I wish to recount how a friend of mine, Gangadhar Chowdary overcame his shortcoming in carrying out his job as a Pharma Sales person. In my days as a medical representative in Guntur in the 70s, Gangadhar Chowdary was working in a Company called Beacon Laboratories as a medical representative. Beacon was a small company. It selected Gangadhar Chowdary as it's representative as he belonged to the dominant community in Guntur district. Most of the medical representatives were from the Brahmin community in those days. So Beacon had made a strategic plan to attract medical practitioners of the dominant community in the district by employing a man from their community. However, my friend was not proficient in communicating in English.
Communication between a pharma representative and a medical practitioner is generally done in English. But Gangadhar Chowdary had a great answer to his problem. He befriended a representative from another Pharma Company, SANDOZ (Baji) who was good in his job and had excellent communication skills. Gangadhar offered a ride to Baji as a pillion on his motorbike while visiting nearby towns around Guntur. While Baji briefed the doctor about his brands of medicines and ended the briefing with "doctor, please prescribe this (mentioning the name of the drug) to your patient." Our friend, Gangadhar would at that point interject and handing over his product pamphlet and some samples say "Also." With that he meant that the doctor should also patronise Becon brand when an occasion arises to make use of similar formulation (luckily Becon was having formulations which did not require any technical discussions.) They were "me too" kind of products similar to very commonly used brands from many big companies. He thus camouflaged his lack of skill. He was fairly successful in his job. He thus earned a nick name "ALSO" Perhaps with ingenuity you can find solutions for any problem. Perhaps for a million problems, there are a trillion solutions if one seriously looks for!
Comments
Post a Comment