Lee Hardesty, welcome to Coursera. Well, thank you Michael, I appreciate being here. You've had a phenomenal career in sales and all. Let's just start a conversation off for just telling me a bit about your career and how you got to where you are today. You're in the pharmaceutical sales industry working for one of the big pharmaceutical companies, but help me understand how you got to that point. Well, to understand where I am now, I want to start before my career. Really, I tell people anytime I have a chance to talk to a young person, I say sales changed the trajectory of my life, and it can change a trajectory of your life. When I was in eighth grade, I took an aptitude test, and this aptitude says said that I should focus on a career supervising a machine, maybe I could watch a few gages and adjust, with proper training, I can adjust the knobs along the way. Now, I got to tell you maybe watching a machine and adjusting the knobs will be pretty interesting to some people, it is probably a pretty good job, but it wasn't what I was really interested in. Unfortunately, I'd always been an under-achiever in high school. But I worked in a grocery store, I got to meet some sales people, and I thought these guys actually are valuable to me as a customer, they're helping me make more money. By the way, they make more money than I do, and they dress nicer, they drive a better car. So, I decided I want to go into sales. I came to WVU and I became a pretty good college student. I made up for lost ground, and what I found out about sales it's the ultimate merit autocracy. It really doesn't matter what your past is, it matters what can you do today, and I really was able to thrive in a selling environment. My first job was in business-to-business sales and I sold giftware to independent retailers. It was like a laboratory of sales learning, that we'd have a big binder, and I'd go to this business owner and pitch like one page and say, "Okay, you want this? Do you think this is appropriate for your store?" I would get the answer real-time; yes or no. We might pitch 20, 30 products during a sales presentation, and at the end, you knew how well you did because you had a sales orders, these are lots of orders or very minimal order but you knew how you did. What I loved about that as I could find out that as I change in the way I'd present information, maybe the inflection in my voice, maybe just change my techniques a little bit, people change their behaviors. What I love about sales is a lot of times I'm actually helping people get what they want but I'm just inspiring them to take action maybe a little sooner than they would have. So, I did the business-to-business sales for a little over a year and I found out about pharmaceutical sales. So, I went into pharmaceutical sales. I got to admit it's a more sophisticated customer, much more complex products in a highly regulated environment. But many of the lessons I learned from business-to-business sales transfer directly into pharmaceutical sales. I'm proud to say that I carried a bag, I was a frontline salesman for nine years. I made about 14,000 sales calls, and I was asked to become a District Manager over two decades ago. What I'm very proud of is I had the opportunity to work in the territory with over 150 representatives across eight states. As I think about my career in sales, I think that I've been able to help a lot of customers get what they wanted, a lot of our employees get what they want and deserve, and I have taken so much away from it. I'm just very humbled and appreciative of the career in sales. So, now let's focus a bit on what you currently are and you said for about the last 20 years you have been a front line sales manager. Right. Talk about what is your job? What is the kind of duties that you have? I'm sure I could find a job description somewhere that would print out to be about a page and a half long. But as I really think about what I do for a living, I break it down into three big categories. The first category is personal and professional development. So, I think my first role and responsibility is to help my representatives become better sales representatives that get better at their current job today. But a very important part of my job is to help them look toward the future, think about their future roles because I want them to be ready when opportunity comes their way. So, I try to help people not only loop for the day and get better for today but also think about tomorrow because tomorrow is coming quickly, and I want you to be prepared. Secondly, it's a sales job. So, we have to drive performance and do it right now. So, lot of what I will do there is help representatives see opportunities. If you're working in your territory, you know everybody so well, you know the numbers, sometimes you get kind of myopic or fixated on what the problems are or what the opportunities are, and if you bring in somebody with a little different viewpoint, I may have a little further away from the situation and they are. I've got a little different experience over the years. A different set of eyes can help them look at the business differently. It's fascinating to see what we can do, how representatives when they get an extra set of eyes on the business they may see opportunities they didn't know existed before. Then, of course, they'll set goals and track results. It's really a virtuous cycle of good things that can happen when two people put their heads together and think about the business. The third bucket really has nothing to do about building people or building sales but it's critically important as well, and that's around operations and administration. Think of big international