I recently met Jennifer Woo, Therapeutic Area Manager - Respiratory, at a Genentech Women Professionals networking event. I was impressed that her role in pharmaceutical sales and account management ensures that patients get the medicines they need. Therefore, I was thrilled when she agreed to share her experiences with us in this post. Jennifer has excellent advice about how to be successful in a pharmaceutical sales career.
1. What is your role as a Therapeutic Area Manager?
The Therapeutic Area Manager (TAM) works closely with physicians and staff to provide product education. I help drive Genentech’s vision of achieving the ‘Triple Aim’ within the healthcare system.
The ‘Triple Aim’ is:
- To improve patient outcomes,
- To improve quality of care, and
- Lower healthcare costs.
As a TAM, I help drive product demand. To do this, I provide education on Genentech’s products for its indication and use for patients who may need the medication the most.
What is an indication? In medicine, an indication is a valid reason (like a symptom) to use a certain test, medication, procedure, or surgery
In essence, my role is to support the clinical staff to be aware of our products within our therapeutic area of expertise. These days, ensuring healthcare access can be tricky to navigate for a patient. Therefore, my job is to ensure the doctor’s office is equipped to share those resources to help support the patients and/or their caregivers. I develop relationships with physicians by driving awareness and demand of our product. My TAM position is field based. Thus, I directly interact with offices (in person, on the phone or virtually) within my geographical area.
The therapeutic area that I am focused on is in the respiratory space. Specifically, this includes respiratory conditions such as asthma and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. As someone who has family members with respiratory conditions, I find it meaningful to be able to help offices specialized in this therapeutic area. This is especially important in these times of being in a pandemic.
2. Can you describe your pharmaceutical sales organization and what other functions you might interact with?
I work on the commercial sales and account management side of Genentech. My role sits within the commercial organization where I frequently interact with the marketing and business analytics team. I also work closely with peers who are in sales or in clinical education as nurses. Together, we strategically engage with a physician’s office or a large healthcare institution.
3. Can you describe a typical work day?
Sharing my typical work day is a bit tricky! Pre-COVID, much of my work would entail traveling to visit healthcare practices (offices/hospitals/pharmacies). The purpose was to engage in meetings with clinicians about our products. To prevent the risk of COVID-19 transmission and to avoid overwhelming the healthcare system, most of my work recently has been remote. Thus, I engage providers and their staff via phone calls and video conferences.
My work day typically depends on how I schedule my week with meetings with providers or my teammates. Sometimes, I may spend my day responding to emails or planning out how I engage with an account. Other times, I spend my time facilitating phone or video calls with a healthcare practice. Given that I have clinical discussions with doctors and nurses, I do need to study and stay updated in my knowledge of our products and how they can help specific respiratory conditions.
Each day, I’m learning something new- whether it be through my own studies or interactions with physicians. That is something that I really enjoy in my day to day.
4. What are the characteristics or skills that are required to be successful at your pharmaceutical sales job?
Prior to this role, I would have never imagined myself being in a “sales” job because I envisioned “sales” to be a bit intimidating. I had thought that success in “sales” would require having a particular personality (i.e., extremely outgoing and aggressive). While I enjoy interacting with people, I consider myself an introvert at times, so the idea of “pushing” a product didn’t land well with me.
However, this role has challenged my thinking on what it takes to be successful in a “sales/account management” role, especially for a pharmaceutical company.
While I think it is helpful to have a friendly/outgoing personality, I think what really is important is being able to demonstrate your passion and speak about it to be able to influence others.
See our Guide for Getting Your First Pharmaceutical Sales Job.
I have a deep passion for healthcare and helping patients get the therapy that they deserve. In addition, I believe that it is the physician’s right to be able to decide what they believe is the best care for their patients. Therefore, insurance coverage limitations should not be a barrier that deters a patient to get the care that they need.
It is important to be able to articulate that passion and communicate effectively with healthcare professionals. My previous roles involved working at a chiropractic office and also interacting with patients, so I come with the perspective of supporting the office with whatever they may need. In addition, I have a good understanding of the healthcare reimbursement/insurance landscape. Lastly, I am confident in being able to navigate around the nuances of getting insurance approval for a medication.
Other characteristics that would be helpful is to have a drive and a willingness to learn. In addition, it's important to have ‘thick skin’ in moments when you experience difficulty with arranging a meeting with an office to gain their commitment for our product.
One of the challenges I had in this role was the ability to develop relationships with new offices and practices from the ground up in a virtual environment. As we have all probably realized from 2020, it is much easier to develop and foster relationships with people in person versus video conferencing/phone. In these times, it will be helpful to be computer savvy to facilitate meetings with offices. Nowadays, I feel like I could host my own YouTube channel! Ha!
