When he finished his PhD in biological chemistry at Duke University in 1978, Dave Jarvis got the feeling that the daily plodding of bench-side science wasn't right for him. "I wanted something that was more goal-oriented, something with more immediate gratification," he says. He started looking in industry R&D, but the job market was saturated, so he had to become creative.
Jarvis decided to try a job in technical support for sales representatives for Smith-Kline and French, which eventually became GlaxoSmithKline. He gave salespeople seminars on the science behind the product, and traveled with them to help answer the customers' more difficult questions. "After being holed-up in an academic lab for five years, this just hit me right in the center. I just loved it, I loved the people," says Jarvis, who rose through the ranks in sales management, and now runs his own company, Technical Sales Consultants.
Jarvis is ...