company there's lots of systems, and procedures, and processes that we need to be able to use efficiently. There's plenty of regulatory and administrative duties that need to be done, but what we're trying to simplify and streamline those processes and operations so the representatives can extract what they need from them, but then go out and work at their day job which is selling our brands and developing ourselves into a better representatives. A lot of diversity in your job. A lot of variety. It really is. It's one of the things I love about sales and I really love about being a Sales Managers, and no two days are the same. There's some similarities in there but sometimes you just can't wait to go out and make call after call after call. I get a lot of energy from that, but then there might be some other time where I go and sit in a meeting for a day or two and learn about new strategies, I get a lot of energy from that. So, it's exactly the right job for me. I think it's a great job for a lot of people. Just to help our students that are watching this video. You've mentioned that you're in the pharmaceutical industry and all, you mentioned real quickly about calling on customers. So, just to help with our students, who are the customers that a pharmaceutical sales rep calls on? It depends on which company you work for. But as a general rule, a lot of times a pharmaceutical representative call on primary care doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners, physicians' assistants, pharmacists. Really, anybody that would lay hands on a patient or use judgment decision-making in the care of a patient that we're trying to get the appropriate medicine to the appropriate patients in appropriate time. There's a lot of decision-making, a lot of things that need to happen right before the patients can get their medicine. I see. Great. Okay. So, in your capacity as a sales manager and all up and I guess just talking about kind of like the typical pharmaceutical company and all, they have to obviously organize their sales function like they have to. Tell us, how is that done like how's the sales function organized in the pharmaceutical industry? At the heart of it all, we are science companies that are using science to fight disease. So, typically, a company will look for unmet medical needs and apply their scientific research and development toward that. Then, as we develop medicines, we've got to understand who's the appropriate patient? Who are the appropriate customers to prescribe for those patients? Then we would re-organize our salesforce so that we're able to get the message to the right people that can make a difference for the patients. So, I did a little homework last night and I looked in my 31 years with my present company, I've had 18 different disease states. So, you can see is the research and development projects either flourish or fail away, things tend to change, the science evolves very quickly. So, do you tend to organize yourselves along different products, like different drugs that treat certain types of diseases? Is that is that how you-? That's exactly right. So, for example, a company may be would have a Diabetes Division. They may have two or three medicines to treat diabetes through different mechanisms of action. They may have a couple of medicines for heart disease, maybe some medicines for the central nervous system. Different specialists treat different diseases. So, representatives generally will specialize in usually one disease type, maybe a diabetes representative might know a lot about several different diabetes medicines, maybe a cardiovascular representative would know about cholesterol medicine and anti-hypertensive medicines, but I mean, these are sophisticated products, there's a lot to know. So, we try to make sure that representatives have a very in-depth knowledge of a fairly narrow set of information where you contrast that to a lot of the doctors we call on, these guys have a very broad knowledge of a lot of different disease states and treatment. So, it's truly impressive that the people we call on, the knowledge that they have and how sharp that our sales representatives should be in order to bring value to those prescribers. Great. So, one of the things that we've covered in this course is one of the functions of a sales manager is hiring sales people and all. Talk to us about how the hiring process occurs in the pharmaceutical industry. For my company, it's evolved over the years and I'll give you what we do now. So, it's largely outsourced to a company that specializes in hiring. They have the infrastructure literally to put advertising on the Internet and receive thousands of resumes. They then have a battery of people that read the resumes, that screen the resumes then they do phone screens. Only after candidates have made it through the phone screen, would I have a chance to maybe read the transcript of the phone screen as well as look at the resume and then pick and choose off of a Website the people that I want to meet live. Normally, I will do a live face-to-face interview with two managers and a candidate, that would be the first interview. It's largely a behavioral-based interviewing technique, like what situations you faced? What are the actions you took? What were the results that you were able to achieve? By the way, did you learn anything from this and were you able to apply the lessons someplace else? So, that would be quite the interview structure. After the first face-to-face interview, we whittle down the candidate pool to a very select group of individuals and do a second interview with probably the hiring manager will be there and maybe a different district manager