We don’t sell drugs!
Have you ever had the following happen to you? A vendor comes to your office to pitch a product, tool, or service. You ask them what experience they’ve had with companies like yours and they say, “We have tons of experience with companies like yours. Look at this great work that we did with Merck, Lilly, and Pfizer.”
Right.
How many times have you had to explain that you don’t sell therapies or drugs, that you sell the products and services used to develop them.
Or even worse, suppose that your company’s president, whose previous experience was in pharma sales and marketing, insists that you use a specific marketing communications agency or a sales trainer, a vendor that your president used while in pharma. Now the onus is on you to spend a huge amount of time educating the vendors about how to do their job in a life science environment—if you’re a marketer, you end up rewriting everything and are saddled with the vendor’s very expensive graphic designer. If you’re a sales manager, you end up developing the bulk of the sales training materials—role plays, case studies, sell sheets—only to have the vendor make it look pretty. Or worse yet, you’re a salesperson forced to sit through a sales training program that clearly was designed for pharmaceutical sales reps.
Your professional life is challenging enough. You shouldn’t have to compensate for an outside firm’s inexperience in your business area.
Horror stories like these formed the impetus to create the SAMPS supplier directory.
The directory lists the contact information for 75 vendors ranging from marketing communications and market research agencies to CRM and conference companies, all with experience in the SAMPS space. And organizations that join the SAMPS via a sustaining membership may also include a company logo and a 50-word description of their products and services.
With your help we can grow and improve the directory to include more companies in more categories. So use the comments field below to suggest other vendors to add to the list. We promise not to divulge the source of any information submitted for entry into the directory.
Chuck Drucker
Chuck Drucker is a results-driven leader with over 20 years of experience in selling and marketing scientific products and services. In addition to his role as President of the Association of Commercial Professionals – Life Sciences (SAMPS), Mr. Drucker is Director of Client Facing Operations and Alliance Management for Quest Diagnostics Clinical Trials.