Life Tech: Alza: Sales force leverage

As a company grows and diversifies its marketed product portfolio, building and maintaining multiple sales forces becomes a challenge. To complicate the picture, big pharma companies have been ramping up their sales organizations, increasing competition for sales reps. As a mid-sized company faced with these issues, Alza Corp. uses co-promotion arrangements with big pharma as a substitute for growing its own sales force as well as leveraging the sales reps it already employs.

Last week, AZA expanded its relationship with Bayer Corp. (West Haven, Conn.), signing two marketing deals. AZA will co-promote Bayer's Avelox moxifloxacin to U.S. primary care physicians to treat acute bacterial exacerbation of chronic bronchitis, acute bacterial sinusitis and community-acquired pneumonia. Separately, the two companies will cross-market their products to U.S. urologists, with Bayer co-marketing AZA's Ditropan XL oxybutynin for overactive bladder and AZA co-marketing Bayer's Cipro ciprofloxacin to urologists, obstetricians and gynecologists...