Chronicle of the dentist Cátia Iris Gonçalves published in DentalPro 143:
This real character who, as soon as we get to the clinic, is already sitting in the waiting room with a smile, waiting for us with a suitcase and who, unlike the patients, says he will watch as long as it takes for 5 minutes of our attention.
A medical sales representatives has a life almost as ungrateful as a dentist. They also have to deal with people (worse: dentists), have to know about your product, have to know about management, psychology and marketing. They have a rib of science and two of advertising. One or two more psychiatry vertebrae.
They have a car as messy as ours. Know the country and the best cafes and restaurants on earth. They use kilometers to discount taxes and comfortable shoes to walk the most unlikely and bumpy streets. They eat unhealthy food at bad times and have learned to survive high doses of cynicism and hypocrisy. They have a PhD in sympathy and another one in parking tickets. They have varicose veins, the spine almost as bad as ours (from carrying bags of pamphlets and material) and contractures in the risorious muscle. They have an open Samsonite account and crumbs and papers decorating the upholstery of the car. Experts in assertiveness, persuasion, persistence and patience know what life costs, with all its discomforts and setbacks, what it takes to earn a few hours of quiet and silence, to shed a tear in the peace of solitude, to shut up and smile when you want to crush skulls like stuffed crab shells.
They know the chemistry of what they spread to the point of molecular exhaustion, the most convincing clinical application, the flaws that the big company doesn’t know or insist on not seeing, and they can go back, in their bags or cars, to leave us anything they don’t have the certainty that it will be seen, experienced, prescribed, valued.
Some support our most disruptive follies, training, courses, and clinical practices, including idiosyncrasies of egos, industry, value and vanity, trying, at the end of the day, to bring each boat to its proper harbor, often without any recognition other than someone else’s money in someone else’s account by ensuring the economic fate of their employer.
They know the personal history of those who work at the reception, assistance, the back office, the management, and they don’t go down, because they know what it takes to wear a work mask to fulfill their financial dignity at the end of the month.
They know secrets of professional success in general, such as how to recycle energy and reinvent interpretations with every new face they visit – even if the products have been the same all day, all week, all month or year.
The annoying representatives are a bit like us, but more humble. And most of the time, much less annoying.
Thanks a lot to all of them, especially to those who push the tiring aspect of training, to those who watch over our success and our treatments.
Even those (or especially those) who get back in the car, just to be able to leave us a thong or a tube of paste.
