Do you remember the last time your sales reps sat down with a doctor and spent a few minutes chatting about your new drug? And how deftly they used the detail aid you spent months developing, perfecting, and crafting into the perfect message with the perfect visual? Can’t recall, huh? It’s probably been a while.
 
Did you know that 93% of sales calls on doctors last less than 2 minutes? Today’s physicians have patients to see, insurance to file and tests to run. Now they also have email to read and Blackberrys to check. Not to mention thousands of medications that change almost daily.  Who’s really going to have time for a nice chat about the arachidonic-acid cascade in the GI tract?
 
So how do we solve our time-challenged doctor issues? We’ve got to stop relying on salespeople. They do a great job, sure, but they can’t do it all. Especially in 120 seconds. Marketers have got to start thinking outside the sales call. We need to aggressively look to the web, to things like YouTube and video searching. Find those PDAs and use them to get the doctor a better message, one that’s tailored to him and is relevant to his practice. And don’t forget about those journal ads, either.

Look, no one likes a big fat visual aid more than an ad agency executive, so this is hard for me to admit. I love being able to tell the story of my clients’ products. That means we have to stay one step ahead of our targets, which these days, means running. So get your sneakers on and get those ideas going. You’ve got less than 2 minutes.