Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman (19 page)

“Sample tracker,” he hissed, without missing a peck.
Sample tracker?

They say that people with life-threatening food allergies feel a sense of dread as soon as they have swallowed something they are allergic to, as if the body’s self-defense system can
instantly
identify the presence of a lethal intruder. That is how I felt when Michael uttered the words “sample tracker.” I did not know what they meant, but I instinctively knew that they were not good for me and could even be fatal.

Looking to “cut down on paper usage,” G.D. Searle & Co. spent a ton of money on an electronic sample-tracking system. Brandishing handheld computers, reps had physicians sign their names on the screen—just like the brown-clad deliverymen did. As a side “benefit,” this new system time-stamped each signature, meaning management knew the exact date and time when Dr. Smith signed for samples.

This was truly a sign of the apocalypse. How was a sales guy supposed to wake up at ten-thirty
A.M.
, not see any docs all day, and still enter eight calls at eleven
P.M.
? After a few moments of breathing into a paper bag, I had the answer.

“Just change the time on the, uh, the thingy,” I said, as if it was the most elementary idea in the world. Apparently, it was.

“They already thought of that,” Michael responded, glumly. “The time is controlled via satellite.” Bastards! Genius bastards!

I could hear the proverbial bell tolling. If a little company like G.D. Searle & Co. had ponied up the cash to adopt this new technology, then Pfizer, Inc., industry titan, would not be far behind. I grew nauseous at the thought of updating my résumé.

So the wait began. I flinched every time I heard my boss’s boss’s voice on voice mail and soon turned into a nervous wreck. Days turned into weeks, and it finally dawned on me that there was nothing to worry about. Maybe Pfizer actually trusted us!

More realistically, perhaps management resisted the urge to implement a system of which Big Brother would have been proud. I once asked Bruce how often he drove past his reps’ homes in the morning to see what time they left for work. He looked at me as if I had suggested selling company secrets to Abbott Labs.

“Can’t do it!” he said, face reddening. “That would be considered harassment. We could get sued for that.”

I shook my head as though I didn’t hear him correctly. “You can get sued for checking up on your people to make sure they’re doing their job?” He nodded.

I’d finally found a difference between the army and Pfizer!

An army captain who commands a company has three or four platoons of forty soldiers each. This guy works for a lieutenant colonel, who runs a battalion, which consists of three to five companies. Throughout the week, the lieutenant colonel will check the battalion training schedule to see where his Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, and Delta Companies are conducting their M-16 marksmanship or orienteering or bivouacking, and then jump in his vehicle and drive out unannounced to observe. Brigade commanders (colonels who have three to four battalions under them) and division commanders (generals who have five brigades reporting to them) do the same. How else can a boss know if his people are truly exhibiting the behaviors necessary to succeed? Checking up does not reflect a lack of trust, just a desire to ensure that standards continue to be met. Any leader can get his people to look good when he knows the Old Man is in the area, but what about the 99 percent of the time when he and his soldiers are not being observed? Every boss likes to make sure his people are doing things correctly; if they are not, the commander will “suggest” ways to improve.

I can only imagine the scene if a company commander told his battalion commander, “Sir, I cannot work like this. I do not appreciate your showing up to monitor my efforts without any notice. It is nothing short of harassment. Cease such behaviors immediately, or I will sue.” That young captain would spend the rest of his (short) career trying to remove his boss’s combat boot from his
rear end. Yet, that was the situation within Pfizer. I could park my Lumina on the street all day long and not worry about Bruce driving by and busting me. Even if he did cruise through my neighborhood and spot my car at two
P.M.
, the evidence was inadmissible in pharmaceutical court.

Bruce developed his own system for keeping me in line, though. Without fail, he would schedule a ride-along with me on Friday (preventing me both from going out Thursday night and leaving early for the weekend), or the day after my birthday, or the Super Bowl, or a Game 7.

After one particularly brutal day when Bruce had hit the Daily Double by working with me the day after the NCAA championship basketball game fell on my birthday, I collapsed on the sofa at six. At night. My back and feet ached; my stomach was still doing somersaults thanks to a hangover combined with a daylong case of the nerves from walking into offices and being terrified doctors would ask, “Who are you?”

“Jesus, that was a long day!” I announced to my roommates. “I don’t know how people do that.”

“How long was it?” Steve asked.

“Eight to
five-thirty,
” I whispered, barely able to summon the energy to speak.

Steve and Michael exchanged looks. “Welcome to the real world,” Steve said without a trace of sympathy.
The real world?

We’ve gotta have a drug for that, right?

CHAPTER

Nine

IT’S THE SALES, STUPID

D
ESPITE BEING PRESENT
for all my nonworking working hours, I was stunned to discover that my sales stank. I thought that doctors would find me as likable as I found myself and would proceed to write prescriptions hand over fist for all my drugs. Instead, I was ranked in the lower half of my team and the lower quadrant nationally. This shocked Bruce, as well.

“I don’t get it, Jamie,” he said, over an extended lunch at Lula’s Café. (I gave Steve a lot of business.) Bruce and I were reviewing my sales performance. More accurately, he was doing the reviewing while I was doing the hemming and hawing. “Do you realize you’re only going to make two grand in bonus for the first half of the year?” he asked, incredulous. At this, I looked up from my standard turkey and provolone on sourdough and met his hard stare.!

“You mean they pay me more?” I had forgotten all about the bonus thing.

