Medical Sales Recruiter - Tips & Quips

If you’re at the PHC Consulting website or blog, you’re either looking for a new opportunity in your area of pharma or medical device or laboratory sales, or maybe you’re looking to transition from one to another.  Maybe you’re unsure about the differences between them, and don’t know how to tell which would be the best fit for you.  Vincent Ma, the author of Non Sterile (a blog focused on medical device sales) wrote an extremely informative guest column on http://www.pharmrepclinic.com/  that outlines the differences between pharma sales and medical device sales , sprinkled with examples from his own experiences, that you should read now.  I can’t post the entire thing here, but here are some excerpts:

There are several similarities between pharmaceutical sales and medical device sales. In both professions, we are trying to educate doctors and other medical staff that the features and benefits of the products that we represent are better than that of our competitors. Both types of sales representatives provide lunches, samples, marketing tchotchkes and other forms of entertainment.

In both areas, you will be concerned with repeat business and purchasing groups, which Vincent covers.  It gets more interesting when you start considering the differences:

The goal in pharmaceutical sales is to increase the number of prescriptions (”scripts”) written by physicians in your assigned geographical area. In medical devices sales, the goal is get the purchase order. In pharmaceutical sales, the results of your efforts are rarely instantaneous; weeks may pass before you know if the lunch you provided increased the writing habits for your drug at that particular office. With medical devices sales, you know at the end of the day if you did a good job, because you either got the purchase order or you didn’t. You don’t have to wait a month to see if your numbers go up.

Whereas pharmaceutical companies may provide their representatives with a targeted list of physicians, medical device representatives will spend much of their time prospecting for new hospitals, medical offices and clinics within their territory. With prospecting, there is a lot of cold calling. It is critical to network and ask for referrals in medical devices sales. The sales cycle is usually longer, and device representatives have to work harder to maintain relationships. Once a purchase is completed, a hospital may go five or ten years before they need to replace the equipment. This is especially true of capital equipment purchases. In pharmaceutical sales you follow a routing schedule and see many of the same physicians again and again. In device sales, you will usually cover a larger territory, but the bigger the territory, the greater the opportunity.

The differences are in selling styles and processes and in what your own personal risk/reward factors are.  Vincent has a list of questions to ask yourself to help you pinpoint which area would be the best for you.