Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman (18 page)

Talking on the phone to Stephanie one Thursday night, I complained about the number of signatures I had to get the next day to cover myself for a lazy week.

“Just double up,” Stephanie said, as though it was the most elementary idea ever. Feeling like Watson, I asked Sherlock what she was talking about.

“Go to the docs who like you the most and ask them to sign two or three sheets. Tell them that the extras are for ‘a rainy day.’ If they’re halfway cool, they’ll just laugh and sign away. Then spread out the samples over the three sheets so you don’t lose track of inventory.”

I sat in my chair thinking that Indiana was a lot farther than two thousand miles from Los Angeles. Immediately running down my list of doctors, I identified at least ten who would likely help me bend the rules in such a benign manner. Although Stephanie’s tip did nothing to alleviate the stress I was under to see thirteen physicians the
next day, she did provide me with the means never to get myself stuck in such a position again. Using her trick, I could see ten docs in the first week of the month, but in “reality,” I had seen twenty, twenty-five, or thirty over the next three weeks, depending upon how many extra sheets I asked them to sign.

Getting a doctor to sign his partner’s name was another successful ploy, albeit on a smaller scale. Even more so than the previous trick, this required a physician who
really
liked me. I’d start out playfully while watching a guy sign my sheet. “Now,
that
would be a tough John Hancock to copy.” He’d normally laugh and agree, at which point I’d get the ball rolling. “Dr. Partner’s signature looks pretty easy, though.” Another laugh, but inevitably he would share that sometime in the past he had been forced to forge Dr. Partner’s signature in his absence as part of everyday business or whatever. That was Go Time. “Listen, Dr. Pal, I am in
such
a jam. I’m trying to cut out early to get a head start on my vacation, but I haven’t seen
nearly
enough guys today, do you think you could help me out?” He would always want to help me out. “Do you think you could sign for Dr. Partner?” No one ever said no. Thanks to me, one orthopedic surgeon became so adept at signing his partners’ signatures that he joked he could have emptied their bank accounts. Ha-ha-ha.

Getting docs to sign extra sample sheets or their partners’ names garnered me thirty to forty extra signatures
per month, but those tricks required my actually visiting offices, even sometimes in the morning. This was unacceptable. I needed a big score, one that would nab me twenty sigs at a time. Who would have guessed that a yeast infection would lead me to the buried treasure?

“Jamie’s here!” the receptionist announced before I had finished crossing the waiting room. Unusually excited to see me, she even opened the door to the back. Incorrectly thinking that
I
had something to do with this greeting, I strolled down the hall and stopped in front of the sample closet, where I began to check their Pfizer inventory. I needn’t have bothered, though, as a nurse quickly asked, “You brought Diflucan, didn’t you?” Nodding, I placed a few boxes of the antifungal agent on one of the shelves. “Which doctor is going to sign, ladies?” I asked, pulling a sample sheet out of my detail bag.

Uh, none of them? Thanks to a few inconsiderate newborns that apparently did not get the e-mail specifying their ETAs, none of the members of this four-doctor ob-gyn practice were in the office. After explaining to the staff that I couldn’t leave samples without a physician’s signature, and I’d return a few days later, I turned to leave. However, the women wouldn’t let me. They were in dire need of the world’s only one-pill cure for yeast infections, and simply would not take no for an answer.

“Jeez, I’ve never seen an office in such a craze for Diflucan!” I said. “How many patients with yeast infections are coming in this afternoon?”

My question was met with silence and lots of staring at feet. Finally, one of the receptionists whispered, “One of the girls in back could really use some.” Pity the poor girls in the back. In the history of medicine, no front office worker had
ever
had a yeast infection—or any other medical problem, for that matter—but the “girls in the back” were forever plagued with maladies requiring thousands of dollars’ worth of free samples. Somebody really should’ve done a study just to see what it was about back-office work that made those women so susceptible to illness.

I explained that the woman would have to wait until the next day because I was not allowed to leave samples sans signature, making me feel like the dorky kid who had just informed his teenage friends that they could not raid his parents’ liquor cabinet. The pall cast over the room by my declaration lasted several uncomfortable moments before one of the RNs asked, “Can Dr. Jones sign at Pizza-n-Dash?”
Pizza-n-Dash!

