Correspondence: Ramendra Singh, Marketing Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad FPM House No-1; IIM Ahmedabad Vastrapur, Ahmedabad Gujarat 380015, India. Tel: +919998493034; Fax: 917966306896; e-mail: ramendras@iimahd.ernet.in

¹is a doctoral student in marketing at Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad in India. He is currently pursuing his thesis on salespersons' customer orientation and sales effectiveness. Ramendra has presented several research papers at international conferences such as the Academy of Marketing Science Conference and the Academy of Marketing Conference, among others. He has also published articles in several international journals such as Asia-Pacific Journal of Marketing and Logistics, and Global Business Review. Previously Ramendra worked in sales and marketing functions in several organisations such as Indian Oil Corporation, ExxonMobil Corporation and ICICI Bank. He is a member of INFORMS, AMA and AMS.

Received 20 May 2008; Revised 20 May 2008.

Abstract

Influencing physician prescription behaviour has always proven elusive for pharma companies. This is especially so in these changing times when physicians are tightly pressed for time to spare on attending to sales calls from pharma sales reps. Previous studies have examined physician prescription behaviour (PPB) as an impact of detailing activities of pharma salespersons (FLEs) and marketing mix variables deployed, with little emphasis on the network connectedness aspects of the physician–salesperson dyad, and its impact on the PPB. This paper aims to fill this gap. From a business networks perspective, a new conceptual model is proposed that incorporates three aspects of network connectedness —resource transferability, activity complementarity and actor relationship generalisability— as antecedents of PPB. The moderating effect of FLEs' role ambiguity, which is a key intervening variable affecting sales performance, is also examined. The suggested propositions highlight the importance for pharma companies to leverage resources, bring complementarity in promotional activities and capitalise on the positive word-of-mouth references of physicians to increase the effectiveness of their salesforce in influencing physicians.