Lilly declares a truce in diabetes rep war

For a while there it looked like Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk were competing to see who could deploy the biggest army of diabetes reps in the U.S. While most pharma companies were chopping sales forces, Lilly swelled its contingent in the diabetes field by 40 percent, only to see Novo Nordisk recruit 700 new diabetes reps in the U.S. But Lilly's president John Lechleiter used yesterday's analyst day to call a truce on hiring. "We're not in this to see who can add more salespeople," he told Dow Jones. Not that sales are all they could be, he added, voicing some disappointment at Lilly's sales of Humalog and Byetta.

- read the report from The Wall Street Journal

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