Following in his father’s footsteps, Gerard Gregory found sales to be something in his blood. “I subscribe to the belief that a lot of people are in sales capacities more by default than by design, but that wasn’t the case for me,” says Gregory. “My greatest aspiration in life was to be someone as good as my father. He was very much an entrepreneur and the consummate sales person.”
Born and raised in Newfoundland, Gregory helped his father sell clothes to general stores before the era of malls and big box stores.

Gregory attended Memorial University in St. John’s and earned a degree in science in 1975. At that point, Gregory’s father was selling vehicles, and Gregory decided to join him after graduation for a short time.

His first job in the pharmaceutical industry was as a sales representative with Boehringer Ingelheim Canada Ltd. in Burlington, Ont., and he has been with the company for nearly 30 years.
“I live by the adage now that when I am finished with Boehringer Ingelheim or Boehringer Ingelheim will be finished with me, that I will be finished with pharmaceuticals,” says Gregory, who has been the company’s Director of Marketing since 2000.

Gregory was promoted to district sales manager and then later to regional sales manager. He also held positions as national sales manager, sales training/sales services manager, and international group product manager. Marketing is an area that he enjoys and was attracted to because of the strategies and concepts involved.

The job as international group product manager took him to Germany for two years. One of the primary objectives during his tenure in Germany was preparing for the worldwide launch of the company’s angiotensin receptor blocker Micardis®.

“That was a milestone for me,” says Gregory, noting the anti-hypertensive agent is a $1.3 billion product for the company. “There were lots of challenges, and I appreciated the cultural differences between Germany and Canada.”

While based in Germany, Gregory would travel back monthly to see his wife, now a retired nurse, his son, and his daughter, but Gregory, now a grandfather, found it difficult to be away from his family.

Another product that has done very well for the company and that Gregory regards as an achievement is Spiriva®, a prescription treatment for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Advances in technology, such as the use of tablet PCs and Closed Loop Marketing allow for presentations to physicians to be more interactive and address the segmentation of physicians in healthcare in the last decade, observes Gregory.

“Not all white coats are the same,” he says, explaining product managers can now review which marketing messages resonate more with physicians compared to others.

New physicians who come into the healthcare system are part of a generation that are computer friendly and are frequent users of the Internet and many technological devices, and so there will need to be a transformation in marketing to physicians, according to Gregory.

“I don’t think the Internet will displace field forces, but I do believe that how a field force interacts with physicians will change,” he says. “It may be that you spend part of your day promoting via the Web rather than meeting the physician face to face.”