POSTED ON July 1, 2026

The Hidden System Behind President’s Club Performance

In this solo episode of the Medical Sales Podcast, Samuel Adeyinka breaks down how medical sales reps can turn a struggling territory into a high performing one by building a real system instead of relying on effort alone. Samuel shares a personal story from his own career, where he went from being a top national performer to the bottom of the sales force after a competitor disrupted his territory, and how that experience forced him to rethink everything about performance. He explains why denial, vague excuses, and simply working harder are not enough, then walks through the exact shifts that helped him rebuild, including mapping the territory, finding overlooked accounts, enrolling staff, staying visible with top producers, and identifying the “relative number” of qualified interactions that drives consistent results. This episode is a must listen for medical sales reps who are facing declining numbers, competitive pressure, or self doubt and want to learn how to regain control, rebuild confidence, and create a repeatable path back to top performance.

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Transcription:

Samuel Adeyinka (Host):
And I do think that’s a little bit different than just simply believing in yourself.

I think it’s beyond that.

It’s knowing yourself.

Knowing that you’re capable.

When everything is going wrong, you are capable of figuring it out.

I almost like to call it real confidence.

The reps who only perform when conditions are right do not fully know what they’re capable of.

Hello and welcome to the Medical Sales Podcast.

I’m your host, Samuel, founder of a revolutionary medical sales training and mentorship program called the Medical Sales Career Builder.

And I’m also host of the Medical Sales Podcast.

In this podcast, I interview top medical sales reps and leading medical sales executives across the entire world.

It doesn’t matter what medical sales industry, from medical device to pharmaceutical, to genetic testing and diagnostic lab, you name it.

You will learn how to either break into the industry, be a top 10 percent performer within your role, or climb the corporate ladder.

Welcome to the Medical Sales Podcast.

And remember, I am a medical sales expert sharing my own opinion about this amazing industry and how it can change your life.

For the past few months, I have been getting a lot of questions about performance and doing well as a medical sales rep.

And I see both sides.

I talk to a lot of people who want to get into medical sales, and they say, “Yes, I want to get the job in devices, aesthetics, diagnostics, pharma, biotech, or whatever have you. But once I get the job, how do I become good? How do I become great?”

And then I have reps I speak with regularly, and some that I coach, who say, “I’m a two-year rep, and I’m trying to become that better rep. I’m trying to get into President’s Club. I’m a five-year rep, and I’m still not in President’s Club. Or I’m a 10-year rep, and I’ve always had this kind of territory, so I’m just kind of sticking it out. It would be great to have a different experience, but it is what it is.”

I’ve been hearing about this a lot.

So in this episode, I’m going to tackle it head on.

I’m going to give you my experience, not just with what I coach and what I help people solve, but my own personal experience when I was in the field as a rep and what happened to me that showed me the realities of how to go from low-performing or average rep to President’s Club rep.

Let me first say this.

If you’ve heard my personal story, right off the bat, you know I started in pharma, then biotech, then devices, then back to biotech, and then I kind of stayed in biotech until I left.

At the beginning, I was doing very well.

My first year, I got President’s Club.

Second year, third year.

So I felt like I was a natural when it came to medical sales.

I was a natural, and I was able to get into a territory, find out what went wrong, and fix it.

I often came across underperforming territories.

Almost every role I took was an underperforming territory I stepped into.

Then I would find what was wrong, bring it up to where it needed to be, and compound the success.

But there was a time in my career when I had already been a rep for years.

I stepped into another underperforming territory, did the same thing I always did, and brought it up to the top 10 percent.

Then within two quarters, I went from not the middle of the pack, not the lower half of the pack, but out of 300 reps, I went to the bottom of the pack.

I’m talking maybe one rep away from literally the bottom.

It was an extremely humbling experience.

I was able to get myself out of this over about two or three quarters.

And the things I learned in that process are what allowed me to go on and get to President’s Club on a regular basis until I concluded my career.

