Immunomedics Market Research

Research: MDs don't appreciate CEA-Scan

Focus groups showed that, even in the investigational period, doctors had formed unjustifiably negative views of CEA-Scan. One of the major complaints was "fuzzy, hard to interpret" images – and a reputed "high false positive rate." That harsh judgment was formed when CT and MRI of CEA-Scan-positive areas showed no tumor – when surgeons decided to trust the CEA-Scan, the majority of patients were determined at operation to be free of metastatic disease.

Nevertheless, the same research uncovered several very knowledgeable nuclear medicine specialists and their referring MDs who had found CEA-Scan to provide unduplicated staging information that could determine when heroic surgery was – or was not – likely to be curative.

Meetings with the licensee's sales managers determined that most were fearful of the price of a CEA-Scan kit – at nearly $1000, far more expensive than other imaging-agent kits on the market. Result: At one year, sales generated by their 50-person sales force were very disappointing.

Stage 1: Parallel CSO sales force

The first step in boosting CEA-Scan sales was the recruitment of a small contract sales organization (CSO) sales force, capable of focus on major-metro "tough" accounts with which the licensee force had been unsuccessful.

While CEA-Scan alone would not likely support the force long term, Immunomedics had a second imaging agent, LeukoScan®, already approved for infection imaging in the E.U., and approval was expected in the foreseeable future in the U.S. LeukoScan had the potential to match Thallium-201 and Cardiolite® as $100 million nuclear agents – impressive for an industry whose sales totaled just $300 million in 1997.

Mel participated with the CSO's recruiter in screening resumes and candidates, and from the first pool of 11 hired applicants, identified three very clearly superior salespeople: Cheryl Gwynn, in the Los Angeles area, Gary Polterak, in the New York area, and Michael Carracci, who agreed to move to Chicago. These three quickly demonstrated their capabilities not only to educate and sell key opinion leaders in their areas, but also to effectively share their expertise with the eight other field reps.

Upon Mel's recommendation, those three were appointed region managers by the CSO. He developed a sales training program from scratch, and ran training sessions in San Diego and Orlando, to prepare the new reps for their assignments.

After examining several distribution companies, Mel selected the ASD Division of Bergen Brunswig to handle distribution and billing of hospitals that chose to buy CEA-Scan direct, and a matrix of nuclear pharmacies prepared to service hospitals that wished to buy ready-to-inject CEA-Scan already mixed and labeled with the technetium-Tc99m tracer.

Continued on Immunomedics Sales Force page.