Where is Bill Pelton?

To the point that the guy makes about the importance of education beyond the walls of academia, CC may have said it best.

"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education alone will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan Press On, has solved and will always solve the problems of the human race."
-Calvin Coolidge

 

Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth are Ivy-light.

 

1) OK, an MBA from Columbia counts. Aint nowhere near as hard as being accepted there for undergrad studies, but that's close

2) Great leaders do not always go light on the reigns, keep it simple, or low on cumbersome BS. They only do so if it is the correct approach for what their people need at that particular point in time

3) Treating managed care orgs like they were from the untouchable caste was a tremendous mistake. How anyone can claim that our strategy was appropriate is beyond me. When it came to formulary placement, our biggest customers took every chance (speaking for myself) they had to put the screws to our products. Even those silly little industry survey results had Pfizer placed at the bottom rung.

4) The managed care VP merry-go-round that happened earlier in the decade was a flippin joke. First B.P. suddenly retired, then we had F.H., then C.W., all in the space of less than 3 years. Did any of these guys have years of expertise in managed care, or have advanced degrees in...well, in anything? Nope. They were all former VPs of Sales, two of them with less than 3 years on the job. In true Pfizer fashion, they were picked for political reasons. And we suffered, because the company could not see what EVERY one of our competitors saw

5) Yes, I have an ax to grind because I watched people at the top benefit from great drugs and turn this company into their own personal nepotism depot. And many of these former "leaders" have been...well, they're not here any more

 

Education alone will not; the world is full of educated derelicts

 

What world are you living in...oh yeah. You're a Pfizer sales rep. Nevermind.

 

Biggest mistakes that led to today's situation:

1. McCrorie retires and is replaced by Mosebrook instead of Burch. Canata soon retires and the entire moral compass is now gone from the top of Sales Leadership. Pat Kelly is named President of Marketing and because of weak sales leadership and his own (nice guy though) the chaos begins.....we will leave the CW days out of it (that was the sequel)

2. Hank McKinnell, a bean counter, is named CEO instead of Karen Katen, University of Chicago MBA and all around good egg. Pharma guidelines are enacted under the guise of easing political pressure which it totally fails to do, but the bean counters love the cost cutting, not realizing (and still not realizing) the affect on top line revenue. McKinnell social liberalism from Canada begins the erosion of the moral compass with domestic partners being covered.

3. Kindler is named CEO and the liberal left go nuts within the company and HR weilds power along with the incompetence in marketing and whats left of sales.

Lesson for HBR: Leadership and Character cannot be replaced by book smarts and a lack of moral values. Its just the way it is.

Ex-Pfizer leader who lived through the demise.

 

Uhmm...you are implying that some of the leaders that you wanted were more "moral" than those selected. You must have your 'R' gene blinders on. Werent most of the people at the very top 'R' gene people? ? What, pray tell, caused their early exits? You people crack us up, you brag about making everyone read The Oz Principle, and then you consistently live below the line.

Back to your post: many of the 'R'-geners have had a tough enough go of it lately, so I wont go into detail of where they are now. But please dont claim that any of them were more moral or had superior character than McKinnell or Kindler's people, because we could go to the videotape for all of the reasons that many of them no longer have a little blue oval on their business cards.

 

Isn't Burch under investigation by the Feds?

 

Oz principle was PD3 or other Parke-Davis. The R people somehow never got immersed in the crap we endured. Dressing up as Oz people. So much for dignity.

 

Never was a business development deal. typical scam.

 

It was actually Karen Katen who questioned our contracting with MCOs. Increased rebates resulted in decreased net revenue. The field force could not pull through. Pelton fought the fight and was the best leader I worked for, and I worked for many great leaders.

 

Hey I got your pull-through right here. Pull this....loser.

 

Below the line thinking defined: "....the field force could not pull through".

Isn't this the same field force that made Lipitor, Zoloft, Zithromax, and Norvasc tops in their respective classes? I guess we were good at selling in those brutal markets, but we just couldnt figure out how to do the really tough pull through thing.

 

Understood. The issue was recouping the discount and meeting "net" growth goals. Karen Katen was constantly frustrated that discounting did not pay off in many instances. Dropping the price 14%was not always a good business decision.

Also, the three drugs you mentioned were innovations. Why discount them that much? We did not discvount them much, and look what happened.

Finally, why discount when you don't need to? The "market" back then was not brutal. It was much easier because it was branded.

 

You must have been in a region different than mine. And your reps were obviously much stronger than the ones I covered, because I never remember hearing the Zoloft people remark about how easy it was to sell against Paxil and Prozac and Celexa. The Zithro-Biaxin or Zithro- Levaquin battles were just a cakewalk, I suppose. And Pravachol or Zocor vs Lipitor? Like candy from a baby, it was so easy.

 

Truth is, the RAMS were never really in the battle. Their little smoke and mirrors game never really made a difference. Pelton tried to make it seem like it was real but it wasn't. The real sales reps were the ones who sold the earlier antibiotics and cardiovascular products and Zoloft up against Prozac. Those were real battles back then. Competition was stiff, especially with the early LABS and Roerig products. Those reps sold with science in order to win. If you could not sell you were eliminated before Phase VI. The RAMS never knew that world. Pretending to have meetings and making up slogans and catch-phrases like "pull-through" was their world. Expensive mistake.

 

Lipitor vs. Zocor or Lipitor vs. simvastatin? Which is tougher? Branded markets keep market volume up. Generic markets bring market volumes down. The issue is increasing revenue, not what you do in your little world.

 

This focus on pull-throughs and soft-n-fuzzy relationships was a top-down strategy, at least in my region. She never really understood what it was like to go head to head against Marion Labs or GD Searle. The early 90s' ACEI vs CCB and Zoloft vs Prozac battles were legendary, but most of my Account Manager colleagues came from a division where they didnt have to fight like this. They were never the lead division selling any new product in those days.

I have years and years of horror stories that I wish I could share. OK from the top of my head, here is a typical one: I had one colleague who was such a "ghost" that the DMs in his TACU used to call me and ask for help tracking the man down. "We never know where he is, he never responds to our emails or voice mails, and he'd rather DIE than meet with our reps. We hear from YOU more than we hear from HIM!"

What a bad business model.

Like I said, this model came down from the top in my region.

 

William Pelton, My Dad...passed away September 12, 2016.

 

RIP Bill.