Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman (28 page)

Let me pose the question like this: If you had the chance to have the greatest orgasm of your life, but you had to take a relatively safe drug to do so, would you do it? That is the hope we all had with Viagra. I spoke with colleagues who said their sex life was already super, so they had no reason to try it. The New Jamie said, “Well, why not see if it can be a little better?” That would be a good thing, right?

Think about the Olympics. Remember Ben Johnson, the Canadian sprinter who tested positive for steroids
during the 1988 Summer Games? Drug-free, he had been one of the fastest guys
in the world,
but that wasn’t good enough for him. He risked permanent physical damage and international scorn to get that much faster, just two-tenths of a second. It’s all about pushing the envelope for these athletes, and I, as an amateur bedroom gymnast, was always on the lookout for an edge to improve my game that much more.

So, yeah, I tried Viagra, and let me tell you, that little blue pill was a guy’s best friend after the aforementioned thirteen shots of Jagermeister.

“How hard?” was the question I got from guys, their eyes aglow at the thought of secretly calling for a psuedo relief pitcher from the bullpen. I’d answer by flicking my finger against the beer bottle in my hand, prompting envious nodding.

However, the women who asked me if I had tried Viagra didn’t necessarily want to hear about that. In fact, it was questionable if they wanted to hear
anything
about my taking it. Leave it to a woman to ask a question to which she didn’t want to hear the answer.

Taking Viagra as a healthy, twenty-eight-year-old guy was not exactly like being the cool guy in junior high who brought reefer to the party. “Have you tried it?” the cute seventh-grader with braces would ask. “Sure, babe, and it is some good shit.” Then she’d tell her friend, “Oh my God, he
tried
it. I think I want to give him a hand job.” No, this was something completely different.

If I said no, she’d probably shrug and think, “Of course not. A healthy guy like that wouldn’t need it.” No harm, no foul.
Or
, maybe she would look at me like I was a moron, a guy with easy access to a revolutionary sex drug who didn’t take advantage of it. Maybe she’d think I was the
geek
in junior high who left the room when the bong got passed around.

If I said yes, though, the obvious question would be “Did it work?” I couldn’t just pull the cool-guy routine and say, “Yeah, babe, it did,” because she might have deduced from such an admission that I
needed
Viagra. I could not have blamed her for thinking so, since that was exactly what
I
thought after trying it and noticing a difference.

Dr. Charming’s staff was more than a little surprised to see me at eight a.m. on a Monday. This was not your normal Monday, however; this was the Monday after the Saturday I had taken Viagra. I practically tackled Dr. Charming when he entered the office from the “secret” entrance in the back of the building. “This’ll only take a minute,” I assured his confused nurse as I shoved the equally confused doctor into an empty examination room.

“What’s up?” he asked, smoothing out any wrinkles I’d caused in his thousand-dollar suit.

I didn’t hesitate. “There is something majorly wrong with me.”

He opened his hands. “Well, what is it?”

“I tried Viagra this weekend.” I paused to see if he was shocked.

He wasn’t. “And?”

Gulp. “And it …
worked
,” I said, whispering the last word.

He was unfazed. “And?”

I could have strangled him! “‘And?’ What the hell do you mean, ‘And?’ I’m twenty-eight years old, and I just told you that Viagra
worked
for me, and all you can say is ‘And?’”

His laughter did not calm me very much. Ditto for the could-you-be-any-dumber? look on his face.

“Jamie, you have nothing to worry about,” he assured me. “Look,
most
guys would notice a difference after taking Viagra. It’s a vasodilator! Viagra’s job is to increase blood flow, so that is what it’s going to do for everybody. Let’s say you’re operating at ninety-eight percent ‘efficiency.’ In that situation, Viagra would increase your blood flow two percent, or if a guy is at seventy-five percent, it’d increase it twenty-five percent. But Pfizer can’t run around telling every man in the country that Viagra may give them an improved hard-on, because the government would shut you down right away. That’s the last thing the FDA needs, you sales guys promising better boners to all the men in America. So the feds required Pfizer to limit Viagra’s labeling to only those men with serious erectile dysfunction.”

What he said made sense regarding “all the men in America,” but they had not tried Viagra that weekend and gotten the surprise of their life. “So, there’s nothing wrong with me?”

He shook his head. “No, there isn’t. Now, get out of here and let me do some work, Limpy.”

It was a good thing I could take a joke.

CHAPTER

Thirteen

SALES OR LACK THEREOF

U
NFORTUNATELY, THE JOKE WAS ON ME
when it came to Viagra sales. Thousands upon thousands of men sought treatment once a noninvasive option was made available. Viagra had literally created the market.

Everywhere, that is, except central California.

It took awhile for me to figure out that my Viagra sales sucked. Everybody in every office wanted to talk about Viagra. “Is that your Cadillac out there in the parking lot?” Dr. Door asked with a wink, alluding to the fact that I would obviously be making a bundle in bonuses. Every urologist I saw told me without prompting that they were writing more prescriptions for Viagra than they had ever written for anything else. So I assumed I was doing well.

I finished the 1998 sales year at approximately 94 percent of quota, good for third to last in
the nation
. The national average for urology reps was somewhere around 120
percent. Many people—my boss being the most curious—attempted unsuccessfully to figure out why my Viagra numbers drooped so far below those of my colleagues. I had the answer all along: The company screwed me.

Sales reps always took full credit for good sales and rarely accepted blame for poor sales. If Joe Rep made it to the top, there was
no way
he would credit random luck, e.g., the new PharmD of his biggest HMO added Zoloft to the formulary, or a hospital pharmacist who feared a price increase after New Year’s quadrupled his normal order in December. Sometimes, a rep had no clue as to how he had managed to finish number one. No matter. When asked to share the secret of his success with the group (managers
always
asked the number-one rep to share his secrets with the group, forgetting that the group’s members would not pay a lick of attention because they attributed his success entirely to luck), the guy peered down from his lofty perch and credited his own creativity, hard work, perseverance, blah, blah, blah.

