- A pharmaceutical sales representative's job is to improve market share for their portfolio of pharmaceutical products. They do this by traveling to physicians' offices and conveying the benefits of their products to the physicians. Pharmaceutical reps attempt to differentiate their products from their competitive products by discussing potential side effects that may occur less frequently with their product, or additional benefits or effectiveness that have been proven by clinical studies. For many products, pharmaceutical sales reps provide physicians' offices with samples that are used to start a patient on a new medication.
- Pharmaceutical sales representatives provide physicians with access to new clinical research studies that they may not otherwise be aware of. Physicians lack the time necessary to research and learn about new pharmaceutical products that are now available for use, and pharmaceutical sales representatives help save physicians time by providing copies of new studies and other data. The samples pharmaceutical reps provide to doctors' offices are valuable because they allow patients to begin taking a new medication immediately instead of waiting to get a prescription filled at the pharmacy.
- There are generally two types of pharmaceutical representatives: primary care, who market their products mainly to general and family practice physicians, and specialty pharmaceutical sales representatives, who are experts in a specific disease or specialty area of practice.
- Pharmaceutical sales representatives have developed a poor reputation over the years. Some believe that pharmaceutical representatives waste physicians' time and try to push drugs on patients in inappropriate cases. Unfortunately, with so many pharmaceutical products on the market, the number of pharmaceutical sales representatives has increased proportionally. The large number of representatives vying for a physician's time in a given day does tend to take a toll on the amount of time the physician has to spend with patients, and as a result, many offices have restricted access to physicians.
- While pharmaceutical sales representatives do provide value to physicians, the sheer number of representatives has the potential to negatively impact health care. Some pharmaceutical companies have had to lay off hundreds of sales representatives in the past, and it's likely that this will happen again. Other companies are changing the way they market their products and are eliminating the availability of pharmaceutical samples. Eventually the system will evolve, possibly reducing the number of representatives in the field and creating less intrusive ways to get pertinent information to physicians.
