The Maven: Lowdown on Layoffs

To wit: if you kill all the salespeople, how are you going to peddle product?

The question carries with it answers. I asked it, in one of my most telepathic calls of 2006, when Pfizer announced it was cutting 20% of its sales force and then, two days later, announced how great its pipeline was. If its pipeline were so great, I prophesized, wouldn't the company want people around to sell what was in it? It turns out, of course, that it pulled its most promising drug in no time.

Business Week starts the story looking large. The pharmaceutical salesperson, the article posits, is all but dead. Layoffs have not done the trick alone; there are regulators wary of all the incentives and junkets, and there are the doctors themselves, sick, I guess, of having good-looking twentysomethings call on their offices. (Geek alert.)

So where does this leave the pharmaceutical companies and their shareholders? Read to the bottom of the Business Week story, and you'll see: They're in an odiferous little state, trying to replace a tried-and-true sales method. They are experimenting with routing doctors to promotional Web sites. (If this works as well as those twentysomethings, The Business Press Maven will eat socks on the corner of Wall and Broad.) They are also playing around with fewer salespeople doing more -- in other words, a more streamlined force actually working better.