Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman (29 page)

I had to wait a long time. Fortunately for my colleagues, most of them posted their finest sales numbers ever. One guy in New England reached 1,000 percent of quota at one point during the year, before fading to a paltry 800 percent at year’s end. I made it a point to introduce myself to this sales sensei at a meeting, and I had the reaction most fans have when meeting a celebrity: I thought you’d be taller. He was a nice guy—don’t get me wrong—but charismatic he was not. “Outgoing” would even have been a stretch. Later, I met another person who surpassed her sales goal by six or seven times, a chatterbox Jewish girl from New York City who could have been the inspiration for Chandler’s girlfriend Janice. This mid-twenties mensch offered to fly out to California to work with me and see what I was doing wrong because “this is, like, the
easiest
drug to sell ever!”

In normal years, making quota was sufficient. In Trovan’s debut run, however, my 102 percent prompted jokes from my colleagues. “Reidy, you could sell ice to Eskimos, really.” Toss in my third to last in the nation Viagra ranking, and 1998 finished up as a complete waste of time for everyone involved with Jamie Reidy.

No longer could I kid myself. For two years, I had ignored the fact that I had finished behind a guy who had never seen nachos. But now that my shitty Trovan performance had prompted offers of assistance from strangers, I finally acknowledged a burning humiliation: That splinter had festered into a full-blown sepsis. Enough was enough.

Sick of getting my ass kicked, I approached 1999 with a new determination. I resolved to sell Trovan with the energy I should have applied in ’98, to relaunch the antibiotic in the San Joaquin Valley. This did not mean that I began waking up before nine or working past four—after all, I didn’t undergo a brain transplant—but I did begin to target the high prescribers in my territory, in addition to the docs with whom I liked to joke around. I even implemented a radical new strategy in which I’d actually discuss Trovan with physicians when calling on them. And it worked!

With a year’s worth of sales data to analyze, Pfizer HQ had zeroed in on the appropriate quotas for everyone; subsequently, no one stood above 200 percent. By the end of May, I ranked seventh in the nation at 160 percent, but this number belied my actual position since my weekly sales were still trending upward while those of the six reps ahead of me were falling, due in large part to competitors’ spreading news of Trovan-related liver failures in the first half of that year. Fortunately, no patients in my territory had experienced this tragic adverse event, and my doctors continued prescribing it. I was finally kicking ass! Until June, that is.

After consulting with the FDA, Pfizer voluntarily pulled Trovan from the U.S. market due to the increasing reports of severe liver damage caused by the antibiotic. Looking at the big picture, I was proud of the company for doing the right thing ethically despite the negative
financial impact on our bottom line. Sitting in Fresno with my personal blinders squarely on, however, I was crushed.
But I was gonna be number one!

My new boss Mitch quickly recognized my symptoms of depression and began damage control right away. “Jamie, I know this sucks, but you can still have a great year. Your Trovan ranking won’t drop, so you’ll have that number seven, albeit weighted less heavily, going for you. And your Celebrex numbers look good, so just focus on Celebrex and Viagra from here on out.”

We had launched Celebrex, a new anti-inflammatory drug in February 1999, and for a nice change of pace, I actually managed to not screw up the first year’s sales. Sitting comfortably above quota, I still had several docs who had not bought into the advantages of Celebrex, meaning Mitch’s plan for focusing on this drug held a lot of promise. Focusing on my nemesis product, Viagra did not look as rosy.

In order to complete my worst-to-first campaign, I’d have to get my urologists to prescribe more of the drug they claimed they could not prescribe any more often. “Of course they can’t prescribe any more than they are already doing,” came the reply from up above. “That’s why we need to get more men into the urology offices.”

For once, it seemed as if headquarters and field-based personnel were on the same wavelength. We couldn’t wait to see the ad campaign that would make Claritin’s in-your-face marketing tactics seem tame. Everyone
knew Pfizer had landed a national spokesman, but he had yet to be named publicly. The rumor mill buzzed; maybe even Hugh Hefner? The possibilities were tantalizing.

