Emotional Selling for Medical Sales Representatives

While traditional medical information is mainly focused on products to fulfill standardized needs, emotional selling prioritizes doctors’ individual needs over the final outcome. Accordingly, emotional selling represents an innovative way to convey medical information, in which Medical Sales Representatives are of course the key actors. They carry out a fundamental task, as they provide the medical community with information and training, therefore benefiting us all as potential patients. Strictly speaking, they should not be seen as mere ‘Sales Representatives’, as doctors do not purchase pharmaceutical products from them directly, but are given the principal information to prescribe them to patients (the actual final clients) whereas necessary, with the latter who have no power to decide which medicine they need to buy. This way of “selling” should be beneficial to all the parties involved – i.e. the doctor, the Medical Sales Representative and, above all, the patient – thus producing a “win-win-win situation”.
In this sense, Medical Sales Representatives work to promote health, a primary aspect in everyone’s life. The context in which Medical Sales Representatives perform their services has changed considerably over the last few years: there is little time to liaise with doctors, who are not impressed by traditional medical information. Therefore, communication with doctors should take place through new channels, through listening and empathy, in line with the principle envisaged by Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP): the map is not the territory and everything is connected. Ineffective forms of communication may lead to the improper use of pharmaceutical products and break the relationship of trust among all those involved. Medical Sales Representatives must be aware of the fundamental principles according to which the brain processes the information received and of the ways in which a deep relationship can be built with doctors utilizing some of the tools described in this book.
Based on the author’s experience and through a number of exercises, this book provides a new and somehow pioneering approach to enhancing the opportunities related to this profession.

Riccardo Izzi holds a degree in Pharmacy and has thirty years of experience in scientific & medical information. He has held many positions in this sector, working as a Medical Sales Representative and as a Sales Director for a number of businesses. At present, he serves as a National Sales Manager HCP at Bayer Consumer Health. He has met and trained many Medical Sales Representatives, with whom, as a leader and as a coach, he has successfully applied the theories of situational leadership and emotional selling.