Perception Of Medical Doctors Towards Personal Selling Practices Of Medical Representatives Of Pharmaceutical Firms In Nairobi

Abstract

This study sort to investigate the perception of medical doctors towards personal selling practices of medical representatives of pharmaceutical firms in Nairobi. To achieve this, doctors were asked if they agreed or otherwise with the way medical representatives performed certain aspects of the personal selling processes. The population of interest for this study comprised all medical doctors in Nairobi. The sample frame used was the Kenya medical directory of 2002-2003.According to this directory,1348 medical specialists existed in Nairobi. Out of this ,only 1108 were medical doctors who frequently interacted with medical representatives .A sample size of 80 doctors was used and convenient sampling was used to select the sample units. Primary data was used in this study and data was collected using questionnaires comprising both open and closed ended questions. Research assistants were fellow medical representatives and the questionnaire was administered to the doctors using drop and pick later method as the researcher and research assistants visited their clinics or area of practice. Collected data was analyzed by use of tables and percentages were used to summarize and reflect the relative weight of a specific process in comparison with total number of responses. Likert scale was used to measure perception of doctors towards personal selling practices of medical representatives. From this study, it was found that as much as medical representatives were important in providing information to doctors, they lacked skills in getting to know the doctors needs and closing a sale, they were perceived not to be genuine and were unable to discuss medicine and other drugs with doctors other than what they were selling. This could have been caused by the fact that doctors are intelligent and medical representatives because they are not doctors may not be able to discuss technical issues with them. It was recommended that product managers design good training programs for medical representatives and offer continuous information to medical representatives so they could be able to be of value to doctors. This study was conducted in Nairobi and therefore the perception of medical doctors could not be generalized as results may vary in rural areas.Future studies could be carried out to find out the importance of these personal selling practices to doctors.