Competence Management: A Study on the Perception of Pharmaceutical Representatives in Rio Grande do Sul

Abstract

The objective of this article is to verify how representatives of the Brazilian pharmaceutical industry see their competence management, as well as analyzing opinions and needs about the training offered to them by those companies. The theory and methodology utilized in this article refers to both national and international literature covering business administration, and the quantitative and qualitative data was collected from 100 surveys which were applied to pharmaceutical representatives from Rio Grande do Sul, compiled with two softwares: SPSS and Excel. The results indicate that the perception of pharmaceutical representatives about competences is related to factors that contribute directly to their work and are present more frequently, in order of importance: knowledge, pro-activity, compromise, productivity, organization, motivation and optimism. Regarding soft and hard competencies, the representatives favour mainly hard competencies. The training offered by the companies is considered essential to achieve better performance at work despite being mass-implemented nowadays, only 15% of the subjects answered that a good salesman does not need training and 13% believe that training is not capable of turning any person into a high performance salesperson.