Myriam – Medical Representative

A passion for convincing people

 

As a social worker, I already had some affinity with the care sector, but my studies did not lead me directly to my present job. Through some years of experience as an Employment Agency Consultant, I acquired a taste for commercial work, as a result of which I deliberately started looking for a purely commercial position. An outsourcing agency offered me the chance to work for three years as a Medical Representative at Bayer. Since 2000, I have been working for Bayer on a permanent basis.

 

The job of Medical Representative suits me because of the independence I get in deciding how to approach my customers. Even though certain conditions are laid down, there is still a lot of room for personal initiative. The Product Manager provides us with a ‘leitmotiv’ and supporting material. For the rest, we decide ourselves how to handle the sales process. Therefore, I decide which group of doctors to approach and how to convince them of the added value of the Bayer products and to persuade them to prescribe these to their patients. Mapping out my customers’ profile and convincing them are my primary motivations.

 

For this, I can count on my Field Manager, who sometimes accompanies me during a visit and with whom I can later evaluate my approach. Such feedback is interesting because you are so often alone when carrying out your task. At such times, you can test your ideas against another person’s opinion and see these in the context of the results of the entire organisation. Since the scientific area where my customers and products are located is constantly changing, we have the opportunity to participate regularly in training sessions in order to update and test our scientific knowledge. This way, we are always in a position to talk to our customers and convince them.

 

Why Bayer?

 

I have been working for eight years now as Medical Representative with Bayer, and am here mainly because the company offers me a good balance between work and leisure. We have quite a few holidays. Since I love travelling, that is a welcome bonus. In addition, Bayer offers you everything you need to be able to do your job properly: good support, a nice car, home-office and other benefits.

 

Moreover, Bayer remains a company with a ‘heart’. Though it is a big company and you are part of a multinational, everybody knows one another. You are not just a number but an individual with a name. The atmosphere at Bayer is open, and the employees are heard and assisted where possible. The results obviously count, but you also have the budget, resources and materials (such as flyers, scientific studies, statistics,...) at your disposal in order to optimise or adjust these results.

 

A Medical Representative can be part of a project, get opportunities within another division, or become a Hospital Representative. By widening your horizons, supplementing your expertise with knowledge from other fields or deepening your scientific knowledge, you can evolve within the organisation.

 

A day in the life of...

 

As Medical Representative, your task is to promote certain products; this involves products which are new or whose sales need a boost.

 

My customers expect me, as Medical Representative, to be an expert with regard to the Bayer products on the market. Doctors have an overall knowledge of the working of the various products on the market, but they expect the Medical Representative to add to this general knowledge with more specific information regarding the product. By organising science evenings with an interesting speaker, I try to respond to that need and also, of course, to convince the doctors of the added value of the Bayer product. 

 

At Bayer, you can be as creative in your approach as you think necessary. Also, depending on the nature of the product, it may be important to convince the customer / the doctor in a different manner. For the one product, it is important to build up a long-term relationship and win the trust of the doctor. The results of your efforts are usually only visible in the long term. The use of another product is, for example, related to a specific period, as a result of which your efforts must lead to a short-term sale.

 

It can happen that the approach needs to be altered: new products, a change in the region assigned to you or in the product on which you were focusing. This means that you must work out a new approach to the market and go back to the pioneering phase. In this way, during my eight-year career with Bayer, I have also evolved along with the Bayer products :  starting with Lipobay (cholesterol-reducing), then with Adalat Oros and Kinzal (anti-hypertensives), through the antibiotics Ciproxine (urinary infections) and Avelox (bronchial tubes) to Levitra (erectile dysfunction).