I want to share this story with you because I think anyone in any kind of medical sales, whether you’re in device sales, biotech, pharma, diagnostics, dental, healthcare tech, or even healthcare SaaS, if you have a product and you sell it within a territory, this applies.

And it’s going to answer a lot of the questions I get about what to do to become that better rep.

Let’s get into it.

First, let me start with what I did wrong.

In most med sales positions, especially with an organized territory, usually with mid-sized to larger companies, there’s a rolling four, rolling eight, or rolling 12.

There’s a rolling sequence of numbers that gives you your performance.

The way you gauge if you’re performing or not is if the rolling numbers are downtrending or uptrending.

So anytime you’re in a territory and you’re performing, doing your thing, and you start to see your rolling weeks downtrend, it’s a signal that something might be going on.

It doesn’t mean your role is over.

It doesn’t mean your product is no longer being used or your therapy is no longer being applied.

It just means something is going on.

When I was seeing the signal, I refused to get specific about what exactly it was.

I was very used to just performing and doing everything that needed to be done to have high performance.

And I refused to get granular about where something was going on with my therapy.

So I would come up with different reasons.

I would say, “Well, you know what? This is because lately, it’s been really hard for patients to get approved for this therapy.”

Or, “You know what? This patient population is really difficult. They’re really challenged. Sometimes they’re on other products that get in the way of having this therapy applied.”

Or, “Access has gotten a little weird recently. More and more physicians are becoming more like institutions. Even private practices are getting a little lackluster with seeing representatives, and they’re really holding up certain relationships that have been there longer.”

I had a whole array of reasons why my product was no longer being the choice product on this rolling trend.

And those things could have all been true.

Those things do happen.

But I refused to acknowledge the real culprit.

And for me at the time, the real culprit was that a new competitor had entered my space with a therapy that included my patient population and many others and was being used off-label.

This competitor worked for a very small company that bent the rules a little bit around how they could promote.

And they completely invaded my top accounts to enroll them into using their product off-label because, at the end of the day, it did the job.

And it just made sense for a lot of these physicians to use this product.

There was a period in my career, I was about 35 years old, well into this industry, well past the point where I could blame inexperience, where I showed up to a national sales meeting and I genuinely did not want to walk through the door.

Not because I didn’t love the company.

Not because I didn’t believe in what I was selling.

But because I had gone from one of the top sales professionals in the entire country, ranked nationally in the top 10 percent, to the bottom of the sales force.

And this was out of about 250 or 260 reps.

I mean the very bottom.

I was around 257 or something like that.

And it wasn’t just a dip.

It wasn’t just a rough quarter.

It was the bottom.

And everybody in the room knew it.

Now let’s be honest.

When you walk into a national sales meeting, is everybody looking at you and thinking about you?

No.

That’s usually in our own heads.

When your name comes up and people cross by you, sure, they might spend a moment thinking about it.

But everybody thinking about you, that’s usually in your head.

But that was very much in my head.

And you can’t hide your ranking because it’s broadcast every couple of weeks to the entire nation.

Where you rank, the numbers are the numbers.

You can’t even argue with that.

Even defending it doesn’t really make sense because it is what it is.

So when you’ve been the person winning awards consistently, in President’s Club, top 10 percent of the nation, accepting recognition, feeling like that guy, the guy they go to, the company points to leadership, the company goes to for training other reps, the company goes to for difficult problems, and then you are the example of what not to be, that is a feeling I can barely put into words.

I remember sitting in that room at the national sales meeting.

At the beginning of most national sales meetings, for those of you in the industry, you know this.

For those of you who are about to get in, this is what it looks like.

Usually, you have a company-wide meeting where everybody goes to the same room.

There’s usually a reception or something like that.

Then there’s a company-wide meeting that’s kind of like the kickoff meeting.

I remember sitting in that room and thinking, “Are they thinking about me right now? Are they thinking about how Samuel is at the bottom?”

And I was very known.

I kind of stood out in the organization.

So I wasn’t just a random name.

And I was at the bottom.

I could feel the eyes.

Were the eyes really on me?

I don’t know.

But I could feel the eyes.

