Pharmacia & Upjohn adds 600 reps

KALAMAZOO, MI - Pharmacia & Upjohn is expanding its prescription pharmaceutical sales force by more than 600 sales representatives and sales managers.

Currently, the company employs more than 1,300 salespeople. With its aggressive new hiring, anticipated to be complete by mid-1998, Pharmacia & Upjohn will have a sales force with numbers pushing 2,000.

The majority of new hires will join the existing primary care force, according to Greg Schofield, the company's vice president of U.S. sales. Those representatives will be responsible for promoting Caverject, Estring, Depo-Provera, Luvox and Vantin, as well as new products Pharmacia & Upjohn plans to promote heavily in 1998, such as Camptosar, Mirapex, Xalatan and Destrusitol, a urinary incontinence product awaiting FDA approval.

"We're going from one primary sales force to two," Schofield said. "One will have a specialty focus on neurology and urology, and the other will handle a women's health and central nervous system product line."

Ten salespeople will be hired as district managers, approximately 120 new hires will join the company's institutional sales force to promote strictly hospital-based products and an undisclosed number of field representatives will fill out the ranks of existing specialty forces that market oncology, ophthalmology, peptide hormone and HIV/AIDS product lines. All field reps will promote new products.

Pharmacia & Upjohn made its recruiting announcement less than one month after it unveiled a plan to relocate its corporate headquarters from Kalamazoo, MI to an undetermined site in the mid-Atlantic region.

Although sales representatives will be hired to cover territories in every major U.S. city, Schofield believes the company's decision to move headquarters from Kalamazoo to the East Coast will facilitate hiring.

"It's much easier to attract talent to a bigger metropolitan area like the New York/New Jersey area. We're in a dynamic, competitive marketplace and we're looking for dynamic, competitive sales professionals to lead the way." PR