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• New safety data are becoming available, creating challenges for useful drugs associated with substantial risks — and in many cases posing risk-management decisions that doctors and patients aren't properly prepared to make.
• Whole new classes of drugs are coming to market. They promise to transform the care of some diseases—but they are unfamiliar, based on new mechanisms of action, and they will require a new level of knowledge on the part of doctors, patients, and payers alike.
• The wider social context is tough and getting tougher, with a hostile Congress, worried patients, OIG on the attack, and FDA in retreat. Pharma needs to rebuild faith in its processes and products—and sales and marketing are its public face.

Without pharmaceutical sales and marketing, the great engine that creates new life-saving medicines would grind to a halt. Your job may not be popular at the moment but it is crucial.

Pharmaceutical Executive’s Marketing and Sales Summit taking place Nov. 4-6, 2007 is aimed at helping pharmaceutical marketers to stay compliant, serve doctors and patients, and build the business.

Patrick Clinton, Editor-in-Chief of Pharmaceutical Excutive Magazine, will be our guest in this podcast and give us his views of of issues facing pharmaceutical marketing and sales today as well as discuss some of the highlights of PE's Marketing and Sales Summit.

Patrick Clinton
Patrick Clinton has more than 25 years of experience as a magazine editor and is currently the editor-in-chief of Pharmaceutical Executive. From 1983 to 1987, as managing editor of the Chicago Reader, one of the largest and best known of the urban alternative weeklies, he oversaw a unique blend of long-form feature journalism and intensive coverage of local arts and politics. He served as senior editor at Chicago magazine, a 200,000 metropolitan monthly, where he edited business and investigative features. From 1989 to 1997, Patrick was an assistant professor in the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where he taught writing and editing and served as lead editorial instructor in the school’s Graduate Magazine Publishing Project, a unique cross-disciplinary program in which graduate students create a fully realized start-up magazine. He is also the author of Guide to Writing for the Business Press, the only current professional text on reporting and writing for trade magazines.

Some questions:

1. What are some of the major challenges, in your opinion, that the pharmaceutical industry is facing today?
2. You say that "pharma needs to rebuild faith in its processes and products" and suggest that marketing and sales must play a role in that rebuilding. Can you explain what you mean by that?
3. Tell us about the upcoming Marketing and Sales Summit, who should attend, what presentations you are looking forward to, who are the important industry and other speakers we should not miss, etc.

Additional Resources

• Pharmaceutical Executive’s 2007 Marketing & Sales Summit
• Visit this Pharma Marketing Events Forum discussion thread for up-to-date notices, program details, speaker changes, etc.