5. What did you work on prior to this pharmaceutical sales role?
Prior to this role, I was a case manager at Genentech. My work focused on supporting patients and their families living with Hemophilia A. I spoke with patients to help them understand their insurance coverage. Then I provided options to ensure their medication was able to be covered by their insurance.
6. What was your education or training? How did it prepare you for your job?
I have an undergraduate degree in Molecular Cell Biology through UC Berkeley. Looking back, it has prepared me fairly well for my current job because I try to keep up with medical literature on our respiratory products.
I had a deep interest in the health sciences, so I naturally thought that becoming a doctor was the route to go. However, after I graduated from college, I wanted to explore other aspects of healthcare. But I knew that I wasn’t interested in laboratory sciences/engaging in research. After all, I had done my share of it in college and wanted something different. As a result, I joined Genentech and felt that there was an opportunity to develop my career path with the company. I would have never imagined that there are roles within a biotech company that goes beyond clinical research. I’m glad that I spent my time at Genentech to explore the different types of roles within a biotech company.
7. What do you wish you knew before joining the pharmaceutical industry?
As I spent most of my academic career in molecular cell biology, I wish I had known that people in pharma do much more than just ‘clinical/laboratory’ work! There are roles that go beyond research and development in these companies. These roles can still have a meaningful impact to support a patient. Knowing this would have given me more reassurance in my early 20s when I was unsure about what to do with my degree after graduating.
Learn about various positions on our Pharma Functions page!
8. What is the best part of your job? What is the most challenging aspect?
My favorite aspect of working in my role is to be able to witness the impact of my work for a patient through the eyes of a clinician. My role goes beyond providing a ‘sale’ to an office because I can offer support and education. I love hearing stories of how a patient’s condition has significantly improved with our therapy and that I assisted in that process. In the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I helped support a toddler living with Hemophilia A and his family. I worked to ensure that they were able to continue receiving his medication overseas despite the travel restrictions placed from an international lockdown. Moments like these make me appreciate the work that I do.
The most challenging aspect is having work-life balance while being consistent in meeting my priorities. This is especially difficult in these times of working remotely! I have realized that it is pretty easy for me to be entrenched into work. That's because this job requires me to be self-accountable in my work.
In the beginning of the pandemic, it was difficult to adapt to a new working environment. That's because I was no longer traveling and mostly worked from home. Sometimes, I would ‘justify’ being in front of a computer screen for more than 8 hours each day just because I felt like I wasn’t getting ‘enough’ work done compared to the past when I was able to get it done more quickly in person. Therefore, I am now learning what is best for my workload and being comfortable with saying ‘no’ to specific projects.
9. What are typical compensation structures for pharmaceutical sales positions?
Each company has a different structure on how they compensate their field employees. Individual contributor field roles may have a base salary and bonuses based on performance on an annual or quarterly basis. The criteria for performance evaluations for a sales position can include the following:
- Ability to drive growth within the territory
- Quality of interactions with a provider
- Feedback received from peers or healthcare providers/customers
- How a customer’s needs were met
- Commissions or quota-based metric
If you’re curious and want to learn about the compensation structure, I would recommend researching that particular company’s performance incentive program for their sales/field employees.
10. How do I get involved with or learn more about a commercial role in pharma?
- Network! If you are already in a pharma company, get to know the people within the organization and find out what they do. See if there are opportunities to collaborate on a project. Alternatively, see if your manager will allow you to participate in a rotational job opportunity in another role. If you just recently graduated college, check out the career services. Or find the time to reach out to someone who has experience working in pharma to get to know what it’s like to work there.
For more on networking, read this guide and watch this video.
- Do your research. Reading this post and blog means that you are already taking an initial stab at learning more about the different types of roles within pharma. LinkedIn and Google are great tools to utilize to learn more about commercial roles in pharma.
- Find out if the role requires additional education/degree.
- Ask yourself, ‘What type of role am I looking for?’ Field-based commercial roles involve directly engaging with customers. For example, they include doctors, nurses, pharmacists, CFOs of major hospital systems or payers. There are other roles that are more internally focused within the company such as an Operations Manager or Marketing Director. Network with people with experience in those roles and ask them how they got to where they are now.
A huge thank you to Jennifer for sharing advice about her pharmaceutical sales work!
About Jennifer Woo
Jennifer began her career with Genentech in October 2013 as a Regional Case Manager supporting patients in the Ophthalmology and Hemophilia space. She is now a Respiratory Therapeutic Area Manager with Genentech.
Jennifer is a San Francisco native and currently lives around the Bay Area in California. She is the first in her family to attend and graduate college at UC Berkeley with a B.A in Molecular Cell Biology and Asian Studies. During her free time, she enjoys working out, going on food adventures and teaching her cat, Nimbo, new tricks. As an avid learner, she is currently exploring graduate programs in Business and Public Health to continue leveraging her passion in the healthcare industry.