For those of you interested in advancing to a specialty-sales position, clinical-trials competency is especially critical. Even before you advance to specialty sales, however, you may already appreciate the need for a certain level of mastery in understanding the clinical development process when you confront objections from doctors about data you present. The other key competency is, not surprisingly, your ability to communicate clinical information.

Clinical communication competency

• Learn how each of your doctors likes to receive information. In other words, customize your approach to the individual physician. While there are useful tools to group doctors, psychographically, for example, as a "skeptical" or "friendly" customer, your best source for what a doctor wants is the doctor himself. The only constant you can count on is a deep disdain for canned sales speeches.
• Tailor each interaction to the level of evidence preferred by the doctor. Evidence-based medicine has a foothold in clinical decision-making today. Therefore, know the levels of evidence in evidence-based medicine, and what differentiates each level of evidence. This can be more effective in engaging physicians in meaningful dialog than figuring out ways to psychoanalyze your doctors based on what's hanging on their office walls. They'll also appreciate you more as a true clinical professional. In cases in which a doctor needs in-depth scientific discourse that is unmet by traditional responses (for example, a medical-information letter or a product-information request), you can facilitate a meeting for that doctor with a physician peer or a medical-affairs constituent within your company.
• Treat doctors' objections as an opportunity for dialog, not a "problem to handle." I am amazed at how focused sales training is on handling objections. The commonly prescribed approach plays more like a mind game in which the doctor is set to win because he can shut the door in your face. It's no wonder representatives today continue to face objections that they need to "handle" on a daily basis. To turn objections into opportunities, you will need to accept the possibility that the doctor's objection may be valid, and be able to interpret the data from the doctor's point of view. And I don't mean paying lip service where you feign understanding, because doctors catch on right away.
• Stay true by behaving professionally. If you are in this for the long haul, you must learn to become comfortable talking about topics that amateur representatives shy away from: safety, patient compliance (adherence), patient types and generics. The reps doctors trust are those who aren't afraid to admit that their drugs work well in certain patient types (as opposed to "the next 10 patients who walk into your clinic with disease X") and to defer to the doctors' decisions for generic alternatives because of patients' sensitivity to price. These representatives proactively discuss safety issues with physicians so doctors don't become blindsided when the patients call back. Professional sales reps will discuss issues around patient compliance to therapy, and help physicians anticipate and manage patient-compliance challenges.

Ultimately, the integrity and professionalism of today's clinical sales professionals will be a saving grace for our beleaguered pharmaceutical industry.