Medical Sales Accelerator Podcast
The Medical Sales Accelerator Podcast brings you insider tips and secrets to help you drive your sales. Featuring interviews with top-performing medical sales reps, president’s club winners, and leaders in the MedTech industry. Hosted weekly by Zed Williamson and Clark Wiederhold. Listen online, or find us on YouTube.
Developed and produced by TrackableMed, the medical marketing agency known for creating predictable, trackable growth for MedTech companies and medical practices.
Episodes
Resetting Your Mindset for 2022: What Every Rep Should Know
It’s high time you let yourself suck at something new—in fact, it could be the best thing you do for your MedTech career in 2022. You’re probably familiar with the concept of fixed vs. growth mindsets as outlined in psychologist Carol Dweck’s landmark book “Mindset.” But mere surface knowledge of the daily tips, tricks, and techniques she popularized won’t revolutionize your career. In this special book review episode, we explain why most MedTech reps manage a growth mindset in some areas but fall into a fixed mindset where it really counts. Discover the problem with “problem territories,” why pointing fingers at marketing doesn’t make you a better sales rep, and how to combat your customers’ fixed mindsets.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Why being your hardest critic causes you to miss more opportunities
- How to acknowledge failure in a healthier, more constructive way
- The reason we tend to seek comfort from our own faulty assumptions in social situations
- Practical steps for replacing self-deprecation with course-altering questions
- Why “smart” kids often grow up to be risk-averse adults
Plus, we explore adopting what works—and discarding what doesn’t—from the mindsets of colleagues and competitors.
Helping Physicians in 2022: Give Them a Battle Plan for Better Managing Staff
Is your physician partner lacking what’s known as ‘conversational capacity’? If so, they may be alienating staff, botching the patient experience, and hurting their bottom line. This week, we’re sharing communication techniques from leading consultant Craig Weber that might just save a struggling medical practice and give you, the MedTech partner, a competitive advantage in the process. As we define ‘conversational capacity’ and how to deploy it in everyday scenarios, you’ll discover the biases and ‘ego traps’ that plague medical practices and how physicians can make their most difficult conversations with staff more effective.
In this episode, you’ll also learn:
- Why authority is No. 1 killer of conversational capacity, and how you can help docs be aware of this
- How overly candid people steamroll others and why overly curious people get nothing done
- Reasons a team member might consciously decide not to report an issue they’re seeing
- 3 key questions that immediately remove roadblocks from internal meetings
- Why it’s a rep’s responsibility to impart techniques that could save a medical practice
Plus, we get explore how leaders—physicians or otherwise—can meaningfully address a lack of trust.
Shifts in MedTech Company Culture: Where to Make Concessions and Where to Draw the Line
As a company grows and matures, how should its culture change? Some think it shouldn’t change at all… and MedTech market development specialist Michael Waidler thinks they’re half right. Michael is a President’s Club winner and current area business director with Palette Life Sciences. And though the hustle-and-grind ethic of start-up culture courses through his veins, he understands change that is inevitable—and that every rep has a different threshold for it. Join us as we discuss what shifting company culture can reveal about you as a sales professional, how leaders can better prepare their teams for the realities of acquisition, and what a growth-driven culture looks like.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- What it means to be folded into—and not steamrolled by—a larger organization
- How a team’s transition from “nothing to lose” to “everything to lose” impacts a rep’s mindset
- Why change isn’t scary at all (so long as your company has the right stop gaps in place)
- Warning signs that your culture might be changing for the worse
- How to use the Predictive Index to find appropriate fits as you scale (or start from scratch)
Plus, we touch on the necessity of self-awareness when charting a career path.
Seeing What Others Miss: Techniques for More Authentic Communication
Are your own mannerisms, body language, and tone working against you in high-stakes conversations? Almost certainly, says Shelly O’Donovan, communication expert and CEO of Authentic Influence Group. She’s coached scores of executives and sales teams in MedTech and Pharma on how to be more conscious of nonverbal communication, and we caught up with her to learn how MedTech reps can recognize dozens of subtle, largely subconscious behaviors to secure buy-in, preserve trust, and drive business. Join us as we discuss the prehistoric reason why you should never talk with your hands in your pockets, how learning to read micro-expressions will impact the questions you ask people, and simple ways you can practice ‘reading the room’ to better manage conversations.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- How to wean yourself off ‘blocking behaviors’ that can stunt dialogue
- What your suprasternal notch is, and how it releases hormones that help you calm down
- Why handshakes are worth at least 3 hours of quality face time
- Why your phone calls go better when you’re looking at the person’s profile picture
- How your smart phone can inhibit an in-person conversation—even when you’re not using it
Plus, we talk about where (and when) you should be directing your eyes while speaking on Zoom calls.
Encore Episode: How to Position Yourself as a Partner vs a Sales Rep
Can you put a price on perspective? Believe it or not, it’s the most important thing you have to offer a physician. That’s why this week we’re revisiting our chat with Amy Smith, director of marketing at Neuros Medical, to shine a light once again on the strategic advantages sales reps can realize through practice observation and candid communication. As Amy puts it, MedTech reps can only level up their relationships when they learn to identify and convey the unique blind spots that threaten each medical practice’s business operations. In one of our very first (and most popular) episodes, you’ll learn the importance of building a 360-degree knowledge base of each medical practice and its key role, what to look for when it comes to patient experience and the patient flow throughout a practice, and how to ultimately become the outside eyes and ears that most physicians never knew they needed.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Proven strategies for practice observation
- How to share uncomfortable feedback with your physician clients
- Why you’re never as persuasive as when you commit to active listening
- The power of shadowing each team member in a medical practice for a day
Plus, we discuss why it’s so critical to dive deep into the complexities and truly understand how a medical practice operates as a business.
How to Package Your Talents and Land Your Next Big MedTech Opportunities
On your best days, you feel like there’s nothing you couldn’t sell—so why are you still selling yourself short when new job opportunities arise? As president of Fallstaff Search, a recruitment firm that specializes in medical device sales, Hilary Trader never ceases to be amazed by how many qualified reps make easily avoidable blunders in the hiring process. All too often, reps unknowingly spoil their chance to graze in greener pastures when they turn away recruiters or don’t take a proactive approach to career advancement. We caught up with Hilary to discuss how reps can better market themselves as a company’s plug-and-play option for overcoming immediate and future pain points, why it always pays to be brutally honest with recruiters, and what it means to confidently (and not cockily) play by “the rules of the game.”
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Why you should leave humility for first dates and dinner parties
- The kind of research and outreach you should be doing after the first interview
- The importance of itemizing call points in your resume so you’re searchable in a database
- How to stop psychologically guarding yourself and make a strong ask for the job
- The kinds of questions you should be asking MedTech hiring managers
Plus, we explore the subtle ways recruiters sniff out half-hearted (or otherwise problematic) candidates.
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