Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman (30 page)

At six feet tall, I still had to crane my neck to look up and give him my best disbelieving stare. “Now, Doctor,
why
would I do that? What good could possibly come from my making you this angry?”

As he glared down at me, I realized that, of all my urologists I could have pissed off with the boycott stunt,
this
guy was the worst possible; he was rumored to have threatened to “firebomb” the new office a competing group of urologists from another area had planned to build in his town. They ultimately decided not to expand their practice, after all.

Thankfully, Dr. David Banner didn’t have an answer for my question as to why I’d want to make him angry, and he let it drop. As it turned out, I didn’t get an answer, either. An answer to my prayers, that is.

Aside from aggravating a few urologists, the boycott accomplished nothing. My Viagra sales stayed relatively flat. Which is to say, they stayed relatively shitty, never climbing above 88 percent of quota. This was becoming problematic, because now my career mobility was suffering in addition to my self-esteem.

By the end of 1999, I had managed to climb into the number-eight spot in national Celebrex sales. Combined with my number-seven Trovan position, this made me one of, maybe, three reps ranked in the top ten in two drugs. Obviously, I was going to need a new shelf in my office to hold all the awards headed my way, not to mention I’d have to call the movers because I would certainly be getting promoted out of Farmland, U.S.A.

Mitch returned from the year-beginning manager’s meeting in Florida with a promise from the head of Pfizer’s training department that I would be considered for one of the upcoming vacancies. “I bumped into him in the men’s room,” Mitch told me, with a combination of embarrassment and pride. “And when I brought your name up he said, ‘Enough about Jamie Reidy, already! If one more person talks to me about him, I’m gonna puke. He’s getting an interview.’” I had wanted to be
a trainer since Day One of initial training, and now I was actually going to get the chance to make it happen!

Mitch didn’t want me just to get a chance, though. He wanted to make it impossible for them not to promote me. “You really need to get your Viagra numbers up, man,” he said, having grown oblivious, like all people involved with the little blue pill, to the innumerable double entendres created by the drug. Without my nemesis, I was ranked number one in the district, number one in the western region, and number one in the nation. With Viagra, however, I was third out of five, seventh out of twenty-five regionally, and in the top quarter nationally. Good, but not great. And you needed great to make it to training.

Always the voice of hope, Mitch told me, “If you can move your Viagra number in the region [twenty-second out of twenty-five] up just three spots, you’ll be tops in the district. If you can move up seven, maybe eight places regionally, you’ll make VPC [Vice President’s Cabinet, the most elite award a rep could earn; I had never had a VPC discussion with a manager prior to that]. Once you’ve got VPC on your résumé, Jamie, you’ll get any promotion you want.”

Beside holding my career hopes in the balance, my Viagra sales were also negatively impacting my family life; my father was starting to suspect things were not so
bueno
in Modesto.

My dad loved hearing about my sales experiences. I think they reminded him of himself thirty years ago at IBM. “How’s business?” he’d ask cheerfully. What this
really meant was, “By how much are you outselling the other guys on your team?” I had always done well with at least one of my drugs, so I tended to focus on the positive rather than share with my father the extent of his eldest child’s mediocrity. In other words, I’d lie to him. This tactic worked fine until I got promoted. My moving up the ladder had given him the false sense that I was kicking ass, but two years later that impression was about to change.

My response to his question never changed: “Good. Good,” with too much enthusiasm on the first good and the second good thrown in for lack of anything better to say. This meant, “Lousy, but I do not want to admit that to you, Dad.” I never quite figured out if he had figured out that I was trying to duck the issue, but at least he never pushed it too far.

From Day One with vitamin V, Dad could not get enough of the stories. A human Rolodex of jokes, he quickly memorized every bit of Viagra humor ever told. He was surely regaling his Wall Street buddies with Jamie’s latest real-world installment, boring them to tears with assurances that I was setting the world on fire sales-wise. Then something changed. Anecdotes weren’t sufficient anymore, now he wanted stats, too. Sometime in late 1999, he asked about my Viagra sales, specifically. I started to give him the “Good. Good” routine, but he cut me off.

