MISUSED REPS: I'd like to add to add some further context to your story on large pharmaceutical firms cutting back their salesforces (Drug firms slash their salesforces, Business, last week).
Pharmaceutical salesforces, known traditionally as "reps", will remain vital in informing doctors of new products and their implications for health service prescribing guidelines. They are also vital in influencing prescribing habits, and I personally believe pharma companies cannot undertake a wholesale reduction in the sales force and hope to retain market position.
Reps are not, however, the best avenue for share of voice, or worse, share of noise which is how they have been used for the past 10 years, creating today's increasingly untenable situation.
And with the rise in "e-detailing", using online technology to deliver targeted information to doctors, there is no need to misuse the rep in this way. Rather than having change forced upon them from the government or City analysts, it's time pharmaceutical firms took a more sophisticated, multi-channel approach to informing doctors and used these highly trained, valuable rep resources to their best advantage.
At Doctors.net.uk, we have an online community of over 110,000 UK Doctors (around 70% of those practising), most of whom use the site regularly to obtain information on new products and directives. Pharma firms can deliver targeted messages to these doctors, and electronic communication can be a highly effective means of achieving good message retention, but it cannot replace the sales rep: doctors still require the face to face interaction. But by combining that information with the sales rep within an integrated online strategy, firms can lead a doctor faster along the path of product trial and additions to standard therapies.
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Neil Bacon MRCP
Founder and CEO
doctors.net.uk
Abingdon, Oxon
FRENCH TAKEOVER: I am sure that Jean-François Théodore (Special Report, last week) does not seriously expect to be believed when he claims that the acquisition of the London Stock Exchange by Euronext is "not a nationalistic issue". The French don't do anything unless there most definitely is such an interest, though nowadays they like to disguise it as "European".
With a succession of Westminster governments unable or unwilling even to begin to comprehend the meaning of national interest, the serial acquisition of UK strategic industries by French companies has been largely a formality.
Tony Stone
Oxted, Surrey