James Montague Change Quotations

When the guidelines say 'moderate by local standards,' you know that's different from Billings, Montana, to New York City, so the companies do find room for interpretation. The menus haven't changed a great deal. It's just that wine and other alcoholic beverages aren't served, and the hors d'oeuvres are not as lavish. But these days that has as much to do with budgetary constraints as compliance issues.

For a series of meetings, if you can reduce the no-show factor by even 1 percent, that can make a significant difference. If you're running a series of 100 dinner meetings and you can get even one more doctor to each one of them, then you've touched 100 more physicians. That has a lot of impact. Even a minimal decrease in the no-show factor can pay volumes in dividends for years to come if, for example, those 100 doctors were to change their prescribing habits based on what they learned.