Much has been written on the critical skills, technologies, systems and methodologies associated with successful pharmaceutical selling. Bryan McCrae explains why consistent sales success involves much more.

At my company Sales-Motivations we’ve just completed research into the most critical factors for sales success.  There’s been some very illuminating initial results. The two factors which we’ve found to be most important for high sales performance are resilience and intrinsic motivation. Strangely, given their importance, these factors rarely receive attention or development. It’s a sad fact that medical professionals often see little value in technological communications. Representatives now have only a few minutes or perhaps seconds to communicate and, in some countries, are prevented from seeing medical professionals altogether. Where contact is maintained, this is often driven more by sampling than the exchange of information. If current trends continue, then direct access to medical professionals may fade away altogether.

Resilience is the ability to recover quickly from setbacks and to keep going in the face of challenges. There are two main aspects to resilience.

The first is how badly a setback affects performance. It’s normal to feel down or demoralised if a major opportunity is missed. But does this result in just a small drop in activity levels for a short period or a major and long lasting drop in activity and performance? How long does this drop in activity and performance last for? It can vary from a few minutes to days, weeks or even longer. In some instances performance levels never fully recover. It is easy to see that the deeper the dip and the longer it lasts the more it will reduce performance. Resilience is vitally important to sales success.

The second factor is intrinsic motivation, which is the degree to which people want to work well in their jobs in order to achieve personal satisfaction and success. External motivators do work, but the effect is often short lived and not as strong for complex, technical or solution selling, compared to transactional selling.  This link between intrinsic motivation and effort, persistence, productivity and staff turnover has been repeatedly and reliably demonstrated in many studies.

‘Will-do’ or ‘Can-do’

Together, these factors also explain the difference between ‘can-do’ representatives and ‘will-do’ representatives. This is often most obvious when there are major changes in the market or changes in the role of the representative – as is certainly the case presently within pharma.

Selling doesn’t come naturally to everyone. But by harnessing the latest psychology techniques every employee can become part of the wider sales team. The outcome? A boost to employee motivation, the ability to engage in selling and a boost to your bottom line.

A new approach

The playing field has changed with the recent changes in the NHS and budget pressures resulting in the market becoming a lot more competitive. Sales professionals now need to be able to sell themselves and their products more than ever, show what differentiates them from their competitors and use sophisticated sales and account management techniques to win and retain clients.

But even the words ‘sales or selling’ fill many representatives with feelings of dread as it conjures up images of pushy double glazing and dodgy used car salesmen with questionable ethics. However, this selflimiting belief can be addressed by using powerful proven psychological techniques.

Fundamentally there is an issue around the thoughts, feelings and beliefs conjured up by the words ‘sales or selling’. This is where a change of mind-set can be very helpful. Rather than think of it as selling, think of it as of the process of finding healthcare professionals who need your products to help their patients stay healthy. In return, they will want to stay aligned with your brand, rather than competitors.

By challenging one’s mind-set the lack of motivation commonly associated with doing something we don’t feel comfortable with can be addressed. In fact, there is no need for any pharma sales professional to feel uncomfortable selling. The skill sets used for sales share many of the skills found in many scientific professionals. With a bit of flexibility and creativity these skills can be transferred from use in sciences to utilisation in sales to great effect.

Breaking barriers

One approach that has been proven to be very effective is ‘structured self-coaching’. Just like face-to-face coaching sessions, this involves clarifying what a person wants to change then identifying, exploring and overcoming the psychological barriers to achieving these goals, followed by creating an action plan to implement it.

Taking the example of ‘I want to feel more confident when trying to get a client to sign up for a new brand’, a common barrier might be the belief that if you can’t get them to sign up quickly then you don’t know how to negotiate sales and you’ll inevitably lose the client as a result. This sort of thinking is obviously unhelpful and, if left unchecked, results in reduced motivation, the ability to recover quickly from setbacks and lower sales as a consequence.

