Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman (24 page)

Dr. Romeo sat down behind his desk and asked Joe if he needed help with anything. Physicians rarely asked reps if we needed anything; normally, they asked if we could get them something. Thrown off balance, Joe said no. “Are you sure?” the urologist asked. “Don’t you have any other drugs besides Viagra that I should be using?” Shocked, Joe stuttered a bit before mentioning our two other urology drugs, which the guy immediately offered to start prescribing. “At that point,” Joe told me,
“I thought he was going to ask to see me naked. It was weird, man.” It would get weirder.

Dr. Romeo leaned forward in his chair and looked my nervous colleague in the eye. “Joe, I need a favor.”
Here we go,
Joe thought. Before proceeding, the doctor shot a quick glance at the door as if to ensure it was still closed. Joe tensed in his seat. “I need Viagra samples. Lots of them.”

Thoroughly relieved that he would be keeping his pants on, Joe sat back in his chair with a smile. “That’s not a problem at all. I just got a huge shipment of samples,” he said, rising to walk out to his car and grab a case of little blue pills. With a horrified look, Dr. Romeo motioned frantically for Joe to sit back down. “No, no, no. Not for the clinic, for
personal
use.”

Joe thought things were getting weird again. “But, Doctor, you’re a
urologist.
If you need Viagra samples for your own personal use, why not just take them from your sample closet?”

Dr. Romeo leaned forward in his chair to get closer to Joe. “I don’t want my staff to know about this. The samples aren’t for me,” the physician said before pausing. “They’re for my wife.”
Hello.
Joe tried desperately to keep something resembling a poker face.

“It’s like she’s a different woman, Joe.” The urologist continued speaking as Joe cringed. “We’ve been married for almost twenty years, and I don’t know who this new woman is. Viagra has changed our life! She gets wetter
than she ever did, and now she’s coming three, four times a night.”
Please, God, don’t let this woman be the office manager!
Joe prayed. “The sex has never been this good. She was the one who wanted to try the Viagra, but I wasn’t too crazy about the idea. Now, neither one of us can get enough. When she’s on it, she’s a tigress.”

I interrupted Joe’s story. “What’d you do?”

“What could I do?” he responded. Only one thing. He met Dr. Romeo behind the office, slipped him a case of Viagra, and made a lifelong friend and valuable customer in the process. “You know,” Joe said with an awestruck laugh, “Viagra makes people crazy.”

Pfizer’s Viagra mania hit full speed at the company’s official drug-launch meeting in Orlando in early May 1998. It was an industry-wide tradition to hold a three- or four-day meeting to mark the approval of a new drug. Whereas my Urology Division colleagues and I had attended the crash course in Miami in early April, the company wanted to bring together all five divisions that would be selling vitamin V to officially kick off the Viagra era.

Designed to promote product knowledge during the day and morale during nightly activities, each launch meeting was basically a huge party. Held at upscale hotels in desirable locales, and highlighted by seven-hour open bars with enormous shrimp and crab buffets, launches were wildly expensive affairs that reps critiqued closely;
the Zoloft launch had been legendary, while Lipitor’s disappointed. Reps acquired gift bags filled with giveaways such as golf shirts or pullovers emblazoned with the new drug’s name and logo, as well as other necessities like bottled water (hydration proved key) and Visine (a Pfizer product).

The Viagra launch proved notable for its size (over two thousand Pfizer personnel), security (ID tags were required for entrance into any conference room), and seduction (a female urology colleague of mine met her future husband at one of the evening events). It was the civil-treatment training that sparked the most conversation, though.

Extremely concerned that the sensitive subject matter of erections could create awkward moments for reps and medical professionals alike and that “humorous” conversations with office staff could lead to lawsuits against the company, Pfizer put all of us through four hours of civil-treatment training. We were shown videos demonstrating how female reps should handle lewd male physicians and how to extract ourselves from Viagra jokes. “Don’t dress slutty and don’t tell dick jokes to chicks” was how one teammate, seemingly unaffected by the training, summed up the lengthy session. The training was not unwarranted. During my tenure in Indiana, a cute Cefzil rep had been licked (that is, the guy leaned forward and licked her with his tongue) while detailing a male physician. She had been talking about bronchitis when this happened; imagine what could happen when female reps discussed erections.

