Tiny sigma-tau adds 22 new employees to sales force

The 12-person sales team of sigma-tau Pharmaceuticals Inc., Gaithersburg, MD, added 22 new employees to its force.

The small company, the U.S. subsidiary of Italy's largest pharmaceutical company sigma-tau S.p.A, markets Carnitor® (levocarnitine) for the treatment of carnitine deficiency.

"Our company started in 1989 to market Carnitor in the United States," said Brad Stewart, the company's manager of marketing. "We started with six people and then went to 12 in 1996. Now we've gone to 30 reps."

How does a size increase that may seem insignificant to some companies affect one as intimate as sigma-tau?

"When we added six, it was such a small number that it was still like a close-knit family," Stewart said. "Twenty-two was a bigger jump."

The company has added an additional regional manager to its existing two and is in the process of hiring a full-time sales trainer. The new sales representatives are learning their new territories by shadowing the representatives who covered them before. By early 1998, the new representatives will assume full responsibility for their customers.

"This makes things much easier for the people who were already with us," Stewart said. "We had people covering five or six states. Before, the smallest territory was three states, now it's half the Los Angeles area. This gives them more time to spend with their customers, less time to travel and [the chance to] see their customers more frequently. To us, it's a pretty dramatic difference." PR