And that specific kind of shame that comes from not feeling like you failed at something you were never good at, but from being great, being used to feeling what great feels like, and watching yourself slide to the very bottom of the pack, not knowing how to stop the slide, hits you in ways that are really tough to describe.

For all of you who are struggling and have been at the bottom, no excuses for you, but I believe the good thing about your situation is you have nowhere to go but up.

But when you’ve been great, and you watch yourself slide all the way to the bottom, it hits differently.

I’m telling you this story today because I know some of you are listening right now, and you might be in that very same place.

Maybe you’ve been at the bottom.

Maybe you were in the middle of the pack and you’re sliding to the bottom.

Maybe you were at the top, like I was, and you slid all the way to the bottom.

And you might not be at a national sales meeting with a bunch of eyes looking at you, feeling the insecurities bubble up from out of nowhere.

But maybe it’s the weekly call with your team.

Or the monthly call.

Or the biquarterly call.

And you have nothing good to report.

Or maybe it’s the meeting with your manager, and you have nothing good to say, or they’re saying, “Hey, we have to figure out what’s going on here because this cannot continue.”

And it’s been a number of months, and you have the same explanation or no explanation.

Or maybe it’s just the drive home on a Friday, and you’re racking your brain on why your weeks are not getting better.

Whatever version of the bottom you are in right now, this episode is for you.

Because I want to tell you exactly what happened to me, exactly how I felt, exactly what I did, and exactly what came out on the other side.

That was literally one of the worst stretches of my professional career, and I turned it into one of the biggest successes of my professional career.

I promise you it’s worth staying for every word.

So listen up, and let’s get started.

Let me paint this world for you.

To truly understand how far I fell, you have to understand what I built in the first place.

I was selling a specialty therapy in the biotech space.

It was a rare disease.

I’m not getting too specific about the product, the company, or the category because none of that really matters.

This is applicable to anyone in medical sales.

What matters is that this was not an easy product to sell.

It was a very complex sell.

It was a very difficult disease state.

And it had multiple parts.

The therapy had multiple parts and a pretty difficult clinical profile.

For lack of a better way of saying it, there were a lot of hoops to jump through.

There were side effects to manage.

So even though the product worked and got the outcome the patient needed, there were still side effects to manage.

The patient journey really required commitment from everyone.

The physician had to be a true believer in this therapy.

The patient had to be a willing participant.

And then the rep had to be there to make sure everyone was having a positive enough experience.

Just factually, most reps who inherited this territory struggled.

The rep before me had not been effective at all.

They had been in the space for about three years since the launch of the therapy and just could never get it off the ground.

They had a little bit of runway in the first two or three months, and then it went dead relatively quickly.

And the territory was grossly underperforming when I walked in.

Other high-performing reps would try to do what they could in the territory, but they belonged to other territories, and you can only do so much.

I want you to understand that when I talk about underperforming, I’m not talking about a territory that was simply below goal.

I’m talking about a territory that just did not have a lot going on.

There was very little business happening.

So I came in there, and I gave everything I had.

I learned the product at a depth that went beyond what training required.

I found the physicians who were most open to the therapy, all the thought leaders in the space, and I built deep relationships with the staff and the physicians.

Really, anyone who would give me the time of day, I developed a relationship with.

I understood the patient profile extremely well.

I was having conversations with the scientists on a regular basis just to be able to hang with thought leaders, and they could see that I was truly passionate about the outcome of these patients and that I actually knew what I was talking about.

Of course, I’m a student to this.

I never acted like I was the educator when I truly wanted them to see me as a resource who knew the product well.

And I figured out which accounts had the most potential, and I worked those accounts like my career depended on it.

This is how I treated most of my roles.

This is what allowed me to be a performer with every organization I joined.

And it worked.

Within a reasonable period of time, I had taken that territory to places it really had never been before.

I was recognized very quickly.

Within the first two to three months of being responsible for this product, I was already being called by senior leadership.

They were saying, “Hey, we love what you’re doing. Keep going. You’re someone everybody already has their eyes on.”