“No, how are your
sales.
”

“Uh, they’re okay, Dad, you know, a little flat right now.” I thought for sure he’d respond with a “flaccid” quip, and we’d change topics.

“How flat?” he asked, sounding a bit annoyed. There was no escaping him.

“Uh, about as flat as you can get.”

“But you’re at least making quota, right?”
Once a sales guy, always a sales guy.

“Uh, no, Dad. I’m not.” I decided to come clean. “And, I didn’t make quota last year, either.” I waited a moment for the deluge of verbal abuse.

“Are you pulling my leg?” I assured him that I was completely serious.

“What’s your percent to quota?”

“Eighty-eight percent.”

“Ha-ha, ha-ha, ha-ha!”
The laugh exploded from deep inside his sizable belly. “This is terrific!” he bellowed. “I can’t believe it! Viagra’s only the most popular drug
in history
and you can’t even make quota?” More laughter, followed by a coughing fit. I thought that was it—that he had spent himself, run out of ammunition.

“Hold on, hold on,” he gasped, as if he could see me getting ready to hang up the phone. I held.

“You aren’t making quota with Viagra! You just might be the worst salesman in the world!” Hysterical, he had to hang up.

Thanks for the support, Dad. It means the world to me. Keep laughing, too. But I wouldn’t go checking the mailbox for those samples anytime soon.

Epilogue

I
WAS DRIVING THROUGH THE
C
AROLINAS
in late July 2000 when my cell phone rang.

“How is it?” the caller asked.

I had to shout over the roar of the road—doing eighty with the top down got pretty loud. “How do you think?” He laughed, enviously.

This was the first time Mitch had contacted me since I’d quit Pfizer two months earlier. I’d left amicably, though disappointed.

Boredom and frustration combined to drive me away from my first civilian employer.

As I explained earlier, Pfizer programmed us to deliver the proper message on each and every call. In fact, as one legendary southern California rep said when asked about the secret to his unequaled success, “I say the same thing every time I see a doctor.” The questioner probed for clarification, “But what about when—” The twenty-year superstar interrupted and spoke more slowly. “I say the
same
thing
every
time.” If forced to follow that mantra, I would have stabbed a Zithromax pen through my eye inside of two days. Even though I never followed the corporate script and more often than not failed to mention my products, I still felt like I was saying the same thing over and over again. The sound of my
own voice got old really fast—and this from a guy who
loves
the sound of his own voice. Jobs, like drugs, have side effects, and pharmaceutical sales is no exception. Drug reps universally reported boredom as their primary complaint. Of course, earning $100,000 for working twenty hours a week helped make it more tolerable than, say, stomach cramps.

Unfortunately, nothing could ease the pain of being bored while residing in B.F.E.

As a thirty-year-old bachelor entering my third year of living in a farming community, I was ready for a change of scenery, a promotion to a more populated area. Obviously, the training department in New York was my top choice, but L.A. and San Francisco were also fine with me. Management disagreed—not with the cities, but with the concept. Unfortunately, my poor Viagra sales—I failed to move up from twenty-second in the region—prevented me from having the “breakout year” the higher-ups wanted to see before taking a chance on moving me upward again. They told me to be patient.

Instead, I took the advice of my dot-commer friends and asked for a leave of absence, something they routinely requested and received with ease from their companies.

“Tell them you’re burned out and need to take a step back to evaluate things,” my wise friend Ranah instructed. “Dude, they’ve pumped all this money into training you over the years, there’s no way they’d let you just walk away.” This seemed logical, especially given the
fact that Pfizer had recently conducted a retention survey that revealed an alarming attrition rate among salespeople with four to six years of service. My five-year anniversary fell in August, only a few months away. So I put in for a leave of absence. You either work for Pfizer or you don’t, I was informed.

