A snap survey of physicians found a yearning for smarter sales reps who know their disease states back and forth and can use clinical studies in their details.

The Sermo survey, commissioned by Publicis Selling Solutions Group and titled What Physicians Want, was completed by 208 practitioners. Of those respondents, 51% said they want reps with more education, training and experience, while 87% said they wanted to see greater use of clinical studies and evidence-based medicine in their interactions with reps.

They want to see fewer reps in their practices (90%), fewer “mirrored” or “pod” sales teams (72%) and fewer traditional primary care reps (69%), but want more “customer service representatives (77%)” doing lit and sample drops and more clinical health educators to address compliance and adherence problems (73%). They were also keen on specialty reps, with 60% of respondents saying they’d like to see more of them.

On communications from industry, respondents want more product and disease awareness websites targeted to professionals, as well as more industry-sponsored CME (78%) and more industry-sponsored peer-to-peer education and consultation (72%).