As usual, I had completely forgotten about a dinner program we were having that very night. Normally, we held our physician-education programs at restaurants and provided an expert speaker to discuss a specific disease state in which one of our drugs was very effective. A new breed of sales rep, however, had ushered in a creative era in “programming,” one in which boring eateries and expert speakers were replaced by irresistible draws. For instance, Pfizer reps hosted “Christmas-Tree-n-Dash” (docs swung
by a Christmas tree lot and picked out a tree paid for by Pfizer), “Flowers-n-Dash” (docs swung by a florist and picked up a bouquet for their better halves), and a “Movies-n-Dash” (docs would bring up to three kids to a movie theater Pfizer had rented out for a Saturday morning). In return, the physicians were expected to pay close attention to an extended sales pitch while waiting for the tree to be tied to the roof, the flowers to be arranged, or the movie to start. (Pfizer was not the only company to run these events. Other companies hosted “Gas-n-Dash” at gas stations and “Turkey-n-Dash” during the holidays.) Amazingly, the doctors usually did pay attention, and these “outside-the-box” programs always drew our best attendance. Unfortunately, because there existed a directly proportional relationship between “rep creativity” and the speed with which Pfizer headquarters declared an event illegal, these events were normally banned shortly after word reached New York.

Thankfully, headquarters took awhile to figure out that it had to ban all such programs at the
same time
or else reps would invent other ones that had yet to be outlawed. First, “Movies-n-Dash” had its run ended. Next, “Christmas-Tree-n-Dash” was axed. They had yet to burn “Pizza-n-Dash,” so we had hastily scheduled one before it, too, was deemed illegal.

As the clever name suggested, Pizza-n-Dash involved doctors swinging by a pizza parlor to order pies for their families’ dinners. While they waited the customary
fifteen to twenty minutes for the pies to be ready, four to five reps detailed them on all of Pfizer’s products.

So when the nurse told me I could get Dr. Jones’s sample signature at Pizza-n-Dash, I made the command decision to bend the rules and leave the Diflucan. For the girls in the back. Upon arriving at the pizza place, the ob-gyn immediately said, “Hey, the girls think you’re a rock star! They told me I needed to sign something right away.” As Dr. Jones signed the top sheet on my pad, a
second
doctor approached, slapped me on the shoulder, and signed a sample sheet, too. Something was happening here, but I didn’t know what. When a third physician blindly followed the second guy, I
really
knew something was happening. Finally, when a doc who had never deemed me worthy of his time walked up and said, “Where do I sign?” even I could recognize the jackpot. By the time we left, I had twelve signatures, and Dr. Jones hadn’t started the signing frenzy until halfway through the evening! After realizing what I had accomplished, a colleague turned to me and said, “You, sir, are a genius.” I didn’t correct him.

On the drive home, I brainstormed on how to expand this scam into our dinner programs, which we held much more frequently than Pizza-n-Dashes. The main obstacle to a smooth transition was the simple fact that I wasn’t giving out samples; I was just collecting signatures for later use. It had been risky to let other docs sign the sample sheet when they hadn’t gotten samples that day.
Recognizing that I wouldn’t always be able to count on physicians acting like sheep, I knew I had to come up with a legitimate reason for docs to sign a sample sheet while at a restaurant without receiving samples. On my own, I came up with nothing.

Standing around in the private room of a restaurant where we were holding a dinner program, a group of us were discussing ways to make the night more entertaining. A counterpart asked what we thought about raffling off a bottle or two of wine.
Sure, what the hell.
Someone else suggested that after picking the winner’s name out of a hat, we make the physician answer a question from the lecture.
Hey, that’s a good idea.
Another rep said we should rig the raffle so that the docs with whom we needed to improve our relationship the most get the bottles.
Promote that woman immediately!
However, someone pointed out that we needed something on which to write the physicians’ names. This was not a problem, as our drug rep cars in the parking lot contained approximately 40,000 note pads imprinted with product names. So I had to act quickly. “Uh, guys,” I said, “I think I can handle this.”

