Book Excerpt from Chapter Six

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"Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits" -- Thomas Edison

The optimal job experience to secure a pharmaceutical sales job is at least two years prior "outside sales" experience. The definition of outside sales means not retail sales. This means selling to a customer base outside the office. Selling products to customers that you initiate yourself is called "cold calling" Jobs such as office equipment, healthcare related products, uniforms, bandages and telephone sales are good examples of jobs where you cold call for customers. Generally, your employer will give you a listing of established customers and a list of potential customers. You may have to find your own leads. Your job is to increase sales.

Often these jobs pay you a commission on your sales, or a draw versus commission. If you don't sell, you won't make money. This type of experience is optimal because it proves you have been able to find a customer, present a proposal and close the sale. If your job involves repeat business, you will be demonstrating rapport building. These are the same ingredients that make up pharmaceutical sales. Keep records of your sales with commission receipts, sales quotas and achievement letters, etc.

Don't worry if your only sales experience is in retail sales. You are not automatically eliminated from the candidate pool.

Ordinarily, as a recruiter, you provide the customer with what they want. A few years ago, I was in a position to supply candidates for a direct job with Abbott Laboratories. I was not the hiring Manager this time, but the recruiter supplying qualified candidates. Abbott wanted candidates with outside selling experience.

I made the decision to forward Sue, a candidate with no outside sales experience, for the job. Why did I recommend her and why did she win the job?

Sue had a degree in Sports Medicine, which was a plus, and the conviction energy and motivation for this position. But, her professional experience was all retail. At least that was what her resume told me. She sold clinique makeup at Macy's department store.

As it turned out her job was not merely standing behind a counter taking orders, but also involved actual selling, some even outside the store. As I questioned Sue about the responsibilities of her job, she described her activities. Sue developed sales outside the store. On her own time she gave makeup classes at health spas to meet customers. Sales increased by her initiative. She did have experience in selling to customers! She had experience cold calling. She arranged for the sales clinics, secured the appointments and sold products. She retained these customers for repeat business. This experience is analogous to pharmaceutical sales and outside sales.

If Sue had not been a friend of a friend, I would not have met with her for an initial interview. Her resume indicated no outside sales. After our meeting, we reworded her resume, emphasized her sales experience and accomplishments. Sue got the job!

The moral of the story is that your retail experience can be as valuable as outside experience. But outside sales experience is more similar to pharmaceutical selling. Just use examples of your selling experience (retail or outside) that are as similar to pharmaceutical sales as possible.

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Make Your Own Luck

Richard Wiseman, a professor at Britain's University of Hertfordshire, has conducted some experiments which

indicate to him that we have a lot more influence on our own good fortune than we realize.

Professor Wiseman executed a ten-year study to determine the nature of luck, and published his findings in a book called The Luck Factor: The Scientific Study of the Lucky Mind. Among other things, he experimentally studied the lottery winnings from people who count themselves as "lucky" and compared them to those who are self-described as "unlucky," and found that one's perception of their own luck before a lottery has no bearing on their likelihood of winning. Naturally this outcome was no surprise,because lotteries are driven purely by random chance. But in another test,the good professor asked participants to count the number of photographs in a sample newspaper, and subjects who has described      themselves as "lucky" were much more likely to notice a message on page two, disguised as a half-page advertisement with large block letters: STOP COUNTING–THERE ARE 43 PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS NEWSPAPER.

Obviously some measure of luck is based on chance, but this experiment and many others have led Wiseman to conclude that a significant portion of one's good fortune is not random, but rather due to one's state of mind and behaviors. He concludes that luck is an artifact of psychology, where a person is lucky not because of cosmic accidents, but because one achieves a particular mindset which precipitates and amplifies "lucky" events. While this observation may seem obvious, there are many interesting particulars in his findings.Professor Wiseman's newspaper test illustrated that people who feel lucky do indeed differ from those who do not, but not due to some outside force. The lucky individuals were paying more attention to their surroundings, which made them more likely to notice the message in the newspaper. During his long study on the nature of luck, he has

found that "lucky" individuals usually posses many intersecting qualities, including extroverted personalities, a lack of anxiety, open-mindedness, and optimism. Each of these play an important role in one's luck production. The essence of luck is opportunity,

so it follows that the more opportunities one encounters and the more receptive one is to those opportunities, the "luckier" one is. Wiseman has found that lucky people smile twice as often as  others, and engage in more eye contact than unlucky people do.

Such outgoing, extroverted behavior exposes a person to more opportunities due to the increased social interaction. Similarly, open-mindedness allows one to encounter a greater number of unique prospects, and makes one more apt to embrace new opportunities.Professor Wiseman has outlined four principles to help one

increase their good fortune:

Principle One: Maximize Chance Opportunities

Lucky people are skilled at creating, noticing and acting upon chance opportunities. They do this in various ways, including networking,adopting a relaxed attitude to life and by being open to new experiences.

Principle Two: Listening to Lucky Hunches Lucky people make effective decisions by listening to their intuition and gut feelings. In addition, they take steps to actively boost their intuitive abilities by, for example, meditating and clearing their mind of other thoughts.

Principle Three: Expect Good Fortune

Lucky people are certain that the future is going to be full of good fortune. These expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies by helping lucky people persist in the face of failure, and shape their interactions with others in a positive way.

Principle Four: Turn Bad Luck to Good Lucky people employ various psychological techniques to cope with, and often even thrive upon, the ill fortune that comes their way. For example, they spontaneously imagine how things could have been worse, do not dwell on the ill fortune, and take control of the situation.  Unsurprisingly, optimism plays a key role in luckiness, since it  strongly affects luck production and luck perception. Wiseman's

study shows that a lucky, optimistic person is far more satisfied  with all areas of their lives than an unlucky, pessimistic person. An optimist feels lucky for spotting a silver lining, however gray the cloud… yet a pessimist will curse their luck even in the face of good fortune, because they can't see past the green grass on the other side of the fence. Fortunately, one's mindset is entirely within one's control. An unlucky person who resolves to

change their luck can become more social; they can make a

conscious effort to be optimistic and make the best of any situation; and they can be more open to new ideas and experiences.

      In short, if you go looking for luck, you'll probably find it… or so says the professor. With any luck, he's right.