But an approach called ‘thought challenging’ is very effective in breaking this sort of thinking pattern. It involves four specific questions:

Question 1: Am I making any ‘thinking errors’?

There are a common set of unhelpful thinking patters that we all fall into from time to time, such as emotional labelling, magnification and should statements. The word ‘stupid’ is an emotional label. Individuals magnify the consequences of not being able to answer a question immediately and the ‘I should be able to’ belief implies that there is some sort golden rule that is broken.

Question 2: What is the evidence for and against this thought or belief?

Do all effective sales professionals really know the answer to every question that a client might ask of them? How do I really know this? What proof do I have? Have I asked any accomplished reps if it is true?

Question 3: What are other ways of looking at this situation?

What would happen if you said: “I’m not certain of the answer, but I’ll get back to you within 24 hours?” Creatively generating several options at this stage is always useful. Pick one and give it a try.

Question 4: What am I going to do to generate a different result?

If you do nothing different then you’re very likely to get the same results. Sales professionals need to work out how to think, feel and behave differently next time to bring about improved results.

This structured approach, together with on-going reinforcement and practice, really does help people fine-tune their thinking and behaviour to be more successful. In fact, using these techniques has been shown to result in 20% more people reaching or exceeding their sales targets.

Testing resilience

Do you know how resilient you, or you sales team, really are? One approach would be to take a resilience online questionnaire – there’s one at the Sales- Motivation website. Once you have completed our questionnaire, respondents receive a personalised six-page report describing individual motivation and resilience profiles and what can be done to maintain or improve them to boost performance.

Research from a recent study with more than 1,000 participants found that anyone in sales can increase their performance by developing their intrinsic motivation and resilience by a structured self-coaching approach.

It works with poor performers as well as helping others move from ‘good’ to ‘great’ and helping the ‘great’ to become consistent ‘superstars’. These really are the secret ingredients of sales success!

Bryan McCrae is a Sales Psychologist, Sales Coach and the founder of Sales-Motivations. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Sales and Marketing Management, a Founding Fellow of the Sales Leadership Alliance and a member of the British Psychological Society. For more information visit www.sales-motivations.com.

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) plans redundancies in its European sales and administration force to help it cut £1bn from its annual European, R&D and manufacturing costs by 2016.

The London-based pharma giant said it will achieve most of the cost reductions through technical improvements in its R&D and manufacturing processes.

According to CEO Andrew Witty, the cost savings plan has been driven by drug pricing pressures across Europe as the recession continues to worsen.

He also noted that job cuts would primarily affect sales and administration staff across Europe, but did not indicate the likely numbers.

Witty emphasised that GSK has six new drugs (including treatments for HIV, type 2 diabetes, melanoma and asthma) under review by regulatory bodies, with late-stage clinical trial data expected for another nine products within two years.

The company aims to launch up to 15 products within three years, he told business analysts. But given the economic uncertainties affecting Europe, 2013 would be a year of “twists and turns” and “not everything is going to go smoothly”.

According to a company spokeswoman, the technical and staffing changes (including redundancy payments) will have a combined one-off cost of £1.5bn, and will primarily be focused on Europe.

In the new Pf, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt answers some questions from our readers. Maxine Vaccine delivers a brief audit report on his answers.

The most vital thing to remember about Jeremy Hunt is that he’s not Andrew Lansley. The older man spent nine years dreaming up a transformation of the NHS into a competitive healthcare market system, then claimed he’d had to invent it out of thin air when, as part of the new coalition government, he “saw the books” (which he’d had full access to for nine years) for the first time. Then he drove through legislation designed to break up the NHS and place its fragments on the bargain shelf of global corporate business, and mocked anyone who questioned it. Forced into a cosmetic display of ‘consultation’, he followed it up by declaring that the ‘listening period’ had been needed only to educate the ignorant doctors.

