What have you done to prepare for a sales position?
June 21st, 2007 by the medical sales recruiter
A person without sales experience but with a lab background (research associate or clinical laboratory medical technologist) and a science degree (molecular, biology, cellular, chemistry, etc.) calls our firm…….they want to break into the world of sales for the clinical or research laboratory. The defining question I have for that person is: what have you done to prepare for a sales position? Jobs in pharmaceutical or laboratory products sales are demanding and competitive. If your answer doesn’t include at least 2 of the following possibilities you are toast!
1. Ride along with a sales representative from a lab sales company, pharmaceutical company, medical device company or medical products distributor.
2. Met with a neighbor or acquaintance who is a sales manager and spent quite a bit of time going over how their sales process works, what makes one person successful and another not so successful. (Here’s a great post on what makes a sales career fail.)
3. Taken a sales course (this is not seen that often).
4. Read more than one sales book - Zig Ziglar, Neil Rackham, Harvey Mackay, etc. And you better be able to talk intelligently about the author, their philosophy and your take-away from the book.
An answer that doesn’t show significant effort on your part means a couple of different things to me and to my hiring managers. It means you only recently decided to do this and really have no idea what you are getting yourself into….or even though this is interesting to you, it is not worthy of a significant amount of time or effort on your part….or you have such poor time management skills that you can’t find the time to do this type of research…or you aren’t creative enough to come up with an idea of how to prepare yourself for this type of position. Any one of these answers means our answer is “no”.
I think your first point is key. The ride along is so valuable to a prospective representative. Not only will you learn about the day to day responsibilities of a sales representative, but you will learn more about the corporate culture of the company. Find out how many calls you are expected to make per day. Watch closely and see how the representative interacts with the doctor. Are they pushy or more laid-back.
This is a great time to ask a lot of questions about what the representative likes and dislikes about the position. If will be reporting to the same manager, then take the opportunity to see if your styles are adaptable.
If you are lucky, the representative that you are riding with will schedule a luncheon. Representatives spend a lot of time setup lunches, so you will learn valuable, first-hand experience.
Maybe not as important, but you will also what type of company car you get. I have know pharmaceutical representatives that have chosen their future employer by the make and model of the company car. Me I would rather have an auto allowance, so I can choose whatever car I like.
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