety days. Bruce exhaled in a long sigh and explained that “we” were going to need to do some serious expense account manipulation to cover this disaster. He also reminded me not to say anything about this to any of my teammates, who probably would not have understood why I earned a pair of pricey shades for, um, doing my job. I apologized, insincerely, for the miscommunication over the cost and hung up. Immediately, I felt a headache coming on, the pain emanating symbolically from the points at which the metal arms made contact above my ears.

This pain resurfaced every time I wore the glasses, which seemed a little much for a guy who rarely felt guilty about anything. I thought maybe I needed to suffer for my newfound materialism and looked no further for a cause of my increasing discomfort. Two weeks into the Revo Era, I pulled into an office parking lot and, unable to bear it any longer, ripped them from my head. Looking into the rearview mirror, I noticed for the first time two straight lines pressed into my head. My sleek shades were a little too sleek and had been pressing my head like a vise every time I put them on. They had to go. The clerk was less than happy to see me back at the Sunglass Hut, so I didn’t even ask to try on other Revos. I exchanged the pain-focals for a $115 pair of comfy Ray-Bans. I lost them three weeks later.

The trials and tribulations of the sunglasses saga were fitting in light of the tremendous struggle I had coming up with the forty-five signatures necessary to initiate the saga in the first place. In addition to overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles like waking up before nine and
then
working for five or six hours for all five workdays, the fact that I didn’t know more than sixty doctors (in a territory of 250 customers) really put me behind the eight ball. Throw in a number of customers on summer vacation, and I was screwed. Consequently, as time grew short on Friday afternoon, I had to cajole one pediatrician into signing two of his partners’ names. Which, much to my chagrin, supported management’s claim that sales reps really had to be out there
every day
in order to meet their daily quota of calls. Unfortunately, there existed other evidence backing this harebrained idea—
living
evidence: the Pfizer Masters.

In order to don the green jacket worn only by the Masters, a rep had to meet two criteria: first, the sum of his Pfizer service time plus his age had to equal at least sixty-five years, and, second, he had to have a history of tremendous sales success. A salesperson also had to be invited back every year, meaning this was no flash-in-the-pan award. Unlike Augusta National, this club had female members, though I recall seeing very few women on tape. Most of the Masters still combed their hair the way they did when they first saw
Rebel Without a Cause
in the movie theater. They were all filthy freaking
rich, thanks to their stock options that had soared and split several times from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s. What was more annoying, though, was how hard these old guys worked
despite
being millionaires. They just loved to sell; it was what got them out of bed in the morning. I could not relate.

Once a year, the Masters flew at company expense to a luxurious location for a few days of “meetings.” Afterward, the rest of the Pfizer sales force would be forced to watch a video featuring the Masters’ sales advice. Unfortunately, this thirty-minute piece of media torture always included pearls like “See more doctors” and other suggestions that were not applicable in my territory. Then the moderator would go around the room and ask each guy how many sales calls he had made the day before the meeting—a time when most reps stayed home to pack—and the answers would be “twenty-seven,” “twenty-two,” and so on. Occasionally, an octogenarian would say, “fourteen,” prompting guffaws and grief from his colleagues.

“Slacker!”

“What are you, a part-timer?”

The poor guy would quickly try to defend himself—“I had my prostate removed that morning!”—but there was no relief in sight. These hard-core guys were largely unfamiliar with the term “sick day.”

“Call activity,” aka the number of sales calls made per day, was a prominent topic of discussion at every sales
meeting I ever attended, and a manager couldn’t preach call activity without mentioning my nemeses in the green jackets. “The Masters average nineteen calls per day, and you tell me you guys can’t do ten?” What management failed to see were the generational differences that prevented us, or maybe just me, from achieving such lofty work activity. For instance, one Master on video suggested skipping lunch because “most docs sit down in their offices to do their dictations over the lunch hour, and it’s a perfect time to catch them.” When asked by the moderator what they did for a meal during this time, a trim, gray-haired gentleman replied, “Pack an apple.”
Pack an apple?
If I skipped lunch, when was I supposed to read the sports section or take a nap?

Indifferent to any inconveniences in my lifestyle, Pfizer management pressed on with the new signatures-per-day quotas. Sales reps whose sales numbers were below par
and
whose signature average was also substandard were encouraged to get their résumés in order. Left with just two options—work hard or quit—I looked for ways to cheat the system. Thankfully, it had more cracks than an old sidewalk.

The “California girls” showed me the first one, and it remained an arrow in my cheating quiver until my last day as a drug rep. Ah, the California girls. They were something else. Among the 150 of us who trained together, four stood out. Not just because they were smart and attractive and in their mid-twenties, but because
of their skirts. Through its devotion to military and Mormon hires, Pfizer had filled its ranks with opinionated people who felt Pat Buchanan could have been more conservative. Their dusty views on appropriate dress in the workplace hadn’t been updated since Eisenhower left office. The California girls dropped into this bastion of free thought and expression with an unapologetic splash. “These skirts are considered
long
in California.”
Note to self: Move to California.
God bless ’em, those ladies had spunk and flair and an aversion to hard work. We became good friends.