This is Module 2.1.2 Pharmaceutical Industry: Customers and Sales with Steve Parente, Carlson School of Management, working like Shatner Hall. So, the customers in this market are really important. The most obvious customers are the patients. They're going to be the users of the product, and then maybe not so obvious, but a very important customer in the pharmaceutical market are the actual providers. The ones that are basically prescribing the technologies, the physicians as well as the phamracists. You gotta watch out for those phamracists, otherwise known as pharmacists, sorry about that. This is a reminder, all children, to learn how to spell, including professors. In any case, these folks are the gateway to the product, basically in terms of selling the product and putting it on to line, very important to go forward. So, pharmaceutical sales candidate, who are the people that are selling you your drugs? They could be people with math anxiety, they could be communication convulsions, they can have problems with chemistry conniptions because they didn't do that well. They could have physics floundering, this one's kind of mean, wood shop apathy, and I think basic stupidity, that's just wrong, that's not nice at all. Math anxiety, perhaps that is a very important one that's key to understand. Now in the olden days, what people used to say about pharmaceutical representatives, no, not him. We gotta be fair here, too, for gender diversity, or her again. I don't have the time, he would have been a great used car salesman. I can't remember what he said about this product but his pen is really cool, and, by the way, the keyword here is swag. You can get really good swag stone. There are actually sunshine laws that prevent this from being quite the same way it was before, though I do remember once upon a time when I was working with some folks that wouldn't be part of these parties that was really great. That was a long time ago. Now it's important to understand that the representative roll here is to provide value for the customer. In many respects, it's really a critical component where the folks that are coming to really have the science background and to actually educate the provider as to all the different options that are available. They can talk about pricing issues, particularly for patients that might not necessarily have the dollars available to them to pay for the services. In many cases, they can actually be liaisons to medical affairs groups. They can talk about product safety, they can talk about marketing. They can even review some of the clinical studies that are kind of critical to understand what the new options for these technologies are, and if there's even situations for speakers to come in for. If it's an academic health center, there could be a very major role. In some respects, pharmaceutical companies today are playing a key role in having influence in policy debate as well. For the office-based representatives, they're generally working both the MDs in that space as well as the advanced nurses and regular nurses inside an office. They're also going to be working with the chain pharmacies. That would be your CVSs or Walgreens, as well as some of the independent pharmacies scattered around the nation. The other piece, too, is that a lot of these folks are basically in their office-based roles, that they have to interact with on a day-to-day basis, and that's one reason why they travel quite often. Another space as well is we go beyond the office and we actually get to academic medical center subsequently working with the hospitals in the positions, and, in many cases, are being pretty well-informed about the study designs that are actually for the new pathway drugs coming out. They're not just talking to the physicians, but they're also talking to physicians and residents, obviously, in their training, coming out of medical school, and in some cases they do feed them. That could be very important, but more importantly talking about some of the pathway drugs as they're going forward, and, as RNs or nurse practitioners are getting better in their scope of practice, that's a major role as well. But the key responsibility here is to basically find the academic thought leaders, talk about different ideas, and really advance the technologies there. So this concludes this module on talking about who actually does the marketing for the pharmaceutical industry.