I was recognized in the top 10 percent nationally within the first six months.

I was in line for awards.

They had all these different types of awards for people who were new, and I was getting recognition.

Leadership was pointing at what I was doing as an example of what this organization was doing as a whole.

I was called out at a few of the national meetings for my performance.

This went on through the first year.

I was top ranked my first year, already making a name for myself in this organization.

And look, I was 35 years old, so I had worked in this industry long enough to understand how valuable it is to build a territory from nothing to something.

This was not the first time I had done this.

I had done this with at least two positions before.

And I took pride in that.

I looked at myself as someone who could enter a territory and turn it into a performing territory.

A lot of my navigation through medical sales was doing that in a company, being recognized, and then looking for a company to make even more money, have an even bigger impact, and just take things higher and higher.

I had the rank, and I had the recognition.

I felt so good.

And look, I’ll be frank.

I thought I had it all figured out.

I thought I understood what it takes.

I thought, “I’m that guy.”

What I didn’t know, though, is that I had not figured anything out yet.

I had just gotten comfortable enough that I stopped asking the questions that got me there in the first place.

And this is when a competitor came into my territory and changed everything.

I don’t want to get too deep into the product or the company.

But what I will tell you is this guy was good.

He was very aggressive, and he was strategic in a way that I didn’t really appreciate until it was way too late.

He didn’t come in to try to take everyone.

He went straight for the top.

He identified my highest-volume accounts and the relationships I had spent all my time building since I got into the position.

And the clinicians who really became my most reliable producers, he targeted them specifically, deliberately, and methodically.

Get this.

I had heard of this rep from other reps in other territories that were more south of me.

He was almost taking over territory one by one.

But I felt, “You know, it’s me. I don’t have to worry about this. I’m the guy who always has a territory on lock. It’s not going to affect me. He’s going to do what he does, but I’m going to do what I do, and it’s going to be fine.”

The first sign was really subtle.

Because I didn’t see him coming fast enough, I just kept doubling down on what I thought I could do.

I noticed that the lunches I normally scheduled and the meetings I normally scheduled started getting harder and harder to schedule.

Follow-ups started getting harder and harder to get.

Accounts that I normally talked to were just not seeing me as often and not calling me in to work on the things we needed to work on for this therapy for patients.

And I kind of chalked it up to, “Well, it’s the season.”

This was in Q3.

So I thought, “A lot of these people have kids. School is starting. Things are getting a little dicey at this time of year. It is what it is. The clinician is just busier than usual.”

I told myself it was that.

I came up with all kinds of reasons.

It’s product access.

Formularies got a little wonky.

It goes up and down.

They’re making it harder and harder to get access.

But I knew I was lying to myself.

The smart part of me knew something was going on, and there was a much better explanation.

I just did not want to face it.

But here’s the thing about denial that nobody talks about honestly enough.

I don’t think denial is stupidity.

I think denial is a defense mechanism.

When you’ve built something real and invested real effort into something, real time into a territory, the idea that it could be taken from you is so threatening that your brain will literally come up with anything it can to avoid confessing directly.

I think that’s where denial lives for a lot of people.

And that’s where it lived with me.

So week after week, I explained different things to excuse this slow trickle of less and less performance.

I thought, “The side effect profile.”

I explained, “Patients are really resistant. Patients are getting really savvy, so they’re researching the therapies they have access to. When they discover they can’t always do these things, we have to fight patient sentiment.”

Whatever I could come up with.

And while I was trying to explain away what was going on, this individual was closing on my business.

Three of my top producers went dark in the same month.

It was rough.

Again, this didn’t happen all at once.

It happened week after week after week, and I was just not figuring it out.

It’s almost like you’re in really slow-moving quicksand.

Something is changing, but it’s not changing fast enough for you to scramble and try to do something serious about it.

But something is changing.

And then you pause for a couple minutes, look at it, and say, “Wait a minute. Now it’s even worse.”

This is what was happening.

I would call a lot of my accounts, and they stopped returning my phone calls.

