Clinically, Veozah is a great product, and we hear that every day from our customers. We began this launch with forecasts that were ridiculously optimistic, and an even more optimistic reimbursement plan. Our Q2 and Q3 goals were based on these outlandish forecasts. Our reimbursement plan was based on the idiotic premise that “they will come to us” to negotiate formulary coverage. They were obviously passing around a crack pipe at those meetings…. To make it worse, nobody on our managed market teams could describe accurately how the process worked, but they assured us that “continuity of care” was bulletproof and would work great. Then the story changed again, and again, and again…. We totally jerked our customers and patients around for several months before somebody in leadership pulled their heads out of their a$$es and decided to unleash a copay card that actually worked. Our sales force was able to produce a “hockey stick” in the sales numbers with this new card, and proved once again how important it is for patients to have access to products during a launch. Now we’re on the verge of screwing up this copay card and REALLY pissing off our customers. Great move
We have a good sales force at Astellas. We did our part to launch Veozah and did not get paid decent bonuses during this launch because of the ridiculous product forecast and the poorly managed reimbursement process. MAKE IT RIGHT!!! Every rep in the country should be retroactively paid at target payout for Q2 and Q3, and those that did well should be paid accordingly.