By the time Mitch got in touch with me, I had put the top down on my Miata (a knee-jerk purchase made in celebration of northern Indiana’s first sunny day of 1997, which came in March; perhaps if I had worked a little harder, I could have afforded a Z-3) and driven from San Francisco to Phoenix to Austin to Little Rock to Nashville to South Bend to New York City to Newark, Delaware, to Ithaca, New York, to Cincinnati to Atlanta to Hilton Head to Jacksonville, Florida, to Greensboro, North Carolina. Not the most direct route, but that was the point. I stayed with friends every night, met babies produced by couples in whose wedding parties I had served, and lowered my handicap by six strokes. Mitch understood my reasons for leaving. I was having a hell of a time when he called.

“Have you heard?” he asked.

“Heard what?”

“You’re number one.”

I banged the heel of my palm on the steering wheel. All right! Way to go out a winner! “Which drug?”

“No, not with just one drug. With your
territory.
You’re number one. Your territory is number one. In the
country.”
It took awhile to settle in my brain. “Your Viagra finally came around.”

“Are you shitting me?” He was not.

Before quitting, I was ranked in the upper third of the region, and I knew I was “trending well”—my weekly sales numbers kept rising—but I’d had no idea that I would soar to the top.

Pfizer had a two-month lag on its sales numbers, meaning that the sales figures a rep posted in March were really for drugs he had sold in January. I had quit in mid-May; therefore, July’s sales numbers were still attributed to me.

I was number one in the country.

“Mitch, I gotta go, man. Thanks for the scoop, but there’s somebody I need to call.”

He said good-bye, but not before revealing that people in HQ were asking why the number-one rep in the country—the poster child for Pfizer’s retention problem—was allowed simply to walk away from the company. Smiling, I pressed speed dial on my cell phone.

“Reidy.”

“Hey, Dad! Guess what?”

Epilogue, Continued

W
AIT.
T
HAT’S IT?
BOOM—you just quit your job and took off?

I heard that from a lot of people after my book came out. I did a lousy job of letting my readers inside, allowing them to understand the motivations behind my decisions to that point.

At the start of
Hard Sell,
if I’d simply shared my hopes and dreams and fears, no one would’ve been surprised by my quitting Pfizer at the end.

But I didn’t think anybody would care about the hopes and dreams and fears of some random drug rep who egotistically thought he had a story worth telling. Years later, after reading such moving and impactful books like J. R. Moehringer’s
The Tender Bar
and Craig Mullaney’s
The Unforgiving Minute,
I know now that readers buy memoirs and, more important, buy
into
memoirs specifically for the author’s hopes and dreams and fears.

In that sense, I failed my readers. And myself.

I’ve always been a storyteller. I remember friends in junior high nudging me to tell the story, even though I hadn’t actually been present when it occurred.

I didn’t realize I wanted to be a writer until late in my senior year of high school. Mr. Richard Shust was my English teacher, but that doesn’t begin to scratch
the surface of his impact on thousands of boys he taught in over thirty years at St. Joseph Regional in Montvale, New Jersey.

He assigned us an essay titled “The Object I’ll Never Throw Away.” I wrote about the catcher’s mitt I used to make the single greatest play of my entire life: saving the championship for my sixth-grade Little League team.
No really, you should’ve seen the catch.
In the essay, I detailed my childhood dream of playing for the New York Yankees. But, I admitted, “I now realize the only time I’ll ever hear my name called over the Yankee Stadium loudspeakers is to inform me that my four-year-old son has been located at the cotton candy stand in Section 12.”

Mr. Shust wrote in red pen directly above that line, “Beautiful.
That
is writing!”

You would’ve thought I’d pulled Excalibur out of the fucking stone. At that very instant, I knew I wanted to be a writer. Mr. Shust didn’t just light the fuse to the firecracker of my dream; he built the firecracker, explained to me what it was for, and
then
lit the fuse.

I left his classroom knowing what I wanted to be.

Of course, there’s a big difference between having a dream and pursuing one. And it took me a loooooonnnng time to actually do anything about it.

About a month after I left Pfizer, I got a call from a former colleague named Terry Patzner, a Nebraskan with
whom I shared a training class when I got promoted into the Urology Division. Terry left Pfizer shortly after I did and took a job with Eli Lilly’s Oncology Division. They were hiring, and he said I’d be a lock.