Support
That was the first crack. In pharma, primary sales meant what the company sold to stockists. Secondary meant what stockists sold to retailers. Tertiary meant what retailers sold to patients. A beautiful primary number with a rotten tertiary was not success—it was a lie waiting to metastasize.
He returned to his dashboard the next morning. The system had automatically generated a stock ageing report for Nebuflam-D. It showed that 34% of inventory at the stockist level was within 60 days of expiry. The algorithm flagged it as “moderate risk.” But what the algorithm didn’t say was that Suresh was planning to return those batches next week, triggering a cascade of negative entries that would nuke the zone’s incentive payouts for the quarter.
A pattern emerged.
Pooja hesitated. Then she opened a drawer. Inside were forty sheets of blank prescription pads—with Dr. Iyengar’s forged stamp. Fdc Sales Mis
But who? A rep desperate to meet target? A stockist colluding with a retailer? Or the MIS itself—not the software, but the people who controlled what data entered it.
Arjun had been a regional sales manager for eleven years. He had seen doctors change prescription habits, drug reps morph into digital avatars, and CRM tools evolve from paper diaries to AI-driven dashboards. But nothing—nothing—had prepared him for the silence that came after the launch of the new FDC.
Arjun walked to the data entry cubicle. A young woman named Pooja was manually uploading scanned prescription forms from field force. He asked to see the originals for Dr. Iyengar’s forty scripts from week one. That was the first crack
Arjun picked up his phone and called the rep. “Rajesh, Dr. Iyengar—did she prescribe Nebuflam-D in week one?”
“Arjun bhai, your Nebuflam-D is moving slow because the retailers are scared. Two months ago, the state drug controller banned another FDC—same steroid, different company. The wholesalers are still stuck with thirty lakhs of expired stock. So now, every time a retailer sees ‘low-dose steroid’ on a combo, they think: next ban . They order just one strip at a time. And the patient? If the doctor writes a combo, the patient asks the chemist, ‘Can I take just the expectorant alone?’ Then they buy half a course.”
Outside, the city was asleep. But somewhere, a patient with chronic bronchitis was breathing shallowly, having bought only half a course of the expectorant, leaving the steroid untouched—because a chemist had whispered, “Don’t take this combo, beta. Too risky.” Tertiary meant what retailers sold to patients
He pulled up the prescription trend for Dr. Meera Iyengar, a pulmonologist in the city’s top lung hospital. Her prescription numbers for Nebuflam-D had gone from zero to forty in the first week—after his star rep had visited her thrice—and then dropped to two in the third week. But the MIS showed zero patient redemptions from her prescriptions. That meant either patients weren’t buying it, or the prescriptions were never written.
He walked out of the data entry room, past the janitor who had stopped humming, past the empty cubicles, past the motivational posters that said “Data is the new science.”
On days when the company ran high-intensity sales blitzes, primary sales spiked—but redemption data showed no corresponding increase . In fact, on those days, the system recorded a suspiciously high number of prescriptions written after 9 PM , which was impossible because most clinics closed by 7.
The drug was called Nebuflam-D . A fixed-dose combination of an expectorant, a low-dose steroid, and a novel mucolytic. It was supposed to be a blockbuster for chronic bronchitis. The clinical trials were solid. The pricing was aggressive. The sales force was incentivized to the teeth.
Support
