Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman (14 page)

Apparently, every other pharmaceutical salesperson in the United States knew going in that being a drug rep was the greatest gig going. I needed no further encouraging; I was ready to milk the system for all it was worth.

Clearly, a drug rep could not just play hooky from work. A number of precautions had to be taken to ensure that one was not caught slacking off. In fact, it was a lot of work to make it look as if I was working. Exhausting, practically.

There were basically two types of people in pharmaceutical sales: those who focused on exceeding sales goals and those who concentrated on getting enough sleep. Members of the former group prided themselves on being organized and making lists for
everything:
things to do, sales goals, deadlines, and so on. These people prayed to Stephen Covey every night. Those of us in the latter category, while perhaps lacking our colleagues’ zeal for organization, had our own list of daily do’s and don’ts. In hindsight, the undetected completion of a work-free workday may have required more planning and foresight than any successful sales month.

Not that there was a
Slacking for Dummies
handbook, but having thoroughly researched this, I think we all followed the same basic tenets that we tailored to our and our sales managers’ individual styles. If
Slacking for Dummies
had existed, it would have contained the following three chapters:

Voice Mail: Friend
and
Foe

Perception Is Reality

The Paper Chase

CHAPTER

Six

VOICE MAIL: FRIEND
AND
FOE

N
OTHING A SAVVY SLACKER DID
during a typical day was more important than the first thing: check voice mail. It took me two months to learn this.

Pfizer’s requirement to be on the road by seven-thirty provided us with a clear starting point. Obviously, if you were driving around town before eight o’clock, you had already had plenty of time to pick up the phone and check messages. Bruce expected his reps to check voice mail a minimum of three times per day: in the morning, at lunch, and at the end of the day (meaning five
P.M.
). Not coincidentally, he left us voice mails every morning at six o’clock. I did not give this much thought and, as a result, routinely answered those early-morning messages when I woke up. At ten
A.M.
Fortunately, dumb luck stepped in and saved me from a very brief career.

Two hours into our second field ride together, Bruce pulled out his cell phone and dialed into the voice-mail system. He then asked me for a piece of scrap paper. After about thirty seconds, I looked down to see what he was writing, and I almost crashed the car.

Scribbled one under the other were the names of the ten reps in our district, and next to each name was a time, for example, “Craig—6:50” and “Sean—8:15,” denoting when each person had listened to Bruce’s six
A.M.
voice mail. He was checking up on us, and there was no way of knowing how long he had been doing so!
Of all the low-down, dirty tricks. I mean, if a boss couldn’t trust his people to get up on time and work hard, what kind of relationship was that?
Miraculously, I had checked voice mail early that morning—I had
had
to do so to find out where I was supposed to meet Bruce—so my time read “6:30.” For the time being I was in the clear, but I grew nervous about how often the voice-mail lady had spoken my time ending in “
P.M.
”

Initially wary of opening Pandora’s box, I eventually chose to see exactly how deep the doo-doo was in which I was standing.

“What are you doing, boss?” I asked meekly.

Bruce shrugged disarmingly. “Ah, just something I picked up from another manager. One of the capabilities of this new voice-mail system is that anybody can punch a few buttons and code their message so that when the recipient listens to it, the system sends the originator
a message informing him of when they got it.” (Keep in mind that this was 1995, and voice mail was not as commonplace as it is today.) “So, I’m using it to see when everybody is checking messages.”

His blank face revealed nothing. My eyelid began to twitch.

“How long have you been doing that?”

He smiled like a proud papa. “First day!” he said, enthusiastically. “Your six-thirty was the earliest! Is that an everyday thing?”

Not only was I not in trouble, I was being praised! Trying to act nonchalant, I shrugged.

“Nah, it’s usually a little later, but I didn’t go for my run today.” Bruce nodded approvingly, and I sat a little taller in the Lumina, basking in my increased credibility with my boss. I should have been making the sign of the cross to ward off the lightning strike.

The first thing I did after dropping Bruce off that evening was voice mail all my friends.
“They can tell when we’re checking messages! They’re on to us!”
For once, I knew something they didn’t.
“Holy shit, Reidy!”
was the response du jour, and I was promised hundreds of free beers for my intelligence report on enemy activity. Instantly, longtime habits were changed as reps across the nation set alarm clocks for seven
A.M.
, leaving ample time to wake up, clear sleep from voices, and respond to inevitable messages from managers. After which, they would return to bed danger—and guilt—free.

Having neutralized a powerful weapon in Evil Management’s arsenal, I spent the next two months swimming in a sleep-induced sea of mediocrity. During a conversation with two veteran Pfizer reps, however, a storm blew in and rocked my boat.

Walking across a snowy hospital parking lot in Fort Wayne, I spotted Pat and Tom standing in front of the lobby. A combined ten years of Pfizer experience between them, they had already given me several pearls of advice in my short time with the company. I was always receptive to anything they had to offer, and on this occasion, they did not disappoint.

“Hey, you know about voice mail, right?” Pat asked. Finally, a chance to demonstrate that I was not so wet behind the ears, after all.

“Yeah, I know all about it,” I said, going on to detail the managers’ plan. I allowed myself a brief, proud smile.

“No, that’s not what I’m talking about,” Pat answered, rolling his eyes at Tom. Pat had my complete attention. “I’m talking about how they can trace the call.”

“Trace
what
call?” I asked, hairs standing up on the back of my neck.

“Your call into the voice-mail system!” Tom answered, sharing Pat’s impatience.

“How can they do that?” My voice had risen several octaves.

“Don’t ask
me,
man. I don’t know,” Pat said. “But I do know that it doesn’t matter how they do it. All that matters is that they
can
.” Gulp.