We got Bob Dole instead of Hef, which is sort of like getting Ralph Malph when you asked for the Fonz. Disappointment gave way to rage when the former senator refused even to mention Viagra in his television ad; like the whole world didn’t see your wife raving about the little blue pill on
Larry King Live
, Bob. Not that I didn’t appreciate the sincerity of his plea for men to get checked out, but patients across America were not going to burst from their Barcaloungers and run to the urologist just because a ninety-year-old, ex-presidential candidate from
Kansas
urged them to do so. Imagine how many guys would have been standing in urology waiting rooms the day after a commercial featuring Hugh Hefner and his seven lovelies aired during
Monday Night Football!

(In mid-December 1999, Pfizer signed a deal to sponsor a NASCAR racing team. At races across the nation, Pfizer set up medical tents in which men could undergo free screening for diabetes and hypertension, two common diseases in a population—white southerners—known for its poor dietary habits. In addition to possibly saving lives, this program identified future Viagra patients, as men suffering from diabetes and hypertension often developed erectile dysfunction. On the track things were not as successful, as Jeff Fuller’s number 27 car performed miserably, even failing to complete
several races. This prompted painful commentary from
SportsCenter
anchormen: “And the Viagra car
petered out
today at Talladega.”)

After it became clear that our spokesman had failed to generate an increase in prescriptions, Pfizer chose another means. Frighteningly, it involved yours truly.

“
You
are going to drive patients into offices,” Mitch told us with a straight face. We all got a kick out of that one. He did not return our smiles, however. In fact, he had that “I-am-the-boss-and-even-though-this-is-clearly-a-horseshit-idea-I-have-to-present-it-as-though-I-think-it-is-brilliant” look on his middle-manager face. As a former army officer, he had years of experience at implementing ludicrous ideas that had originated in headquarters. He would need to draw on every ounce of said experience to make it out of this meeting room alive.

“You guys are going to set up community outreach programs, at which local urologists and cardiologists will tell the public how Viagra works and why it’s safe.” The room fell silent until someone braver than me spoke up. “But we’re sales reps. Why are
we
the ones doing this? Our job is to
sell
the drugs to the patients, not
find
the patients.” I had to hand it to Mitch, though. Presented with undeniably perfect logic, he stuck to his guns.

“This is going to work out great! See, you’ll put some money in your urologist’s pocket for the speaking fee, and he’ll be your friend forever. Plus, you’ll be helping build his practice by getting him new patients from
the attendees; how many reps can say that?” There was one major flaw in that theory—a flaw that had been repeatedly communicated to headquarters and repeatedly ignored: Urologists didn’t want to treat
more
ED patients. They wanted to treat
fewer.

Urologists considered themselves surgeons first, clinicians second. Sometime during their internal medicine residencies, they figured out that they liked to cut, but didn’t want to do general surgery and didn’t want to spend too much time in a lengthy fellowship. They also liked dealing with patients. Urology was a nice compromise for them. The HMO era threw their routine out of whack, however, by severely curtailing their reimbursement for surgery. Thus, urologists were forced to operate more often in order to maintain their income. Result: They had less time to see patients in the office.

Because of the awkward nature of the condition, patients with ED took considerably more time than those with incontinence or bladder infections. One urologist told me, “You can’t get these guys to shut up! I just want to say, ‘Okay, I understand. This is treatable, and here is what we are going to do.’ But they never let you off that easy.” Referring to the amount of work required to uncover what truly ailed a patient, Dr. Charming, who had a large number of migrant farmworkers in his practice, revealed, “
Back pain
is Mexican for ED.” Hence, urologists wanted to pass the burden of ED patients to their primary care colleagues.

“Viagra has taken the mystery out of treating this. If Viagra doesn’t work,
then
patients should see us.”

Unmoved by such arguments, Pfizer turned its reps into recruiters. Our original strategy wasn’t too aggressive. In fact, it actually made some sense. We contacted local VFWs, Lions Clubs, and other community organizations to see if they had any interest in a Viagra information program. With memberships consisting primarily of men over the age of fifty, most organizations acquiesced. One of my colleagues printed up stamped 3 − 5 cards with the speaker’s name and address on the front, and left them in front of every place setting. All an attendee had to do to set up an appointment was fill out the back (name, phone number, “I’d like an appointment in July”) and mail it in. In spite of these efforts, the urologists giving the talks failed to gain many, if any, new patients. No new patients meant no new prescriptions for Viagra; not exactly the return on investment for which the higher-ups were looking.