Fired up after appearances by Dr. Ian Osterloh—the father of Viagra proved to be a sheepish Brit completely devoid of melanin, who appeared quite embarrassed by the sustained ovation we gave him—and Bill Steere, our adored CEO, who told us how great we were, the Viagra sales team floated away from the launch, high on our company’s and our own futures.

Not every Pfizer employee was thrilled about Viagra. The worst job in pharmaceutical sales? Being a Pfizer rep who
didn’t
sell the wonder drug. Pfizer was divided into six separate sales forces—Roerig, Pfizer Laboratories, Pratt, Powers Rx, Alta, and Specialty (further broken down into CHR, or Cardiology; Uro/Gyn; and CNS, or Psychiatry)—each with its own business card. No two divisions sold exactly the same product lines, but each force overlapped with at least two others for every drug it sold. Practically speaking, this duplication ensured that products would continue getting detailed regardless of vacation schedules, maternity leaves, and other rep absences. On a more devious level, this overlap allowed reps to continue calling on physicians who, fed up with anywhere from three to six Pfizer salespeople calling on them, had banned “Pfizer reps” from their offices. “Uh, Dr. Johnson, I’m with Alta Pharmaceuticals, not Pfizer.”

The majority of doctors and staff members didn’t realize that Pfizer’s sales force consisted of six separate divisions. Consequently, few medical professionals knew that not all our sales reps sold Viagra. As the result, every
person who walked through the door with a Pfizer product was bombarded with questions and comments about the little blue pill. In an unprecedented move, Pfizer made its entire sales force, even the poor Roerig, Powers Rx, and Alta reps who didn’t have the little blue pill in their portfolio, study up on Viagra just so they would be able to answer basic questions if asked.

“Jesus, this sucks!” one particularly outspoken Powers Rx saleswoman told me. “All anybody wants to talk about is Viagra, Viagra, Viagra,” she said, sounding more like Jan Brady than a sales professional. An Alta colleague admitted, “Nobody wants to hear about bronchitis when they can hear about boners. Even pediatricians!”

Reps from the other pharmaceutical companies ran into a similar problem, but they couldn’t even take consolation in the fact that at least their stock price was soaring. “When are you guys going to come out with something like Viagra?” doctors teased them. Most of my colleagues heard complaints from competing reps about the fact that Viagra had thrown them off their game. Even the Merck reps, who generally carried themselves as if their shit didn’t stink (or if it did, they had a drug to cure that), couldn’t hide their envy. “You guys hit the jackpot, man,” a guy admitted to one of our cardiology specialists. “Enjoy it while you can.”

Such comments had to be relayed to me, as I heard none firsthand. How could I when I never talked to the bad guys? You were either on my team or you weren’t,
bled Pfizer blue or didn’t. I simply didn’t understand the desire to befriend someone who was trying to take money out of my wallet or, even worse, beat me at something. Very few colleagues shared my views on fraternizing with the enemy, and more than a handful of lunchtime meetings were interrupted by someone rolling her eyes to say, “Jamie, you know the Roche rep, don’t you? Oh, wait, I forgot. You don’t talk to the bad guys.” (I did, on occasion, waive this rule if I needed to gain strategic information of vital importance from a competitor who may have been an attractive single woman.)

To my dismay, my coworkers did not restrict their contact with NPP (non-Pfizer personnel) to the accidental crossing of paths in a parking lot or waiting room. Many reps actually hung out socially! In most cities one could find a regular “rep happy hour,” where, I was told, discussion of all things pharmaceutical was forbidden in order to force cats and dogs to get to know each other better. This drove me batty. I mean, with the Biaxin rep’s asshole-ness already well documented and my hatred of him rising, why humanize him by finding out his wife was a quadriplegic who still managed to raise a family of seven blind kids? In a nutshell, competing reps were cheaters and liars or, at the very least, they were jerks who thought their drugs were better than mine. And I couldn’t stand for that.

My hatred of Abbott Laboratories and its Biaxin sales force began in initial training, thanks to a stellar job of brainwashing. Forced to memorize five key advantages
Zithromax possessed over Biaxin, an earlier generation agent in a similar class of antibiotics, I could not fathom why any physician would ever use Biaxin. In fact, to this day, I cannot think of a reason. Yet lots of pediatricians prescribed lots of Biaxin because they thought it was more effective in treating ear infections. Where did they get this false impression? The Abbott reps, of course.

