Medical representation continues to decrease

It is an inevitable trend that national procurement is advancing normally, policies are being adjusted in depth, and medical representatives are decreasing
.

01 After centralized procurement, sales staff don’t need so many

Since the official release of the fifth batch of national procurement results on June 28, superimposed on the signals that Chinese patent medicines and insulin have been incorporated into centralized procurement in the recent period, domestic and foreign pharmaceutical companies have accelerated the abolition and adjustment of sales teams
.

Whether it is the sales team of the original research drug of the multinational pharmaceutical company that was forced out due to the low price advantage of the domestic pharmaceutical company's generic drugs, or the pharmaceutical representative team of the leading generic drug company that includes more centralized procurement products, they are facing a new round of adjustments.

.

Regarding the recent intensive adjustments to sales personnel, according to a transcript of Hengrui Medicine’s extraordinary shareholders meeting widely disseminated in the industry, Hengrui Medicine Chairman Sun Piaoyang rarely spoke
.

According to the record, Sun Piaoyang said, "Why adjust the sales team?" On the one hand, because the sales team expanded too fast in the past, there was redundancy, some places were too hierarchical, and some were not efficient; on the other hand, the number of sales staff did not need so many after the centralized procurement of most generic drugs.

.

Regarding the impact of centralized procurement on domestic and foreign pharmaceutical companies, an industry authority said to Cyberland today that once related products are included in mass procurement, whether they are selected or unsuccessful, the company’s related products do not require pharmaceutical representatives—— This situation has already been manifested earlier, and both Sanofi, who was selected and the unsuccessful Jialin, made the same move and abolished the sales team
.

The above-mentioned people said that the purchase volume is guaranteed and no promotion is required for the inclusion of centralized procurement; the original market share has to be transferred to the selected enterprises if the centralized procurement fails, even if it is promoted, it is difficult to resist the policy to obtain the corresponding market, especially for injection formulations.
Once the public hospital market is lost, the sales teams of pharmaceutical companies have little room to play
.

According to a recent report by Cyberlane, Hengrui also revealed the impact of centralized procurement on product sales in its semi-annual report recently released.
On the evening of August 19, Hengrui Pharmaceuticals released a semi-annual report.
Regarding the reasons for the decline in performance, Hengrui Rui explained that the company's traditional generic drug sales declined mainly due to the impact of national and local volume purchases
.

Since the centralized procurement in 2018, Hengrui has entered the national centralized procurement of 28 varieties of generic drugs, and a total of 18 varieties have been selected.
The average price of the selected products has dropped by 72.
6%
.

It is not difficult to see that, regardless of whether the bid is collected or won, pharmaceutical companies have to face the situation of both sales and profits.
In this way, it will naturally be difficult to support the original medical representative team
.

02 The adjustment of the sales team of pharmaceutical companies continues

In the fifth round of national procurement, Hengrui’s oxaliplatin injection, cisatracurium benzenesulfonate injection, dutasteride soft capsule, docetaxel injection, ropivacaine hydrochloride injection, Six products of Palonosetron Hydrochloride Injection were planned to win the bids, but iodixanol injection and glycopyrrolate injection failed
.

According to calculations by relevant persons, in this drug purchase, only three varieties of cisatracurium bensulfonate, docetaxel and iodixanol contributed nearly 5 billion yuan in sales revenue to Hengrui
.

How has Hengrui's sales team adjusted? Sun Piaoyang said that substantial adjustments began in July.
Some generic drug sales staff were transferred and some were directly laid off.
For example, some departments corresponded to only 100 foreign companies, and Hengrui had more than 300 employees.
The efficiency was too low.
According to industry standards
.

Will it be adjusted in the future? Sun Piaoyang said that the adjustment of the team is carried out continuously based on external links and the company's operations, but sometimes the magnitude is large and sometimes the magnitude is small
.

Indeed, the promotion team mainly composed of medical representatives has always occupied a large proportion of the personnel composition of pharmaceutical companies, and has been facing high-frequency adjustments
.

The reason is that due to the policy market nature of the pharmaceutical industry, the market price and sales volume of products are greatly affected by the policy, especially when the expansion phase of medical insurance is basically over, and the three-medicine linkage is mainly used to change the structure of the cage.
, The reduction in payment of medical insurance funds, the reduction in the use of medical institutions, and the withdrawal of drugs encouraged by the drug regulatory department are generic drugs, drugs with unclear clinical effects, and drugs that occupy too much medical insurance funds.
Naturally, the medical representatives of the above-mentioned types of product designs are affected.
It is also the largest
.

Zhan Jifu, the trader of Sanming's medical reform, said on more than one occasion that he would encircle and suppress 3 million medical representatives across the country
.

An expert, who did not want to be named, told Cyberland that under the traditional sales model, many pharmaceutical companies cannot succeed without agents and pharmaceutical representatives, but successive policies are changing this situation, with the two-vote system.
It is the agent of the sword, and the representative of the medicine is the squeeze of the quantity procurement
.

In the second batch of National Procurement’s questions from reporters, the person in charge of the Pilot Office and the Joint Procurement Office bluntly stated that mass procurement is an important measure to purify the ecological environment of the industry and promote industrial transformation and upgrading
.

"Centralized procurement based on the premise of consistent evaluation of quality and efficacy will prompt companies to return to cost and quality competition, and corporate public relations will be greatly reduced, competition between companies will turn into open and transparent product quality and cost competition, and gray operations under the water will turn For fair competition under the sun, it has fundamentally improved the ecological environment of the pharmaceutical industry, which is conducive to the transformation of the pharmaceutical industry from marketing-driven to innovation-driven
.

03Most  medical representatives are facing unneeded

Regarding the career prospects of pharmaceutical representatives, Zhao Jiazhen, director of marketing department of Chongqing Dopotech Pharmaceutical Co.
, Ltd.
, told Cybernet that as a pharmaceutical representative, facing the company's large-scale phased expansion and phased layoffs, it is necessary to realize this It is a stage that the pharmaceutical industry must go through
.

At this stage, domestic and foreign pharmaceutical companies have a total of about 3 million pharmaceutical representatives.
In the future, in the prescription drug system of China's pharmaceutical industry, the number of pharmaceutical representatives that are really needed is expected to be around 500,000 to 600,000
.

It is said that there are about 300,000 medical representatives in the United States, but the scale of medical care is about 1.

Regarding the question of how many pharmaceutical representatives the industry needs, Joe, a senior pharmaceutical representative, said to Cyberland that the industry’s demand for pharmaceutical representatives is dynamically adjusted.

Zhao Jiazhen further pointed out that, of course, professional and academic medical representatives will definitely survive.

At the current stage, if medical representatives want to better respond to changes, they may have to be more cautious in product selection.

Of course, returning to the essence of medicine, only products that meet unmet clinical needs and products that truly benefit patients are what medical representatives need to choose and promote

So what qualities do medical representatives want to have when "the leftover is king"? The above-mentioned people pointed out that in the future, medical representatives must be inclined from customer sentiment and money to customer sentiment plus academic resource investment.

It is worth noting that some experts told Cybernet that the medical representative group needs to be aware that the current problem is that some pharmaceutical companies are abolishing the medical representatives of generic drugs while expanding the recruitment of pharmaceutical representatives of innovative drugs.