I’m like, “What’s going on? Why am I being blocked out?”

I drove home one night after a particularly rough day of just losses, and I sat in my driveway before I got home.

I just sat in silence because it was that kind of silence where you face the demons.

You stop running away from whatever it is.

You stop coming up with excuses and hoping it’s going to turn over the next week.

And you start saying, “Okay, look, I’m losing here. I’m losing my territory. I’m losing my ranking. And my identity as a top performer is great, but I can’t hold on to that. I have to face what’s actually happening. I can’t let this continue to happen.”

By now, we were in Q4, and I was trickling to the bottom of the sales force.

It sounds weird because I’m saying it happened slowly, and it did.

It happened slowly when I was experiencing it.

But by Q3 to Q4, I went from high performer to the bottom of the sales force.

And let me tell you, when you’ve been at the top and you get to the bottom, I don’t think people can capture it well enough.

It’s not just about the numbers.

It’s more about who you thought you were.

You had this identity as a top performer.

It had shown up.

You had so much evidence that this was who you were.

And at a time like this, here’s what’s happening.

You’re being challenged on who you are.

Are you really who you are?

Or is this just a facade you’ve been lucky enough to carry because you’ve just been in enough situations that allowed you to think this?

It becomes personal.

I couldn’t let that get stripped away.

When the ranking comes out and your name is at the bottom of the list, you cannot let this become your new identity.

It’s just a challenge against the identity you’ve built so much for yourself.

So you start to question things that have nothing to do with a territory strategy.

You start to wonder if you’re supposed to be here.

As this challenge is butting up against your identity, these are the questions that come up.

“Have I been lucky?”

“Am I who I think I am?”

And you start to hear this voice you’ve never really heard.

And if you have heard it, this impostor syndrome voice is really loud right now.

I mean, it’s screaming at you.

I’m telling you all this because I want you to know that I also heard this voice.

If any of you are listening to this and resonating with any of this, this is real.

At 35 years old, I was not some young spring chicken.

I was a seasoned vet.

I knew what I was doing with years of experience and success.

But having this territory go from nothing to the top, and then hearing that voice, was challenging.

And at first, I didn’t know what to do about it.

That’s why I’m sharing the story now.

But I did eventually start to do something about it.

And what I finally did is the reason why I’m delivering this episode.

Because anyone listening to this right now who has any kind of connection to this kind of experience, maybe you just went through it, maybe you’re going through it, maybe you’re seeing it coming, there is always something you can do about it.

The numbers kept sliding for the rest of the quarter, the rest of the fourth quarter.

I kept showing up.

I kept doing activity.

I kept running the same accounts.

I would see new accounts, but I was just doing the same thing I had always done with my business.

I was having the same conversations, expecting different results.

Complete insanity.

And that’s the trap.

I want to name it clearly because I know people go through this.

I’ve seen this happen over and over and over with reps that I coach and have coached since then.

When your numbers are declining, your instinct is to work harder, usually against the same strategy.

More calls.

More visits.

More follow-ups.

More of exactly what is not working with more urgency does not work.

It cannot work.

Because the strategy is the problem, not the execution of it.

I didn’t want to face that yet.

So I was just doing whatever I could to survive until I was ready to face it and think clearly.

And I actually found something that is useful to this day for survival.

I think it’s useful for anyone.

I started listening to Tony Robbins in the car.

He had these CDs, these Tony Robbins CDs.

It was positive mindset.

And I started reading books by Napoleon Hill.

Think and Grow Rich.

I read it like three times, I think.

I want you to understand what that looks like practically.

We’re all busy.

Medical sales professionals are busy.

Whether you’re a sales rep in the field, a manager, a second-line leader, or an executive, you’re very, very busy.

So it’s not always convenient to read a Napoleon Hill book or Stephen Covey or something like that.

We have YouTube today.

You can listen to something that reminds you that something can be done.

And I think this is where the gold is.

In order for you to come up with a strategy when you’re in the middle of a crisis, you have to allow your mind to stay positive.

I had to put something in my head that was going to allow me to face the challenge.

