A territory sales rep for a large pharmaceutical company communicated with her actions when she was denied the opportunity to communicate with words. She was making a joint sales call with her boss, the district manager. The doctor they were calling on worked at a medical clinic that was located on the twelfth floor of a high-rise office building in downtown Los Angeles. It’s important to remember here that most doctors don’t like to meet with pharmaceutical sales reps. The reason is that from a doctor’s perspective, there are lots of them, they are young and aggressive, they think they know everything so they insult the doctor’s intelligence and often promise things on which they don’t follow through.
When they arrived at this clinic, the doctor they wanted to see made it very clear through his receptionist that he had no intention of seeing them. As they stood there trying to figure out what to do next, the very doctor they wanted to see came out of the examining area and said, “I have a woman patient in one of my examining rooms who would like a video tape on your hair restoring drug. Do you have a video tape with you that I could give her right now?”
Since they didn’t have one in their immediate possession, the doctor immediately went back into the examining room without even listening to what they had to say. As it turned out, the sales rep did have a videotape on this drug in the trunk of her car. But that was down twelve floors across the street, down the street two blocks and down four floors in a parking garage.
This sales rep immediately set off to retrieve that tape. When she returned, her boss was standing outside the entrance to the building. The woman who wanted the tape had already left, but the sales rep’s boss knew what she was wearing and which direction she was walking. They ran this woman down on the sidewalk and gave her the videotape, a gesture for which she was very grateful. They then went back to the medical clinic where the sales rep wrote a detailed memo concerning what she had done. She then stapled her business card to the memo and left it with the receptionist.
Two days later, the sales rep’s phone rang. Guess who it was? It was the very doctor who just two days prior would not agree to meet with her. And guess what he wanted her to do? He wanted her to make an appointment to come in and meet with him. Why? Because with that single gesture she had convinced this doctor that she was the type of sales rep that had his best interest at heart. That’s the kind of sales rep every doctor wants to work with.
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