Whether he’s bike riding, piano playing, or selling APIs to big pharma companies, Specialty Sales Director, Yehuda Meyer, is fully invested in what he enjoys doing.
“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.” (Albert Einstein) I love this quote because it’s so accurate! I’m an avid bike rider. When I turned 50, I took three weeks off work and rode across the country (Israel) from north to south on my bike.
I’ve been with Teva for over 20 years and I hope to be here at least another 20! I’ve seen the ups and the downs. We’ve gone through tough times and have had to part from very close colleagues and friends. One thing I can say with confidence is that every time we’ve been successful, it is because of team work and humility, leaving ego outside of the room. The key to our success has been when people are focused on getting good results for the team and the company.
There’s a funny story about how I came to Teva. I was working in a patent attorneys’ office, representing big pharma companies, and there was a trial against Teva. I had to testify on behalf of one of those companies against Teva. When the Teva people saw me there, they said, “We want this guy”.
I’m a chemist by education, a patent attorney by training, and a salesman by occupation. I was in the patent world for 11 years. I saw what was going on in sales and wanted to jump aboard! The manager of the Teva api division at that time told me that despite the fact that I’d “never sold a piece of chewing gum”, he’d give me a chance. 14 years later and I’m still here!
It’s the people who can make the change. At the end of the day, sales is about people. It’s about the customer sitting in front of you asking themselves, “do I want to spend the next few years working with this person or with the person from the other company?” I try to maximize my interpersonal skills to bring about success – both for my customers and for Teva api.
My focus is the big pharma companies and I’ve learnt that patience is crucial. While Teva’s main line of business is generics, we also work with the big pharma world which requires a different approach. We’re talking about extremely large companies, where the decision making is very high up. We need to be humble, smart and have a lot of patience. It’s about doing a lot of things right, over a course of many years, until we have great cooperation.
The industry is based on science, and the science doesn’t always work in our favor. And then we have crises — a customer has placed an order, is waiting for their material, and we cannot deliver on time. While this is a common issue across the industry, how one manages the crisis and responds to the customer is what differentiates a good company from others. It’s about being transparent and telling them the true story. This is what they really need and appreciate.
Building integrity is important both on a company level and on a personal level. My aim is to make every customer know and feel that I’m there for them. That their success is our success.
Teva is home, it feels like family. The atmosphere is unique. It’s a great place to work. We offer 350+ different API’s but the one that we produce most is adrenaline! If we’re spending half the time we’re awake in the work place, it should be a place like Teva.