For the rest of the day, my mind was overwhelmed by the likelihood that Pfizer was hip to my check-voice-mail-from-bed trick. Even worse, as my fear of getting caught had diminished and my laziness had increased, I had begun calling voice mail from home throughout the day, after naps, before
Oprah,
and so on. Now, the gig was up. That night as I sent a message informing my friends of this new development, a thought occurred to me:
Do you have to list a company on your résumé if you got fired?

The next morning, seven-fifteen did not find me snuggled in my warm bed as I gargled and sang, “Do, re, mi” in an effort to loosen up my voice. I was shivering in my car as I drove to the nearest gas station, a mile from my apartment. Purpose: to use its pay phone to check voice mail. Standing in the freezing wind, I realized I was looking at a very long winter.

Based on the evidence presented so far, voice mail seemed to be a nasty cog in Darth Vader’s employee-control machinery. For those of us in whom the Force was strong, however, voice mail proved itself a most capable light saber, one that helped us would-be Skywalkers continue flying our half-assed operations beneath Empire radar.

This reverse strategy was a lot easier than I ever imagined. Picture the Allied forces sending hundreds of false messages in the weeks leading up to the D-day invasion of Normandy, attempting to convince the Germans the attack would occur elsewhere. We sort of did that. Just as Pfizer managers used our listening to messages as a
means of keeping tabs on us, we sent messages to make them think we were actually working.

The staple of this deception was the “Success Story.” Managers were forever forwarding on messages saying, “Hey, team, check out this success story from Kelly.” Unless the originator was a friend (in which case, you would want to listen to the message so you could make fun of him later for being such a kiss-ass), such forwards were immediately deleted, since most sales reps, including me, were too egotistical to admit that another rep could teach them something. What your teammates did with your success story didn’t matter, though. As long as your manager noted, “Jamie voice mailed at four-thirty on Thursday,” everything was kosher.

For the true artistes of slacking, however, there was a lot more to the successful leaving of success-story voice mails than merely checking in with the boss.

“En
thus
iasm sells!” Bruce repeatedly told us, referring to our delivery when speaking to physicians. He meant that our attitudes were contagious; if we were upbeat when discussing our products, customers were more likely to share that feeling and vice versa. I took that lesson and applied it to other areas. Like ditching work.

How enthusiastic? Suffice to say, I wouldn’t press the # key, aka the Send button, until I was certain I sounded as though I had just won my second Oscar of the evening. After all, if the call had truly been successful, wouldn’t I be pumped up about it? For starters, I liked to make
it sound like I had
just gotten
into my car following a good call, and I
just had to
voice mail my boss right away. Pretending to be a bit out of breath, I’d stammer a bit as if all the excitement made it difficult for me to get my thoughts together.

Giddy laugh. “Hey, boss, it’s Jamie!” Gasp. “Man, I just
had
to tell you about an
awesome
call I had with …”

Naming the physician was not an every-time thing. If the success story had actually taken place, I would give the doc’s name, list his sales potential ranking (
any
customer mentioned in a success story always ranked among my Top 10 biggest), and then relate the details of the call. The next time my manager spent the day with me, I’d remind him about the successful call prior to seeing the doctor again, thus setting myself up to demonstrate my ability to build on a previous encounter.

However, if any or all of the success story just happened to be fictional, I’d omit the doctor’s name, thereby removing any chance of getting caught in a lie somewhere down the road. Rather than give the physician’s name, I’d say, “A pediatrician in Fort Wayne”; that way, if Bruce ever met a pediatrician in Fort Wayne and asked, “Is this the guy from that great success story?” I could say, “No. That guy’s in Tibet on a month-long trek.”

Whenever possible, it helped to leave such a message while driving, since the sound of the road added to the sense that I had
just gotten
into my car following a good call, and I
just had to
voice mail my boss right away.

While enthusiasm and road noise were important factors, nothing played a bigger role than the timing of such a message. Ideally, success stories were sent after fourthirty on Friday afternoon, hopefully giving my manager the impression that I was a model rep who routinely called on docs till the final horn at the end of the week. Aiming for this time of day proved both convenient and productive for me, since I undoubtedly sounded enthusiastic (at the thought of skipping out of work early on Fridays) while speaking with the sound of the road in the background (as I headed out of town for the weekend).

It was a bit risky to leave success stories all the time, though,
especially
for a guy whose sales numbers were fairly mediocre. After all, a manager just might stop and ask himself, “Reidy leaves at least one success story per week, yet he never rises above the middle of the pack. What gives?” In order to combat such curiosity, I’d mix in the occasional Competitive Activity Story or Failure Story or Objection Story.

The Competitive Activity Story simply described the competition’s latest bad-guy behaviors, such as taking doctors golfing at Pebble Beach or using a previously unknown trial to discredit one of our drugs or tout theirs. “Hey, Bruce, just got out of a call with an allergist in Elkhart who told me he and the Claritin rep were drinking Cristal in the nineteenth hole when the rep showed him some data suggesting Claritin works better in Irish women. …”

The Failure Story simply took the success story and turned it on its head. Rather than speaking quickly with excitement dripping from my voice, I’d slow down my speech and sigh a few times. Enthusiasm was MIA, replaced by a glum my-dog-just-died-and-there-is-no-Santa-Claus tone. “Uh, hey, boss.” Sigh. “Jeez, did I just blow it with an allergist in Ft. Wayne. …” This type of message may have been more believable than its happy counterpart; no one wanted to admit failing, so who would ever make that up? But I learned the hard way not to lay it on too thick.