DISTRICT MANAGER

I started out part-time in 1987 as a flextime pharmaceutical representative. I really had no idea what I wanted to do and just started looking at the help-wanted ads in the Philadelphia Inquirer. I knew I did not want to do any nursing and I did not want to do anything that required weekend, evening or nighttime hours. Friends had often told me they thought I would be good at sales. Turned out they were right. My new job was calling on Primary Care Physicians in their offices to promote over-the-counter products. I did this work part-time working one to three days a week around my kid’s school schedule. Andrew was in the first grade, Eileen in the second and Marnie was in middle school.

While I was only part-time, I brought the same intensity to this job as I had to my manic sewing. We were paid on the number of calls we made per day and I was driven by my need to be productive so I was posting strong numbers from the start. Even though I was always making my quota, my success probably had more to do with my nursing background than anything else did.

Not long after I started, the agency I was working for got a contract for a sales force to promote a new Intrauterine Device (IUD). The client wanted only RN’s for district sales managers. They wanted managers with strong clinical backgrounds to respond to doctors anticipated safety objections because we would be selling the product in a very litigious environment, to customers who had recently been through the Delcon Shield crisis. The Delcon Shield was an IUD with a malignant history. It caused countless incidences of patients suffering from severe pelvic inflammatory disease, infertility and even to deaths with the attendant lawsuits. Therefore, with three months of sales experience and no sales management experience I found myself a District Manager (DM).