Rob Perez
EVP and COO, Cubist Pharmaceuticals
STARTED OUT: As a sales rep in South Central Los Angeles
WANTS TO: Ultimately be a high school basketball coach
Rob Perez
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A mere six months before Biogen's launch of Avonex, no sales plan had been written and only a skeleton crew had been put in
place. But then Rob Perez and others came in and hammered out a commercial model for success.
"I had a chance to design a sales model from scratch," says Perez, who came to run Biogen's US neurology franchise. "Avonex
was wildly successful—with 50 percent share in seven months—because it was as great product, but also because the commercial
model we put together worked well."
When Perez came to Cubist, he had the chance to do it all over again—and this time serve as the company's top commercial
exec. The drug to be launched was Cubicin, an IV antibiotic that was effective in fighting MRSA and other bugs. But Perez
and his team saw an opportunity to leverage the IV drug outside the hospital—and in so doing, made Cubicin the most successful
IV antibiotic launch in US history.
Cubist saw that the ex-hospital approach was working, and upped the resources to capture the opportunity. Perez credits this
quick thinking to the culture. "I've always worked at companies that have had to compete with the Pfizers of the world, who
outspend you every time. So I try to find people who will ask, 'What can we do better tomorrow?' And if we do our job and
put the right business processes in place so that we can learn from that faster, than we can gain a competitive advantage."
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