And suddenly, the Tories are faced with the prospect of losing power. Journalists are calling the Health and Social Care Act ‘Cameron’s poll tax’. Cue the new Department of Health. Exit the sneering headmaster and enter the elegantly half-smiling head boy. Who doesn’t half scrub up well, and – unlike Lansley – can say “the NHS is one of our greatest assets” without crossing his fingers behind his back. Jeremy Hunt was a contributor to Direct Democracy (2005), a Conservative Party activist guide that claimed the NHS was “no longer relevant” to modern society because it was a public sector health system. But he can say “the NHS is one of our greatest assets” because he can say anything. Lansley is a Thatcher type of politician, whereas Hunt is a Blair type.

His answers to the Pf questions are classic examples of why he has been drafted in to front NHS reform up to the next General Election, or at least part-way there. He never says the wrong thing. If he can’t say the right thing, he says nothing in a nice way. He makes you feel that anyone who disagrees with him must be insane. It’s only when you compare his words with what is actually going on that things get complicated – and you realise that, as a new lease-holder in the house that Lansley built, he has only unpacked the suitcases for two rooms: the front room and the bathroom. The rest of the house is unoccupied.

Regular Pf contributor Omar Ali asked Hunt a question about NHS rationing: how will making patients pay for services be integrated into the wider healthcare bill implementation? A good question, as this is already happening: patients in many areas are being told they cannot have cataract operations, varicose vein surgery or hip/knee replacements unless either (a) they wait until their need is greater (for example, they can have cataract surgery once they are blind) or (b) they go private. Referral management, which Sir David Nicholson is very keen on, is another form of rationing: if patients want to see a specialist in many situations, they have to go private. Hunt’s response is worth quoting in full:

Let me be absolutely clear on this – the NHS will always be free at the point of delivery and no one will be asked to pay for its services. Yes, in the future, services will be provided differently – public health services will be organised by local authorities, for example – but the founding principle of those NHS services being free, for those who need it, will never change.

Hunt is neatly splitting the hair of Omar Ali’s question. If people are paying for services they are not NHS services, they are private. But money will still be changing hands for services that used to be free. They just won’t be NHS services any more. And that “for those who need it” is significant. It has two aspects: severity of clinical need (already a moveable famine) and ability to pay (Direct Democracy suggests the NHS should become a means-tested state reimbursement of private healthcare fees). Who needs free healthcare, and what free healthcare they need, will be critical issues from now on – and legally, the Health Secretary now has no remit to influence those decisions, which will be made by autonomous CCGs and/or the autonomous Commissioning Board.

Pf reader Susan Ranch asked whether the Government’s recent announcement that it will cap individual payments for social care at twice the Dilnot-recommended level means that more NHS funding will be committed for elderly patients. Hunt replied: This is incorrect. The Government has not said this and no decision has been made. Strictly speaking, he is right. According to the BBC and three Tory-loyal newspapers (the Sunday Times, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express), journalists were briefed that setting the social care payment cap at £75k (whereas Dilnot had recommended £35k) would feature in the Government’s mid-term review. But it did not – and the critical backlash from social and healthcare experts was either unnecessary or effective, depending on your interpretation. Whatever its level, the cap appears unlikely to be implemented before the 2015 election.

Hunt went on to say: I want this country to become one of the best places in Europe to grow old and make sure people can live independent and healthier lives into old age. Which is the kind of gold-plated soundbite Lansley never delivered.

Another Pf reader, Leigh Saunders, asked how the pharmaceutical industry could work with the NHS to improve cancer survival rates. Hunt replied: The pharmaceutical industry already plays a vital role in improving the health of people with cancer. I want to improve mortality rates, where the targeting and development of medicines is becoming ever more important. I am sure the pharmaceutical industry will want to build on its work in this area and help improve cancer care.

Great stuff: that flatters the industry, expresses a decent medical aim, and then flatters the industry again. It doesn’t answer the question, but who cares?

Jeremy Hunt’s management of the Pf questions is a masterclass in accessible spin. It tells us almost nothing about Government policy, but it tells us why Hunt currently holds the lease on the house of NHS reform. He knows how to make it look good – and in politics, that’s not always easy. The pharma industry should recognise Hunt’s talents as those of marketing and sales. He’s one of us.

