Clinical Communication Techniques For Drug Reps

Assumptions and false comparisons

In the October issue of Pharmaceutical Representative, I presented (using the acronym DEAF) two of the four actions sales representatives should avoid when discussing clinical data with physicians: defending the study and extrapolating from the study. In this month’s column, I will discuss the final two actions: making assumptions and drawing false comparisons.

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Don’t go DEAF on a call

Trainers have told me that teaching sales representatives how to do a “clinical sell” remains their top priority. A critical part of teaching this is helping representatives communicate clinical data. In my last column, I suggested that on a short clinical call, representatives should cut the canned speeches, pick pertinent points and rank research results.

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Short Clinical Calls: Most Important Part of a Clinical Study

How to you handle short clinical calls most effectively? By cutting the canned speeches, picking the pertinent points, and ranking research results to suit the physicians interests. In other words, the most important part of a clinical study to present to a doctor is whatever part that doctor cares about most. The answer is both painfully obvious and difficult to ascertain.

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Think critically: How to read a clinical paper

Instead of reading a clinical paper from the beginning to the end, challenge yourself by asking these questions, looking at the data, and then coming up with some possible answers for yourself – 1. What was the hypothesis? What do the authors want to show or prove? 2. How did the authors go about showing this or proving this? The answer to this question is in the methods section. 3. What were the data? You find this as tables of data sets or figures and graphs. Finally – did the data support the hypothesis in a significant way? This method of reading a clinical paper forces you to think and you’ll walk away really understanding the study. I had to fail a class during graduate school to get the hang of thinking critically.

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Communicating clinical information: Avoid the Kiss of Death

This is what I did to effectively ruin a call with a physician – I started a general discussion about patients with a condition, I challenged the physician’s assumptions about the long-term safety of using a well-accepted therapy, and I talked a lot of scientific jargon that impressed no one but myself. This is what you can do instead and get a better response from your doctor – Make it relevant to the doctor’s specific patient population, Make it patient-driven and when the doc would deem changing therapy necessary for her patients, Customize scientific depth so you don’t beat a doctor over the head with parts of science that he couldn’t care less in his clinical practice.

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