During the cocktail portion of the evening, each physician was invited to sign up for a raffle to be held after the lecture. A
free
raffle? People couldn’t wait to sign up. Curious as to what the prize would be, the docs didn’t seem to notice they were signing a sample sheet. After dinner, I drew two names out of a bowl, and—what were
the odds?—the two biggest orthopedic surgeons in town walked out with bottles of wine.

We were required to hold at least one dinner program per month, and these usually averaged ten physicians. In two hours of “work” that consisted of drinking free wine, eating free filet mignon, schmoozing with customers, and trying to stay awake during a one-hour lecture I had trimmed—at the very least—two workdays off my monthly schedule.
Hello, United Airlines?

Basically, I implemented what, unbeknownst to me, was commonly known as the “T to T” work schedule. A friend of mine from a competing company explained that “T to T” stood for “Tuesday to Thursday, ten to two.” Although I was a bit disappointed that my routine was so commonplace it had a catchy name, I was psyched to know that there were others like me. Moreover, like Tom Cruise in
Interview with the Vampire,
I needed a protégé with whom I could share my secrets, not of raping and blood sucking, per se, but of slacking. The search didn’t take very long; he lived in my house.

Michael had been trying to get into pharmaceutical sales for quite some time when he landed a job with G.D. Searle & Co. in late summer. Fresh off three weeks of brainwashing, er, training, he couldn’t wait to barge into cardiology offices throughout northern Indiana on his first day of work, which happened to be a Monday. It was a dark, nasty, hungover Monday that followed a Notre Dame home football game weekend.

Though he had gotten up early to pack his car with all the drug paraphernalia and samples his company had sent him, the process took much longer than he anticipated and he didn’t finish till lunchtime. Having just gotten out of bed, I told him to give me twenty minutes to shower and put my suit on and then I’d take him to lunch at our roommate Steve’s establishment to celebrate Michael’s first day in the industry. After toasting his future success, we left Lula’s Café, a hip coffeehouse and sandwich place near Notre Dame’s campus, and headed home. Strangely, Steve came with us, complaining of “flulike” symptoms. As the three of us sat on the couches—“just for a minute”—I flipped to the movie section of the local paper. Nothing looked good.

“Anybody want to see a movie?” I asked, noting that the weather had somehow gotten worse in the short time we had been home. Steve shook his head, saying he had to do the café’s books. Michael didn’t say anything at all.
Blood in the water.

“Man,” I said, hoping to sound empathetic, “what a shitty day to start your career.” Pause. “You get out there in a day like this, get rained on, stain your suit pants, that could ruin a sales guy forever.” The living room fell silent just in time for us to hear the first drops of rain hit the roof. Hard.

“What’s playing?” Michael asked.

Steve cracked up. “You are so weak.”

Michael, God bless him, simply shrugged and grabbed his keys.

That night, after we tried to convince Steve that Bill Murray’s
The Man Who Knew Too Little
actually had been pretty funny, Steve told us he had given my work ethic, or lack thereof, some thought.

“How many times, Jamo, do you think you’ve gotten up and gotten ready for work just in time to go to lunch, only to go back home after eating without actually seeing any doctors?”

That was a doozy of a question, and both guys knew it. Steve watched me closely, his eyes sparkling in anticipation, and even Michael folded down the newspaper to see my face. I started to count, but the exercise proved taxing, like asking Wilt Chamberlain to name every woman he’s ever slept with. The guys eventually grew bored and told me to stop before I came up with the answer. Steve shook his head in a mixture of awe and disgust. “You and Michael Jordan get paid more per minute of work than anybody in America,” he said.

“Wow!” I replied, wondering if we had an abacus. “I am really embarrassed.”

So embarrassed, in fact, that I had to play hooky the next day, too, because I couldn’t bear to face my customers.

As it turned out, those ominous clouds brought more than rain that day; they foretold a thunderous storm approaching in my life. Ironically, my days of putting on a suit only to go to lunch were nearly ended by Michael’s company and its evil, newfangled method of monitoring its reps.

Michael sat on the couch during
SportsCenter
one night, pecking at a computerized gizmo that looked like the thing a UPS driver had you sign to get a package. “What the hell is that?” I asked, during a commercial break.