Maxine’s views and attitude are not necessarily those of Pf.

At a recent meeting of the Pharmaceutical Learning and Organisational Development  network, it was agreed that a change in sales training tactics could help address the challenging market conditions by  increasing motivation and resilience for those involved in the sales process.

To address this need, Sales-Motivations have partnered with Wellards to deliver cost effective e-learning based sales performance solutions to help pharmaceutical and medtech teams maintain and grow their motivation and sales performance in these difficult times, without the cost and inconvenience of traditional training. 

To find out more, please visit www.sales-motivations.com, or for a free trial of Sales Motivations, visit www.sales-motivations.com/free1day,  or contact us on +44(0)845 531 4125.

Research suggests that the best work-life balance involves strong commitment to both areas.
Does that happen in pharma – or only in Narnia?

Medical sales professionals are likely to be wary of work-life balance (WLB). The traditional sales model has been associated with a workaholic mindset – the more you work, the more commission you earn – and an attraction to the freedom of the road. But these days, travelling light is likely to mean you have nothing to come back to. As medical sales has developed towards long-term selling and key account management, so its professionals have come to rely more on domestic stability as a support.

A perfect circle
A recent study by Working Families challenges the idea that home life and work are competing priorities. They surveyed over 2,000 high-achieving professionals, mostly female, working in the private sector in South-East England – supposedly the yuppie heartland. What they found was a strong, bidirectional correlation between ‘work engagement’ and ‘relationship quality’. As either factor improved it strengthened the other factor instead of detracting from it.

They also found that problems at work affected home life and vice versa – but whereas many professionals could escape from domestic stress at work, few could leave work issues behind when going home. Where a vicious circle existed between the two, the driving force was usually trouble at work. Where steps were taken to reduce stress at work, the domestic picture normally improved.

Working Families concluded: “Work-life balance is not the bringing together of two separate and competing domains, but rather the two need to be understood as two aspects of the same dynamic. Those who are more fulfilled at work may also be more fulfilled at home.”

These important findings suggest that work-life balance does not have to be seen in terms of managing a conflict. Far more importantly, it can be seen in terms of creating a mutual reinforcement to the benefit of the individual and the company.

Bending the rules
The big question for employers is how they can achieve this perfect circle for the dysfunctional individuals who make up their sales teams. Giving staff more flexibility – in terms of when and where they work – is the most popular solution among companies and staff alike.

However, Working Families notes, flexible working is no bed of roses. For women in particular, flexible working is likely to impact negatively on home life by allowing a conflict to develop. Conversely, men tend to take up flexible working “far less often” than women, perhaps due to fear of such a conflict. Employers should therefore ensure that there is an “embedded culture of flexibility” in which such conflicts and anxieties can be resolved.

The Work Foundation even makes flexible working definitive of WLB: “Work-life balance is about people having a measure of control over when, where and how they work.” But the truth is that WLB cannot be wholly separated from other issues such as accountability and autonomy.

The CIPD’s Employee Outlook for summer 2012 notes that 60% of employees report satisfaction with their WLB. Women are more likely to feel that they have the right WLB (65%) than men (55%). The CIPD reports a strong positive correlation between employee engagement and satisfaction with WLB.

A delicate balance
The Pf Company Perception, Motivation and Satisfaction Survey 2012 shows that for medical sales professionals, work-life balance ranks fourth in a list of 18 priorities (after salary, relationship with direct manager and job security). Overall, 42% of survey respondents are ‘satisfied’ with their WLB and 28% are ‘dissatisfied’.

These figures suggest that WLB is neither a major problem nor a big success for the pharma industry. Given that WLB is a predictor of work engagement, they do not encourage complacency.

Women surveyed are happier with their WLB (44%) than men (39%), which may reflect greater skill in balancing the relevant factors. Employees working part-time are happier (49%) than those working full-time (41%), which may reflect a trade-off between income and WLB.

