Working Style of Pharmacist and Non-pharmacist Medical Representatives

Abstract

A medical representative is one who has duty on giving medical information to doctors on behalf of the pharmaceutical company. The aim to convince doctors to prescribe the medicine will help medical representatives achieve their sales target. Both pharmacist and non-pharmacist could work in this career. The objectives of the study were to describe working style of medical representatives and to compare the working style of pharmacist and non-pharmacist medical representatives. In - depth interview was used to collect data from 20 medical representatives working for the original pharmaceutical companies, 10 were pharmacists and others were not. Data were collected by face to face and telephone interview. Voice recording during the interview and word by word transcribing were conducted. Data were analyzed by categorizing selling activities into 7 selling processes as follows: customer recruitment, pre-call planning, customer visit, information presentation, handling objections or skepticisms, closing and follow up process which supported by sales promotional activities. Moreover, medical representatives still had any other activities. However, not all medical representatives followed all 7 steps of selling process. The working styles which were not different between two groups were customer recruitment, customer visit, handling objections and skepticisms, and closing. The working processes that tend to differ were pre-call planning, information presentation and follow up process. According to the informants’ working style, it was possible that the reasons of the differences might be pharmacy knowledge was needed for working in some steps and rational drug use concern of the informants.