Without an influence, my mind was not ignoring the challenge, but battling the challenge in the worst way.

It was living in denial.

It was doubling down on efforts that didn’t work.

It did not step back from the problem, assess the reality of it, and figure out how to approach it.

It just kind of went into panic mode.

And sometimes you need an outside influence to release the pressure and allow your mind to leave panic mode, get into solution mode, and then come up with a strategy.

For me, it was Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich and Tony Robbins CDs.

The whole principles of desire, persistence, and mastermind.

I was listening to it constantly.

I was reading as often as I could while my territory was sliding away at 35 years old.

But I’ll tell you that it actually helped.

It didn’t give me any strategy or know-how.

It didn’t give me answers.

But it did give me this positive mindset and reminded me that whatever I thought this was, there was something I could do about it, and it’s what I could do about it now.

Which relaxed my mind enough to actually get in front of a solution.

I hope you’re enjoying today’s episode.

And I want to let you know our programs cover the entire career of a medical sales professional, from getting into the medical sales industry, to training on how to be a top performer in the medical sales industry, to masterfully navigating your career to executive-level leadership.

These programs are personalized and customized for your specific career and background, and trained by over 50 experts, including surgeons.

Our results speak for ourselves, and we’re landing positions for our candidates in less than 120 days in top medical technology companies like Stryker, Medtronic, Merck, Abbott, you name it.

Would you run an Ironman race without training and a strategy?

You wouldn’t.

So why are you trying to do the same with a medical sales position?

You need training.

You need a strategy.

And you need to visit EvolveYourSuccess.com, fill out the application, schedule some time with one of our account executives, and let’s get you into the position you’ve always dreamed of.

There’s a psychological reality that I didn’t understand then that I understand now.

I said it a couple times, but I’m going to say it clearly so everybody gets it.

When you’re declining, when you’re in a crisis, your mind is spiraling.

Your mind wants to stay in problem identification mode.

And your mind has this funny thing.

It starts asking questions.

I say the brain is the most powerful search engine around.

And it starts saying, “Why is this happening to me? What is wrong with me?”

When you ask those questions, your mind starts looking for any bit of evidence in your past that supports that you have a problem.

That something is wrong with you.

That these kinds of things do happen to you.

And it moves you farther away from any kind of solution, any kind of strategy, anything productive.

It just finds evidence that takes you deeper into this downward spiral.

That’s where, for a lot of people who get into a place like that, it just gets worse and worse.

However, if you can give your mind a good, positive, solution-oriented space to be in and start asking questions like, “I’m here, but what can I do? What can I do that can really turn this around? What can I do that can take me one step closer to where I really want to be?” then your mind starts doing the same thing.

It starts looking for evidence.

And it pulls you out of the downward spiral.

So again, the recordings didn’t give me any answers.

The books didn’t give me any answers.

But they reminded me that I can do something about my issue.

And they reminded me that there is always an opportunity, no matter what crisis you’re in.

I’m serious about this, and I live this.

No matter how bad things look or what crisis you’re in, there is always an opportunity to change it.

Always.

No matter what.

And your response will determine if you make good on that opportunity.

So this was all going down, and then there was a little bit of luck in my specific situation.

As my mindset was starting to improve at the bottom of the pack, Christmas break happened and Q4 came to an end.

And that’s when, for me, everything really changed.

Most Christmas vacations, I take off with family.

But every now and again, I will not.

I’ll stay home and just reorganize.

Prepare big plans for the following year.

Prepare my admin.

Close up anything that needs to be closed up, not just professionally but personally too.

Any of my own ambitions outside of work, I would take care of.

This time around, I took that opportunity to say, “No, I’m not going on vacation this year. I’m going to stay home.”

And I actually took the break to dive deep into my territory.

Not every single medical sales company has the opportunity to do this.

The company I worked for at the time actually had all the data from launch of the therapy.

So I was able to literally look into every clinician who had ever utilized the product.

I mean everything down to the nitty-gritty.

I was able to look into the habits of all these clinicians who had used the product.

