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Your Negative View Of Sales Only Hurts You
When you read the word sales, what thoughts were triggered in your brain? Were they something like this:
“Salespeople are so stupid.”
“Sales only cares about getting scripts.”
“Ugh, sales.”
Having a negative view of commercial is a common thing among Medical Affairs folks. There seems to be a lot of skepticism if not pure disdain. It’s not true across the board for all Medical Affairs people, but if you are in this camp your negative view of sales only hurts you! This limiting belief not only demonstrates a lack of business acumen, it also results in you missing out in a ton of different amazing opportunities.
Let’s dig into this negative view of sales, embrace a mindset shift and leverage some of these opportunities to increase impact and improve patient outcomes.
Why do Medical Affairs folks have a negative view of sales?
There are a number of reasons that Medical Affairs folks view sales with suspicion:
- History of non-compliant behavior with serious consequences
- Afraid of being viewed as acting promotional or non-compliant
- Human’s natural tendency to sequester into groups
- A misconception about what sales is
- Lack of understanding of the commercialization process
Not to justify any unlawful behavior but many of the reasons are fear-based or rooted in a lack of understanding. Sales and marketing are required to commercialize a product and get it into the hands of patients.
In other words, sales is not going away. Instead of a mindset that it is bad or a necessary evil, what about viewing commercial as a strategic partner? Often when Medical is struggling to demonstrate value, it can be traced back to bad relationships. Viewing sales and other departments as members of the same team, all trying to help patients is the difference between a failing Medical Affairs team and one that is kicking butt.
Having a Negative View of Sales Misses Huge Opportunities!
Lifescience companies invest significant resources in research and development to bring new treatments to market, and sales teams play a crucial role in ensuring that these treatments reach patients. This is the business acumen piece where many Medical Affairs folk struggle: they don’t understand how all the functions are critical to bringing a product to market. Providing education to doctors is an important piece of the puzzle, but that’s only a piece. It alone does not result in successfully getting the therapy to patients. When Medical Affairs is more open and collaborates with sales, it can contribute to the commercial success of its products and help improve patient outcomes.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg!
Here are other reasons why working closely and collaboratively with sales benefits you:
- Understanding how other departments function improves your business acumen and enables you to gather better insights and add value.
- MSLs with great relationships with sales counterparts have an easier time getting warm introductions to KOLs they don’t know.
- It provides a better experience for KOLs and HCPs. It looks so bad when MSLs and sales reps aren’t coordinated. It gives an impression of incompetence.
- Sales does a lot of things well. Not everything, but a lot 🙂! Often they are great at building relationships and engagement. Medical Affairs can benefit from their knowledge of relationship-building and KOL/HCP preferences and challenges.
- Sales may have access to additional resources that Medical Affairs can leverage.
- It helps demonstrate the impact of Medical Affairs. Sales and Medical teams working great together aren’t in constant discussions about how the other is adding value. Strong relationships are key to demonstrating value
- Better work environment overall. Work is not fun when there is a lot of frustration and distrust among teams. It’s so important to have fun at work!
I’m sure I am forgetting some here. Comment down below or share with me on LinkedIn.
Challenge Your Mindset About Sales
If you don’t think of sales as a vital part of your organization and your success, challenge your thinking and mindset. Here are some questions to ask yourself:
- Am I truly collaborative?
- Do I feel like everyone is on the same team?
- What biases or assumptions do I hold about sales? Where do these come from?
- Do I recognize the value that sales can bring?
- Are any underlying emotions like distrust impacting my relationship?
- Am I considering sales colleagues’ perspectives, challenges and goals (i.e. having empathy)?
Building a relationship with sales and other functions starts with your mindset. As pointed out earlier, sales is not going away. Viewing them as enemies isn’t going to help you, your team or patients.
Kirk Shepard shares a great way to develop relationships with cross-functional partners in this hack: Don’t Try to Own Everything.
Conclusions: Your Negative View of Sales Only Hurts You
Here’s a good summary of how your negative views only hurt you: are you part of the problem or part of the solution? Evaluate your perceptions of sales and other colleagues. Are you acting like a member of a team? Do understand how their contributions are valuable to helping patients? How you collaborate matters and directly impacts the value of Medical Affairs and your own work.
How do you view your sales counterparts? How are you currently working with commercial? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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