Bruce’s bug eyes nearly exploded from their sockets. This was not the answer he expected, and he began massaging his temples the way my dad had done in high school when we discussed my C minus in theology. Then he smacked his hands on the table and shook his head repeatedly. “I need to find a way to motivate you, Jamie, because money obviously isn’t it. You
do
realize that most people get into sales because they want to make as much money as they can?” I shrugged. He exhaled loudly and looked around the café as if the answer was somewhere within range of our table. “I just don’t understand how you’re not blowing out your sales. Whenever I work with you, Jamie, the nurses make sure you get to see the docs, and you always give a solid detail and close them for the business, so I can’t figure out why you’re not doing better, let alone not number one.” Figuring it was safer to say as little as possible, I shrugged. “But this,” he said, pointing down at the table, “this is …” He couldn’t finish the sentence. A manila folder with my name on it rested on the table between us. It contained numerous charts and graphs and reports, none of which put a smile on Bruce’s face.

Reps were given sales quotas for each of our four drugs, with each holding a different weighting, or importance, like in a college class where half your grade was determined by the final exam, and the remaining 50 percent was split between papers and class participation.
As our division’s most vital product, Zithromax impacted our overall quota far more than the others. Doing well with Zithromax could almost guarantee a successful year, while cranking out sales of Diflucan, a drug whose market potential and importance were minimal, didn’t mean much.

“This is an embarrassment,” he finally managed to summarize. “A guy as smart and as well liked as you should be at the top, Jamie, but you’re not even close. Even Jerry is beating you.”

Ouch. Telling me Jerry was a better salesman was equivalent to touting Al Gore as more charismatic, Gilbert Gottfried more handsome, Homer Simpson more athletic. A moody, weird guy who taught his kids to shoot chipmunks in the backyard for fun (seriously; he told me all about it), Jerry evoked a “Hello,
Newman
” response from every member of our district. On top of that, he couldn’t even identify an American bar-food staple.

At dinner during a three-day district meeting, I sat with Bruce and Kristi, the female team member who had married the FedEx stalker, leaving one spot open at our four-top. As we quietly but feverishly waved Jack over to take the last seat, Jerry spotted it and plopped himself down. Within seconds, he was regaling us with stories of farm life in Ohio or wherever he had grown up. Fortunately, his soliloquy was interrupted by the arrival of our appetizers—chicken fingers, chicken wings, and nachos.

As Bruce, Kristi, and I started digging in, Jerry stared quizzically at one of the orders. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing at the plate of nachos deliciously covered with cheese, salsa, sour cream, guacamole, olives, and onions.

The three of us Earthlings exchanged looks.
Is he serious?
Then Kristi said, “Jerry, those are
nachos
.” He shrugged. “I’ve never seen those before. I need to tell my wife about them.”

“Jerry,” I said, “you need to get out of the Ponderosa, man.”

So mentioning that Jerry’s sales were better than mine was a shrewd move on Bruce’s part. I felt like Jon Lovitz playing Michael Dukakis on the
Saturday Night Live
skit parodying his 1988 debate with George H. W. Bush: “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.” It stung, but didn’t cause me to leap from my chair, sprint to the car, and call on ten more doctors that day. It was more like a tiny splinter in my skin, a minor irritation that would eventually fester into a raging infection.

Despite dropping the “Jerry Bomb” on me, Bruce refused to relent and continued blistering my sales performance.

“You are right in the middle of the district in Zithromax sales, Zyrtec sales, Zoloft sales, and overall sales. But you’re totally
killing it
with Diflucan. What’s your secret?” Bruce asked, registering a 10 on the sarcasm scale. I got up to refill our drinks.

In reality—not that I pointed this out to him—I wasn’t doing all
that
badly. My performance certainly
disappointed Bruce, but it wasn’t like I was in danger of getting fired or placed on a “development program,” which was the first step toward getting fired. The ultimate goal in sales was to make quota, meaning that you achieved 100 percent of the sales target the company gave you at the start of the year. That number was calculated using the weightings given to a division’s different drugs; my middle-of-the-road sales for Zithromax, Zyrtec, and Zoloft plus my high-achiever number for Diflucan added up to more than 100 percent, meaning I’d done my job. Not very well, but well enough for me. Bruce wanted me to be Abe Froman, Sausage King of Chicago; I saw myself as more of a Ferris.

When I returned, Bruce picked up where he had left off. “Not to mention, you’re
last
in the district in calls per day and signatures per day.” I refused to meet his gaze. “You can forget about getting promoted to the training department with stats like this, guy.”

He looked deeper into the folder and flipped through several pages until he found one he wanted. “I guess it’s not all negative, though,” he said. I stopped examining the tabletop for microscopic crumbs and looked up to meet his gaze.
Really?

“Yeah, it’s not fair to say you’re not number one in anything. You’re actually leading the district in one category.” I sat up a little straighter and thrust my chest out to its normal capacity. You’re damn right I’m leading the district in a category!

“Which one?” I asked, trying to suppress a smile.

Bruce took another pull on his soda. “Sick days. You’ve taken three times more than anyone else.”

Fortunately, this was not my fault. It was his.

If you recall, one of Bruce’s mantras was “Enthusiasm sells!” Conversely, he added a corollary to this rule stating that an ill sales rep who insisted on toughing it out and working rather than staying home in bed could actually do more harm than good. “When you’re sick, you have less energy. And when you have less energy, you have less en
thu
siasm,” Bruce reasoned. “When you have less enthusiasm in general, you’ll have less enthusiasm about our products, and when you have less enthusiasm about our products”—he changed his voice to sound sick and sleepy—
“‘Doctor, Zithromax is a fairly okay drug, really,’
you’re going to have the opposite effect of what you want, you’re going to turn docs off. So stay home when you’re sick.” A devoted student of this philosophy, I chose to stay in bed rather than put sales at risk whenever I felt less than 100 percent. Apparently, my shortsighted teammates did not see the potential disasters awaiting them. Yet I got chided for being number one in something. What a crock.