Industry satisfaction with WLB is fairly consistent across regions in England, but is much lower in Wales (31%) and Scotland (30%). In Scotland, the proportion actively dissatisfied with WLB is 35%, making the issue a negative one for the nation’s pharma companies.

The age-related figures show highest satisfaction with WLB (68%) among employees aged below 25, with lowest satisfaction (35%) among those over 55. That does not suggest that starting a family is a trigger for major WLB concerns – and indeed, Working Families states that such a view is a myth. Rather, WLB becomes steadily more important with age.

Employees whose sales are above average are more likely to feel they have the right WLB (45%) than those whose sales are average or below average (both 36%). However, for those with the highest sales, WLB satisfaction drops to 34%. That suggests that the correlation between professional success and WLB works only up to a certain point.

Roles associated with associated with industry average or better WLB are nurse advisor (57%), primary care specialist (47%) and KAM (45%), while sales management is associated with WLB well below average: 31% for first-line managers, 26% (with a shocking 58% dissatisfied) for second-line managers.   

WLB satisfaction drops steadily with time in role, from 48% after less than six months to 37% after eight years. This contrasts with the effect of time in the industry, where WLB satisfaction rises to a peak between four and eight years (53%) before trailing off.

The whole picture
The Pf survey broadly supports the view that work-life balance is about the mutual reinforcement of work and home life, rather than managing a conflict. But it also shows that conflicts are possible in certain kinds of role, notably sales management, and where individuals may be aiming too high.

Companies need to support WLB, especially with older employees, and understand that WLB is a predictor of good performance. They should promote flexibility without seeking a ‘one size fits all’ model. Above all, they should be mindful that the strongest driver of successful WLB is fulfilment at work.

Fearless blogger Maxine Vaccine examines the key issues affecting pharma industry companies and careers – this week, the question of what makes a truly good employee on the commercial side of the industry.

How many times has the following recruitment scenario occurred in your company? The HR Director announces that the new sales executive is going to ‘shake things up’ and ‘make his presence felt’. (Let’s assume the recruit is male – it makes sense in this context.)

The golden boy arrives wearing a smile a yard wide. Pausing only to tether his horse to the railings, he rolls up his sleeves and gets stuck into some serious cold calling, networking and relationship-building. In meetings, he performs death-defying feats of goalpost relocation and extra-boxicular cognition. He lasts a week.

Don’t blame HR. After all, they did what they were supposed to do when filling pharma sales vacancies. Which was to carry out biometric tests and assess all the interviewees’ haircuts, teeth and cufflinks in order to determine who had the most ‘confidence’.

As a result, they hired a space cadet who had spent the last three months training in interview technique, and whose CV deserved to win the Booker Prize. They didn’t look for analysis of customer motivation, ability to connect clinical and economic priorities, or appreciation of the weak links in the customer’s value chain. They looked for someone who could mimic their body language.

Let’s step back a moment. Last year, the Work Foundation published a report calling for greater investment in ‘manu-services’. That didn’t refer to Wayne Rooney’s hair transplant. It meant the knowledge-based and skill-based industries that produce solutions and outcomes rather than things.

High on the list is the pharma industry, which combines expertise from life science, healthcare and economics to find solutions for the world’s under-resourced and over-challenged health systems.

To build a career in pharma sales, you need the ability to learn, calculate, solve problems, communicate solutions, negotiate and inspire – and to do those things well, you need to believe in them. If your skill set is ‘I can sell anything to anyone, end of story’ you’ll be back out the door before the froth on your latte has settled.

If you are serious about health and want to understand the challenges that clinicians and patients are facing and help them achieve better outcomes, you will do a good job in pharmaceutical sales. If not, then you and the HR manager can mimic each other’s body language all day and night – you are, after all, consenting adults. But leave us alone. We’ve got work to do.

Pharmaceutical companies Lundbeck and Otsuka have formed a global alliance to deliver up to five new psychiatric and neuroscience drugs.