So I pulled every piece of data I could access.

Every physician.

Every nurse practitioner.

Anyone related to the account.

Any information I could find, I laid it all out.

Any time the product was utilized.

Any data on the product almost being utilized.

Any patient who discontinued utilization of the therapy.

Anything I could find.

Every physician who trialed it since launch.

And every account that had ever shown any interest at any level that I could find, I laid it out as a map for the geography.

And I looked at it the way someone looks at a map when they’re lost.

Not searching for where they want to be, but really assessing where they are and what’s available.

And what I saw when I laid it out was something I had not been able to see when I was in the middle of it.

When you think of it and it’s your territory, especially when you’re used to operating in a certain way, you just don’t think to take that many steps back and look at the grand scheme of the territory.

And mind you, I told you there was a rep who had been there at least three years before me.

So this wasn’t a new therapy.

It had been around for four years.

So there was a lot of data to go through.

I saw where my competitor had targeted the top of my territory.

Of course, he had gone for my highest-volume accounts, some of my best relationships, some of my most established producers.

But he had not touched much of the middle.

And of course, he hadn’t touched the bottom.

These were accounts I had always considered mid and low tier.

I’ll be honest.

Before there were any problems, I looked at them like, “That’s not worth my time. My time is valuable. I have to put my energy where it matters.”

And I saw results, so I didn’t see any reason to do it differently.

But now it made so much sense to spend time with these accounts.

Number one, they would readily give me access.

Number two, they did have opportunity.

They had never really been fully developed.

They had opportunity.

It was small, but they had opportunity.

And they had never really been given the attention or investment they deserved because, like I said, when a territory is flowing, you naturally go to the top.

So I came back from Christmas break with this hard plan.

The cool thing was there was enough business with the middle and low-tier producers.

I had to work them extra hard and really go out of my comfort zone and almost reintroduce myself to my own territory.

But there was enough business there that I was able to figure out, if I could get enough going with these middle and low producers, there was enough business to cover enough ground for what my high producers were bringing in.

I had to fight hard for them, and I had to stretch myself very thin.

But if I really went the distance, there was enough.

That was the first thing I did.

The second thing I did was what I always do.

I always enroll staff as a medical sales professional.

And this goes for anyone listening.

You better be enrolling your staff if you’re not already a top producer.

They are invaluable.

Yes, in a lot of medical device sales and a lot of medical supply sales, you might feel you don’t need them.

But staff can go such a long way.

In my opinion, any kind of medical sales you’re in, you want to be dialed into your staff.

To have advocates who are working for you when you’re not there is invaluable, regardless of the space you’re in.

So I doubled down on enrolling the staff of these smaller lower-tier accounts.

This is a move you want to pay close attention to because most reps do not go that deep.

When a physician is less accessible, they usually just take their attention elsewhere.

But in my case, I doubled down on the staff for the middle producers.

And then I went back to the staff of my high producers.

I was warming up the staff.

Physicians weren’t giving me the time of day like they used to.

But I was warming up the staff and getting them excited about the outcomes for the patient.

The cool thing about healthcare that I love is everybody really is there for the patient.

Even the busy office manager who doesn’t want to be bothered.

The administrators who don’t want to be bothered.

The nurse who is completely busy.

Whether it’s a scrub tech, technician, respiratory therapist, you name it.

Everyone really is there for the patient, no matter how they treat a rep.

They’re there for the patient, including the physician.

So if you can leverage that common goal and really speak to why your therapy is so valuable because of the benefits to the patient, and get everybody enrolled in that, you would be amazed at how excited you can get people around whatever it is you sell.

I doubled down on that with the lower tier, the mid tier, and some of my higher tiers where I had just been taking the relationship for granted.

So again, first move, I spent all this time with the mid and low-tier accounts.

Second move, I went hard on getting all of the staff deeply enrolled in why it was important that the patient profile gets on the therapy I represented.

From everyone.

From the office manager to the nurse, every single person, to the nurse practitioner, every single person outside of the physician.

