Not a good career in the near term. Most of the big pharma companies, the ones with the far more enticing sales jobs, are laying off their sales force due to patent expiry and failed drugs in the pipeline. For those who wonder about job security, you don't have it in pharma sales. Say you are put on the team for a drug expected to launch in 9 months but the FDA rejects it... the day the FDA rejects it, I would start sprucing up your resume.
But hey, if you are willing to navigate those landmines and the ones that belong to your pay, raise, and bonus structures, who am I to discourage?
Pharma sales can be a lucrative position, but nothing like sales of other products. In pharma sales, unless you are doing contracts with wholesalers, you aren't actually selling anything. You are promoting your product to the prescribing physicians in the hopes that they then perceive their patients' health will improve through their prescription of your product. This means that you are likely to go through some form of corporate education on the product which includes indepth knowledge of studies, study methodology, etc. I recommend that you take a course in evaluating medical literature and in biostatistics if you want to boost your chances of performing well.
But the FDA is cracking down on what the salesforce can and cannot say to promote their products because of all the off-label promotion. With physicians no longer receiving freebies from the pharma companies, they are increasingly less attentive and frequently dismissive - especially when you consider their time demands for patients is at an all time high. The future of all sales is in the development of very basic barely-educated salesforce which encourages and directs physicians to ask questions to the medical science liaison team which is given a lot more liberal authority on what types of statements they can make about their product because they are, as you would expect, medical experts on their drugs - typically MDs, PharmDs, and sometimes even NPs, and each with clinical experience.
