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
Encore Episode: Agitating the Market to Outshine Your Competitors
We’re diving into the archives again this week to highlight another popular value-packed episode. Every rep wants competitive advantages in the market, but the “old method” of selling and catering to physician customers won’t help you recognize them. Ben Bouterie’s approach is a great example of how to unlock opportunities through practice development and value-based selling. Ben is the regional sales director at Aerin Medical. As a 7-time President’s Club winner, he’s spent his career creating markets for disruptive technologies in multiple specialties. In this interview, he shares practical ways to position yourself as a trusted industry advisor versus a sales rep, and leverage this authority to gain trust and opportunities. Ben’s lessons on agitating the market and simplifying solutions for your customers are worth playing on repeat. If you’re trying to dodge the downward spiral of commoditization and crush growth expectations, then this episode is for you!
Encore Episode: Breaking into New Territories and Developing Net New Accounts
This week, we’re turning back the playlist and featuring one of the most popular episodes to date. Every sales professional in this field is interested in how they can break into new territories and develop net new accounts. Jay Pendleton’s advice and conversation is the perfect answer for this challenge.
Director of Strategy and Talent for Medtronic Cranial & Spinal Technologies (CST), Jay’s held various sales and leadership roles for the company, most recently the last 3 years as Zone Manager for the Western Strategic Spinal Technology team — responsible for driving market share growth and engaging key surgeon customers through differentiating technology (i.e. OLIF, Titan, Medicrea) with sales reps and district managers for the Rocky Mountain Texas & Pacific Regions.
Digging into his innate ability to open doors with new clients, Jay shares tips and insights for medical device reps to get past gatekeepers, develop new relationships, and break into new territories. If you’ve been listening to the podcast and you’re wanting an episode that’s super tactical for new business development, you don’t want to miss this one!
Case Study: How Market Agitation Can Yield Instant Results
What if you could get patients to call in so quickly that you can hear your ad still running in the background? It might sound like wishful thinking, but for one MedTech company, it became reality. In this episode, Corey Oldenhuis, one of our behind-the-scenes producers, joins us as a guest host to help break down the recent orthopaedic advertising program that generated dozens of net new appointments in a matter of days.
We discuss how a market agitation playbook allowed the client to uncover a highly motivated patient population, secure surgeon buy-in, and use simple “old-school” platforms to unleash a new wave of demand.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- How to get patients to drive physician interest
- What it means to put empathy at the center of your messaging
- Why the message always trumps the medium
- How brand obsession often stunts MedTech companies’ strategy
- The power of knowing what not to track during a campaign
- How patient education empowers your sales team
Resources and links from the show:
Short-Term Pain, Long-Term Gain: The Bold Pursuit of the Brokerage Model
Your brain is wired for shortcuts—what’s the biggest one you take daily? Accepting the status quo! The pain of change often outweighs current frustrations, and the MedTech industry is no exception. Stu Brandon, a change agent for ASCdx, spent the first 21 years of his career giving his best to a large orthopaedic company. But when the juice stopped being worth the squeeze, he embraced the unknowns and carved his own path. Now, as a medical device broker, he helps both geographically exclusive and non-exclusive companies deliver ASC solutions. We sat down with Stu to discuss why so many 1099 reps act like W2 employees, how they can take back freedom and work with people they like, and why their influence is only as strong as their ability to have candid conversations.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Where along your career path it makes sense to suffer short-term pain for long-term gain
- Why Company X would ever prefer a rep to sell Company Y’s product to their account
- The blind spots that can accompany a direct selling role at a large company
- The personality traits best-suited for the brokerage model
- How to test whether your best relationships would follow you to a different company
Plus, we dig into the psychological underpinnings of why we’re often our own barriers to growth.
Resources and links from the show:
Weaving Strategic Value into the DNA of Your Business
Is all the “strategic” selling you’ve been doing really just economic and clinical selling? If you’re not challenging your customers on their assumptions and identifying the real motives behind their goals, then congrats—you’re 90% of MedTech reps. Strategic value is the only way to differentiate yourself, but what does that look like to your physician partners? We sat down with award-winning rep Jonathan Lehmann, enterprise sales manager for the East at Ambry Genetics, to discuss how he highlights his customers’ blind spots, boldly leads them on a clear course for the future, and gives them the growth tools they didn’t even know they needed.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- How to combine vulnerability with curiosity to take new ground
- What it means to use collusion in a positive manner
- The value of using “tactical courageousness” to identify your customer’s boundaries
- Habits that help you conquer imposter syndrome
Plus, we explore the impact of routine journaling on both personal and professional development.
Resources and links from the show:
Leveraging Neuroscience to Become an Invaluable Physician Partner
Promise or pain—which is the stronger motivator? We know it’s the latter from decades of behavioral science. But Jonathan Burkett knew the answer long before many of his device rep competitors did. After an experiment gone right, he became an advocate for breaking down corporate silos and helping physician partners speak straight to patient pain points. Now, as director of MedTech market strategy for TrackableMed, he’s an architect of “win-win-win” scenarios: more patient access to life-changing therapies, more trust in the healthcare system, and more business for clients. In this interview, we discuss why he bought into the TrackableMed vision, how he stopped selling products and started revealing possibilities, and some of his best “out-of-the-box” solutions.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
– How to align sales and marketing through a focus on patient education
– The humble origins of a big idea that led to the creation of TrackableMed
– How Jonathan’s passion for marketing evolved over 30+ years in the industry
– Why market agitation triggers loss aversion and faster utilization rates among physicians
-Why the wisest reps never attack their competitors’ products
Plus, we touch on the impact that patient education has made on the industry since the ‘90s.
Resources and links from the show:
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