The Danish and Japanese pharma companies, both of which have a strong record in CNS products, have signed a sales and cost share agreement.

The alliance covers two near-term projects from Otsuka and an earlier-stage portfolio of psychiatric disorder treatments, encompassing psychotic, mood and behavioural disorders at all levels of severity, from Lundbeck.

The two companies have identified psychiatric disorders as a major area of unmet need.

Lundbeck is granted co-development and co-commercialisation rights to two Otsuka drugs: aripiprazole depot formulation (which improves compliance in users of the drug) and OPC-34712 (for schizophrenia and major depressive disorder).

Otsuka will have an option to co-develop and co-commercialise up to three early-stage compounds in Lundbeck’s R&D pipeline.

“With the addition of aripiprazole depot formulation and OPC-34712, Lundbeck has significantly broadened its growing psychiatry portfolio with exciting and unique treatments in an area of high unmet needs,” said Ulf Wiinberg, Lundbeck’s President and CEO.

“This collaboration further strengthens our US platform and allows us to be introduced with the US psychiatry community already in 2013."

Dr. Taro Iwamoto, President and Representative Director, Otsuka, commented: “We are very excited that Otsuka and Lundbeck have entered into a co-development and co-commercialisation agreement for aripiprazole depot formulation and OPC-34712, both potential key drivers of future growth for Otsuka’s CNS business.

“Lundbeck’s expertise in developing depression and anxiety treatments and Otsuka’s expertise in developing anti-psychotics will maximise the medical and commercial value of Otsuka’s portfolio in CNS. In addition, our partnership with Lundbeck will enable us to establish a strong platform to deliver these compounds to patients who need them.”

Through the sales and cost share agreement, Otsuka will receive up to US$1.8 billion from Lundbeck – which will see its psychiatry portfolio and US market penetration increase.

The combination of Otsuka’s strong presence in North America and Asia with Lundbeck’s strong presence in Europe, Canada and Latin America mean that the alliance will reach most of the global psychiatric market.

New research shows that SME growth provides the best prospect for economic recovery in the UK. But, as private equity firm ECI notes, finding the cash to reach out to global partners and markets can be a critical hurdle.

With continued pressure on governments across the Western world to reduce their expenditure, together with sustained macro-economic uncertainty and a tightening of bank funding, times are not necessarily easy for the average healthcare company – which often relies on the public purse for reimbursement and debt funding for growth. One might therefore expect the short-term outlook for growth to be somewhat muted, despite the backdrop of positive longer-term demographic drivers of demand.

Hence it is interesting that a recent survey of UK SME businesses by ECI Partners, a UK-based midmarket private equity firm, has found executives to be generally positive about growth prospects over the next 12 months, with 74% of respondents anticipating headcount growth and 60% expecting double-digit turnover growth.

The results met with a warm response from the Government, with Mark Prisk, Minister of State for Business and Enterprise, saying: “It’s good news that despite a tough few months, nearly three-quarters of the SMEs surveyed by ECI are looking to recruit over the next year and half expect to see substantial profit growth in that period. Up and down the country, it is Britain’s SMEs that are driving our economic recovery.”

Reaching out

This year, the survey conducted each summer by ECI Partners gained responses from a total of 246 chief executives from UK growth companies from a range of sectors with turnover between £10m and £200m. The results paint a positive picture against the gloomy economic backdrop of the Eurozone crisis and sluggish UK economy, and suggest that there remains growth potential amongst SME businesses – which account for around a third of UK private sector employment.

Steve Tudge, a Managing Director of ECI, commented: “Despite the barriers to growth, which are principally cited as a weaker macro-environment and funding constraints, we continue to be optimistic about the prospects for good mid-market companies.”

Executives see the key growth drivers to be increasing international sales – with Europe and the USA remaining the dominant international markets, though India and China are becoming more important – and organic growth through investment in sales and marketing and new product development. Over 40% of companies are also planning to increase their use of overseas suppliers to improve their margins.