The word came down from above. “We’re doing this all wrong.” We nodded knowingly, eager to see them eat crow.

“You need to go directly
to the community.”
Apparently, we were not thinking on a big enough scale. They wanted us to think on a “Billy Graham–revival” scale. I was beginning to think on a “car-bomb-in-HQ” scale. The Viagra sales team in Visalia, California, a town of ninety thousand famous for its citrus production, found religion and set out to host the nation’s biggest Viagra program. And we did.

Not that I had anything to do with it. As
the
urology rep, you’d think I would have been one of the ringleaders, if not Gunther Gabel-Williams. However, I was not involved in any of the planning, coordinating, or doing. Rather, four extremely motivated and organized people—having correctly recognized that I would only get in the way—created the largest undertaking of its kind in the history of pharmaceutical undertakings. They went all out.

You could not go into a doctor’s office in Visalia or its neighboring towns without knocking over a flyer. You could not enter a pharmacy without seeing a poster—a poster!—advertising the event. I even picked up a leaflet at a gas station. This was going to be so big that we reserved a conference room at the Holiday Inn with nonalcoholic drinks and finger foods for two hundred people.

When we totaled up the costs, including $500 each for the local urologist and cardiologist, we had spent close to $3,000. Lord knows how many man-hours they spent on this, the Mother of All Programs. Half an hour before the scheduled start time, one of the newer reps looked out at the sea of empty chairs filling the conference room and asked, “What if there aren’t enough seats?” Such was our confidence level.

Four people showed up for the program. F-o-u-r.
Cricket. Cricket.
Two older gentlemen arrived separately, sat on opposite sides of the aisle from each other, and spent an awkward ten minutes making small talk.
I’m just covering for a friend who couldn’t make it.
I felt so bad
for these guys. You could tell they had expected to find comfort in a crowd. Fortunately, the attendance doubled when a married couple in their mid-thirties showed up. See that, the old men seemed to think. It happens to men of all ages!

We finally told the doctors to begin their talk—twenty minutes late—and no more than five minutes had elapsed when the married couple got up and left. One of my colleagues chased after them to ask why they were leaving so early. They had expected a sex-education class designed to restore the spice in a marriage. I walked to the hotel bar and ordered a beer.

At least nobody got yelled at. That’s what we expected to happen, that somebody in HQ would start a big ball of shit rolling downhill until it crushed the poor worker bees in Visalia. It didn’t happen, though. Mitch explained that it
couldn’t
happen, because we had done everything right. It wasn’t our fault that nobody showed up. Word of the disaster spread quickly across the country, and talk of community programs vanished. Fifteen hundred dollars per attendee was somewhat more than Pfizer’s preferred dollar-to-participant ratio.

And my sales still sucked! In fact, they had gotten worse in Viagra’s second year, slipping to 84 percent of quota. Desperate for an answer, I decided that I had been giving away too many samples, thereby decreasing the need for urologists to write prescriptions. If the national average for sexual intercourse in a marriage is six times
per month (as we had been told at a meeting once), I reasoned, and there are five 50-milligram tablets in each Viagra sample pack, then I was giving the majority of people a freebie! Thus, the boycott was born.

I stopped giving out Viagra samples altogether. Of course, I needed a story to back it up when questioned by urologists. Shaking my head disgustedly, I’d sigh and simply say, “Production problems in Memphis,” as if it were an everyday occurrence with which they were used to dealing. “Somebody miscalculated and we didn’t make enough Viagra samples for July. Hopefully, they will get it straightened out by August.” Strangely enough, the “problem” was not corrected until nearly the end of September, which just happened to be the last month of our sales year. This did not make many urologists happy. In fact, I got yelled at by a couple of docs. One intuitive guy even called me a liar, saying that I
had to be
holding back.