or a regional director would be there. So, that's the final step at my company, I know some companies will fly candidates into an airport for live interviews and literally will go through seven sets of interviews in a day. Some companies will give a candidate a hypothetical situation and say, here's a business we're trying to run, we want you to analyze this business and come to us with a business plan and convince our "Executive Board," which is a group of interviewers why we should do things the way that you're going to do it? So, it can take a lot of different forms, but it's rigorous no matter how you look at it. But it's interesting one of the things that we stress is how, when you are evaluating sales candidates and all that it's important to have multiple data points, like you've just mentioned that. You interview people at least twice. Oh, yeah. I can tell you Mike, it's been times in the past when it wasn't as formal as it is now and I would literally place an ad in the newspaper, I would get the resumes, I would call the people and I would do interviews and it gets so busy that I didn't take the time to really select the best candidates and after one interview, I'm like, I have to have this person and then hire them and it turned out to be the wrong fit. I can't tell you how many times that I've seen somebody in one interview that they maybe not the best candidate and when we did the second round of interviews, they really were the best candidate or vice versa. Interesting. So, I think I always take time when hiring people not an extraordinary amount of time, it doesn't take five people to hire somebody, but you want a few data points as you said just to make sure you're getting the person that you think you're getting and to make sure it's got to be fair for the candidate too, they get to see you in the company and the culture a few extra times as well. So, that decision, that selection of that candidate is a tough decision to make, I mean. It really is. It's easy at first, with your new manager, it's very easy until you realize that the folks that you hire are a direct reflection on you and they're going to make your job really, really easy or they can make it really difficult. Wow. So, another topic that we've studied here in this course is, sales force compensation and we've reviewed there's many different ways of compensating a salesperson and risk of grossly simplifying, you could pay people a straight salary or you can have incentive compensation and companies have many different philosophies. Tell us a bit about the pharmaceutical industry and how do they approach sales force compensation. You know, as I think about the way different sales forces are structured in different industries, some industries that aren't heavily regulated may go with a very heavy commission-based incentive programs, but in our industry we're heavily regulated. So, I don't know the exact number, but I'm going to say it's about 80 percent salary and then 20 percent is flexible or field sales incentive program money. Of that 20 percent, a portion of that is always around behaviors because like I said, we're heavily regulated and we have to behave in an ethical manner, we have a strict code of conduct and the company always wants to make sure even though we're incentivizing people to go out and work and work hard and do our job sell more of our product that we're doing it the right way because if we would run afoul of the rules and regulations it would be so expensive for the company, it's just not doing the right thing for people either. Okay. Another topic that we've studied and we know as part of a sales managers job is evaluating salespeople, their performance and all. Can you tell us how the pharmaceutical industry approaches evaluation? How was it done? How often is it done? What's involved in that? It is constant and it takes many different forms. So, giving an example, on a typical field day, all companies have some sort of a selling framework. Whatever that selling framework, it's usually how do you prepare for the call? How do you introduce yourself or kind of chat with the customer kind of a relationship built? Now, what about the questions and answers? How are you positioning your brand? How do you close? How do you follow up? That's a loose framework and each of those steps, most companies will have several parameters in which a representative would be evaluated on and we want to build the total representative where they're doing every step of every sales call on a very professional manner and it takes a lot of work to do that. So, we evaluate that on every field day and it's really largely it's a partnership with the representative. We even use a coaching model where we're asked the representative, what is your goal and what is the reality? Where do you think you stand? What options do you think you have, and what will you do? So, we want the representative have a lot of ownership on. So evaluation's not just a manager evaluating the representative. It's the representative evaluating the representative but it's against a scale. It's against something that the company says is important. This is the selling framework. So, that would be part of the evaluation process. Another part is we're continuous development organization. We have certain maybe competencies or parameters that we're looking for, things like, "Hey, how do you follow the science? How do you think about putting patient health first? How do you compete and win in an ethical manner?" Then there's descriptions to each of those and it's really important that people understand how to do that and they're curious and find ways to do it better and better because that's part of