When Joe Rep subsequently tumbled
down
the mountain, however, said fall had nothing to do with him. He’d blame HMOs, doctors sleeping with competing reps, or even locusts, but he would never,
ever
take responsibility. Just about out of excuses, a desperate rep would cite the reporting glitch, the infamous claim that he had not gotten credit for all the sales in his territory, as in, “The wholesaler’s numbers were off in March!” Often initiated, this theory was rarely substantiated.

What to do when blaming everyone from Jonas Salk to the Democrats didn’t work? Blame the company, of course.

“The company screwed me” had to be the most common phrase spoken at any Pfizer meeting. It was as if Billy, the blond kid from
The Family Circus
comic strip, had morphed into a real person and chosen pharmaceutical sales as his career.
Not me.

The basis for “The company screwed me” plea was simple: The bean counters in New York City had no clue what it was really like in the field, so they simply invented sales quotas, most often utilizing a dart board to do so. Sales reps resented their fate being determined by nameless people seemingly fresh out of business school.

HQ claimed that quotas were based on years of statistical analysis of each territory and how “equal” competitors, i.e., comparable agents in the same class of drug, had fared in each territory postlaunch. For instance, before Pfizer launched Zithromax, the company researched Biaxin’s sales for each territory in the country, factoring them into the quotas for each rep. Territories in which Biaxin had been more successful received higher quotas than those in which it had not done as well. To their credit, the Suits presented a solid argument that made it seem like there was no way to screw us.

That being said, reps routinely received sales goals that were completely unrealistic and, therefore, unreachable. If there is one basic rule in sales, one
absolute must
, it is to
“reach goal,” aka make quota. I did not make quota with Viagra. In two years.

I was ready to blame the company, believe me. I mean, how could some MBAs in
New York City
who couldn’t sell condoms to Colin Farrell know how much Viagra would be used in the San Joaquin Valley’s farming communities? Well, they couldn’t, but it wasn’t their fault. Viagra broke the mold. There was no “equal” competitor for Viagra. It was impossible to use the first-year sales of Muse as a barometer for Viagra sales projections, since thousands of men had resisted seeking treatment for their ED until a pill arrived on the marketplace. Accordingly, the bean counters had simply underestimated what some territories would sell, and overestimated the amount in others.

For a time, a female rep in Utah had achieved more than 300 percent of her quota. Jokes flew about the marital habits of Mormons, as people tried to explain the strange phenomenon of her doubling the sales of the next best territory. Finally, someone in HQ determined that most of Viagra’s Internet orders from across the nation were being filled in Utah. She subsequently stopped receiving credit for Internet orders, and her sales numbers returned to earth.

A teammate of mine in Seattle benefited from the aforementioned phenomenon of underestimating potential sales and finished the year ranked number one at a whopping 170 percent of quota. We all had a lot of bitter, sarcastic fun asking Dan for his “secret”; the joke being
that we were the
urology reps!
We focused on urologists—the docs whose job it was to treat erectile dysfunction—and it wasn’t as though some reps were better than others at getting those specialists to prescribe more Viagra. No urologist in America looked back on an appointment with an ED patient and slapped himself in the forehead like he could’ve had a V8, saying, “I could’ve given that guy Viagra!” Apparently, this fact managed to escape Dan, who actually talked for ten minutes when asked to stand up and share the secret of his success with the group.

“Maybe some of you can take a lesson from Dan,” our boss Jackie suggested, looking in my direction. Bosses did not like it when their reps finished low enough that people could include “to last” in the sentence. Fortunately for me, she stepped down. Unfortunately, her replacement made it his personal mission in life to ensure that I made my Viagra quota in 1999.

I really thought I would do it. Really. I figured HQ now had a year’s worth of data to go by, and they’d look at things fairly and give us a fair quota.

Not so much. At the Viagra launch meeting in 1998, Pfizer’s VP of Sales—the biggest dog in our sales world—Hank McCrorie stood up in front of us and boasted, “Viagra does not drive our stock price.”
Crazy cheers.
“Other companies would kill to have just one billion-dollar drug. We have
four
other billion-dollar drugs [Lipitor, Norvasc, Zoloft, Zithromax]. Viagra is going to be a billion-dollar drug. This is something we are used
to at Pfizer.”
Crazier cheers.
Fast forward to 1999, when Pfizer stock had been flat for months. The big dog had learned a new trick. “Viagra drives our stock price,” Mr. McCrorie announced, without a trace of irony. “We need to sell more Viagra.”

I, for one, did not need my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss to tell me I had to sell more of my most heavily weighted product in 1999; I already knew that. You see, for the first time in my pharmaceutical career, I had become embarrassed by my lack of success, but Viagra was not the turning point. Amazingly, vitamin V was not the first drug I failed to launch successfully in 1998.

Drug reps loved launching a new drug for two reasons: One, it gave us something new to talk about with physicians in a job that could become very boring very quickly; two, the company’s inability to correctly predict how much of the product would be sold could result in huge moneymaking opportunities (or, in my case with Viagra, not). In February 1998, six weeks before Viagra, Pfizer introduced Trovan, a revolutionary antibiotic the FDA had approved for an eye-popping fourteen bacterial infections. As a member of the new Urology/GYN Division, my Trovan efforts were focused on prostatitis (an inflammation of the prostate) and urinary tract infections. The sales quotas for our division were set
extremely
low, and my colleagues and I could not wait to hit the field and blow out our Trovan numbers.