Internal cash flows are viewed as the most likely source of funding for this growth, though around half of respondents say they are likely to seek bank debt within the next 12 months (despite continued complaints about its cost and due diligence requirements) and around 40% are also likely to look at private equity backing. Fewer than 10% of companies see the public markets as accessible, perhaps reflecting the recent volatility and liquidity issues associated with the AIM market.

Healthcare respondents are less bullish about high growth than their peers in other sectors, and are noticeably less positive about growth than they were last year. This no doubt reflects, in part, the political uncertainty surrounding the current UK healthcare reforms and the public sector spending constraints that are impacting on the health and social care sectors.

Despite this, companies remain more confident of raising growth financing – and of raising it from private equity firms, with over 50% saying that was a likely consideration over the next year.

Financing growth

What does all this mean for SME healthcare businesses in the UK? The sector certainly faces challenges in responding to Government spending cuts, which are tending to put pressure on margins if not always on volumes.

However, opportunities for growth remain amidst these challenges, particularly for companies who are able and willing to venture beyond the UK in order to seek new customers and cheaper suppliers.

Of course, this internationalisation can put a strain on smaller businesses, which may lack the scale to fully support an international infrastructure. Private equity groups with experience and expertise in this process can potentially offer support to management teams in this position – whether by making introductions, sharing best practice or simply financing the required infrastructure.

There are significant sums of capital available for investment from the UK private equity industry, and there remains an appetite to invest in market-leading healthcare businesses. Thus private equity should be considered seriously as an option by management teams in the healthcare industry who are looking to fund growth to help their companies succeed in the current economic environment.

ECI is a private equity group that has been investing in mid-market growth businesses for over 35 years. It invests across sectors, with a focus on UK and Irish companies. Healthcare companies in its current portfolio include a primary care provider (Harmoni), assisted living specialists (Premier Bathrooms, DLP) and medical software companies (Clinisys, Ascribe).

Revenue was up 10% in Q3 at Lundbeck to DKK 4.9 billion but profit from operations fell nearly a quarter (22%) after restructuring its R&D department.

Growth was driven by an increase in revenue from a number of its key products and milestone payments following the launch of escitalopram in Japan.

Ulf Wiinberg, Lundbeck’s President and CEO, says the company is “very pleased with yet another strong quarter” after its branded products delivered “solid results”.

Sales of Sabril increased by nearly half (47%) to DKK 77 million, compared to the third quarter in 2010, with revenue also up for Xenazine in the US by a fifth, compared with the same period, to DKK 191 million.

Lundbeck’s key products, Cipralex, Ebixa and Azilect, which grew 5%, 18% and 20% respectively, compared to the period last year, helped boost revenue from International Markets up 20% to DKK 901 million.

“We are now entering a new era with many new product launches,” said Ulf Wiinberg. “With the launch of Lexapro in Japan, the continued roll out of Sycrest and the forthcoming launch of OnfiTM in the US, we have expanded on our product diversification and strengthened our long term growth prospects substantially.”

Between 1,000 and 1,500 jobs are expected to be lost at Teva Pharmaceutical Industries as part of the company’s cost-cutting measures.

Reports from Israel claim the majority of the layoffs will be made in the US and Europe and mainly focused in Teva’s recently acquired Cephalon’s generic business.

The reports say that Teva is hoping to raise $500 million in synergies from its takeover with job losses expected to raise the majority of its target.

Teva has already said it is planning to cut sales, marketing and administrative expenses by $300 million, R&D by between $120 million and $150 million, and production costs by $50 million to $80 million. R&D savings would be achieved by cutting duplicate operations, the company said.

Teva has a history of job losses following takeovers of generic companies. In 2008 it bought US generic specialist Barr and reduced its workforce by 10%, reports say.

A reduction of 1,000 jobs at Cephalon would represent a loss of 27% roles before the takeover. But one company where job losses will be made, the reports say, is at Mepha, the Swiss generics manufacturer Cephalon bought last year. The company had 620 jobs prior to the acquisition.