the representative self-development and preparing for future roles within the company. Then finally, and certainly not the least, is sales achievements that we have a pretty good estimation on how much potential lies in a given area and we look at market share estimates of what we believe that we should have and it's largely then based on market share a given area and we compete against not only the competition but in totally there would be a little bit of competition to try to achieve more than 100 percent of the field sales incentive program. So, it's interesting. We talked about this in interviewing candidates and all but the need for multiple data points and what you're describing when you talk about sales force evaluation is lots of different perspective and not just looking at one item, right? Yeah. You have talked about behaviors and actual performance and development. So, I'm old school on this and I tell our new hire representatives, when they come into the organization, I said, "When you are going to training, that you may not know it but from the time you get out of your car at the airport to the time you back in car at the airport, you must well assume somebody from our company or somebody who knows where our company is is watching you and we are ambassadors for our companies and we have to be good stewards the business. I'm very proud of the organization that I work for and I know thousands of people came before me that made it what it is now." So, like the home office, we'll do evaluations on roleplays, on scientific knowledge. We take tests, we do video role-play. When you're out to dinner at night, it's not necessarily a formal evaluation but there's always a formal evaluation and an informal evaluation especially with new hires because it's a big risk. It's a big obligation to somebody to bring them on to your organization and they just can't help it that people are going to be evaluated. It sounds also that it's not just a gut feel. It's based on data. It's based on actual norms. It really is because your gut, as a manager, gut can mislead you and take you the wrong way. I mean, anybody can do that and I've seen managers before say things like, "Well I'm really good at evaluating people." You're probably not really good at evaluating people. You need to have some formalized standards. Be it I've worked in different modes like competency mode where you'll have a list of expectations. Can people do this? So, it has to be objective somehow because if it's just subjective, there's no way the organization could get ahead either because maybe one manager sees things a certain way and thinks that's the way it should be done but in the big picture, we're part of a global multi-billion dollar corporation. We have to try to conform to what the company needs and use the evaluation processes that company needs. That's a huge part of our simplification processes right now. Great. So, one of the other topics that we've talked about is the importance of training and developing salespeople. In an earlier discussion that we had, you sort of feel that that's part of one of your main job responsibilities is that. So, can you talk a bit about how does one approach employee development and training? What does a typical training program like? To a typical training program, take somebody like me, I didn't have a science background and we're obviously told, "Look, if you've got a bachelor's degree and you're curious about science, we can teach you this but you know how to sell that's why we want you." In today's world, it's the same thing. We look at a lot of people with business-to-business sales, maybe school teachers, engineers, healthcare professionals, but we start off with basic science education. The things that we really need to know around our disease states and then we talk about product knowledge and competitive product knowledge and really help hold the representatives hands for a while to get them to have a conversation about our products and how they're appropriate for certain patients in treating disease. Then into home office, we have tests, quizzes, evaluations. We also have video role-play. We have video role-play rooms where you're being watched and then you get to go judge yourself when you're done. It's really hard for people to get used to that concept but there's no better teacher than to watch yourself in a sales call. It's one of those things that everybody hates it but it's really, really good for me and always really glad they did it. So, once they get past the initial home office training, they come out into the field and there's literally training on a one-to-one field ride with your district manager. With my team, we'll have small-group meetings every few weeks in the local area where we'll talk about topics, hot topics in the science or what's happening in the sciences of persuasion or selling and just to make sure that we're sharing best practices. In a couple of times here, we may a larger meeting, maybe half the country will get together at a large meeting where we'll hear from the brand teams. We'll hear from motivational speakers. We'll hear from upper management to let us know where our company is going. But in between that, there's a lot of web-based training. So, it is really continuous training. I've had a really good education and it was all free, took a lot of time, a lot of effort but the company really has done a good job to help us understand what we need to understand. That's great and I want to thank you for sharing your experiences and your knowledge. You've really helped to share what it's like here in the real world. So, really thanks once again for being part of the program. Thank you very much.