With no data to back it up, these parrots simply repeated over and over again, “Biaxin is more powerful! Biaxin is more effective!” It worked. We, on the other hand, kept saying, “Zithromax has a cherry flavor and is only taken once a day!” We learned the hard way that physicians care much more about efficacy than compliance. It irked me to know that Abbott’s marketing strategists had been smarter than ours and that I hadn’t been smart enough to figure that out. It wasn’t hard to take my bitterness toward Pfizer and myself and redirect it toward a common enemy. A legendary story helped cement my hatred forever.

Pharmaceutical salespeople followed a number of unwritten guidelines, more like professional courtesies, intended to maintain a healthy atmosphere for everyone involved, including other reps, docs, and nurses. Number one was,
Reps should never attempt to go back in an office if another salesperson was already back there.
Not far behind was,
Reps should not bad-mouth a competitor’s product.

One story spread swiftly, via voice mail and phone calls. District managers retold it at district meetings, giving it more strength and credibility. I never once doubted its
veracity—until researching this book. I guess when you want to believe something badly enough, it is easy to do so.

An internist purportedly in the southeast was sitting at his office desk when a male Biaxin rep dropped by. The doc waved him in. The guy approached and tossed an object onto the desk. The physician picked it up and saw that it was a Kermit the Frog puppet. He asked what that was all about.

“Did you know, Doctor, that Jim Henson was taking Zithromax for his pneumonia when he died?” The physician had not known that. “If you don’t want that to happen to your patients, be sure to use Biaxin first line.” Offended by this tactic, the internist allegedly threw the rep out and barred him from the office. No matter. A line had been irrevocably crossed. Biaxin guys were dirt.

Checking some “facts” during the writing of
Hard Sell,
I discovered that Mr. Henson had indeed died of pneumonia, in 1990. That bothered me. Zithromax received FDA approval in 1993. The possibility existed that the Muppets’ creator had been enrolled in a clinical trial for Zithromax, and had in fact died while on the drug, but that was highly unlikely. So either the Biaxin guy was a moronic prick who decided to make up a story and risk his career to gain business or a Pfizer district manager invented the story to fire up his sales team. Hmmm.

Apocryphal sales tales were not limited to Abbott Labs. The Schering-Plough reps committed equally reprehensible offenses in the name of Claritin, the world’s
number-one-selling antihistamine and Schering’s most important product. Representing more than 30percent of the company’s sales, the allergy medication single-handedly determined stockholders’ happiness. Since Pfizer did not play for second place, Claritin immediately became Zyrtec’s biggest rival after getting FDA approval in early 1996. The battle for supremacy in the $4 billion antihistamine market centered on one issue: What was more important, efficacy or somnolence? There was no question that Zyrtec relieved allergy symptoms more effectively than Claritin; a head-to-head trial demonstrated this superiority. However, the latter had a sedation rate similar to placebo, whereas the former made 13.7 percent of patients drowsy.

To us, this was not a big deal. We had answers for the disparity, of course. “If I told you there was a 14 percent chance of rain tomorrow,” Bruce would ask physicians, “would you cancel the picnic?” No one ever said yes, but many physicians shied away from Zyrtec due to Schering’s scare tactics. The atmosphere quickly grew ugly, as the Claritin reps, desperate to maintain market share with their corporation’s bellwether product, yapped incessantly about this distinction, making unsubstantiated claims that the Airline Pilot Union had banned its members from taking Zyrtec and that several motorists had been cited for driving under the influence while taking our antihistamine. Tension mounted as Pfizer personnel, feeling personally attacked, vigorously defended our product.

We had been programmed, I mean instructed, to ask wary physicians to put just one or two patients on Zyrtec, confident that they’d see the efficacy advantage. This strategy backfired on me several times, with one
doctor’s wife
becoming so drowsy after taking Zyrtec that she fell asleep on the sofa at seven o’clock at night. Another pediatrician found himself unable to get out of bed on a Saturday—at noon. “Daddy, Daddy, get up and play with us,” his children pleaded, futilely. In situations like those, I was supposed to ask the physician, “But did Zyrtec alleviate the allergy symptoms?”