And here’s what I discovered.

When you really make staff feel important and really take the time to speak to them like they’re just as important as the physician, they will really become your advocate.

They will fight for you.

They will work for you.

They will go out of pocket themselves and talk to the physician in ways they hadn’t before because they feel emboldened that they understand the value and why it’s important for the patient.

If you really think about it, staff spend so much time with the patient.

That’s not talked about enough in healthcare.

Of course, the physician talks to the patient.

But almost every patient I can imagine, whether I’m coaching a team, coaching a rep, or I’ve done it myself in the past, every patient takes questions to everybody in the office.

Not just the physician.

So there’s value in making sure the staff is equipped.

Of course, they’re not going to be as equipped as a physician, but they can be equipped enough to speak intelligently about what’s going on with the patient.

And of course, you have to do everything with compliance.

You don’t want to be talking out of pocket.

But you do want everybody to be informed.

And it wasn’t manipulation in any way.

It was very genuine.

It was very sincere.

I truly enrolled all the staff to fight for me when I wasn’t there.

So think about that.

The mid and lower-tier accounts are now utilizing the product or ready to utilize the product.

The staff is enrolled to want to fight for me when I’m not there to utilize the product.

And then I ritualized the celebration of getting patients on therapy.

Anytime my therapy was utilized, of course, you can’t give them gifts or do anything like that, but you can make it a big deal and make them feel like they did this.

Anytime a patient had success on my therapy, it was a celebration.

Whether you’re bringing lunch or you have a meeting and you can bring something in the meeting, you almost make it a point that this is happening because of the success we’re having.

“This is amazing, what you’re doing for these patients.”

And this is all working to you.

I had always sold that way, but not to this degree.

Not where the office manager feels like he or she is literally part of the team and they’re fighting the good fight as much as the physician.

And that’s an opportunity, a way of selling that I really got to hone during this time.

And then the third move was that I still stayed visible with my top accounts.

They weren’t giving me the time of day.

I didn’t just say, “Well, screw them. I’m going to go spend all my time with these lower-tier accounts.”

No.

I still wanted to go see them.

And I didn’t talk bad about the competitor.

As you know, the big thing with the competitor was they were promoting off-label.

And the off-label promotion, widespread off-label promotion, allowed them to butt into the profile that my therapy solved.

It was just easier to get access to.

Physicians were like, “Why am I even trying to jump through hoops with your product and your therapy when I can just utilize their therapy? It’s not supposed to be utilized for this, but it’s giving me some results. So why not? This is a difficult space to address anyway.”

So I didn’t bash that.

It doesn’t make sense to.

But I did take it back to, “Listen, I get it. You’re doing something that’s easiest for you, and you’re getting results. But at the end of the day, it’s proven versus unproven.”

And as a physician who was trained like any other physician, whether a surgeon, DO, or MD, you were trained like everyone else that proven versus unproven, you go with proven.

And when any guidelines for this disease state speak to how things should be conducted, you’re following those guidelines to the best of your ability.

Yes, we have fringe clinicians out there.

But the lion’s share follow guidelines and follow what is proven.

And that resonated with a few of my top accounts.

For select patients, they started to take on my therapy again.

So three things are happening now.

Middle tier and low tier being worked on.

Staff being fully enrolled as team players and advocating when I’m not there for the use of this therapy.

And then top tier being reminded why it’s critical that they try not to be cowboys all the time and remember that there is a patient profile that actually benefits from what is proven.

Slowly, some of those accounts came back.

And one quarter is all it took.

Less than a quarter.

By the middle of the first quarter, I was already back to the middle of the pack.

By the end of the first quarter, I was back to the top 20 percent.

I carried that into the second quarter.

It’s amazing to be able to say that things turned around literally in one quarter, and I was back.

But coming back was not the end of the story.

It was actually the beginning.

Because this is the most important thing I learned in my entire career.

When I came back, I was not just back.

I was different.

Because I had been forced to look at my territory at a level of detail I had never looked at it before.

I had been forced to understand what was actually driving results versus what I had always assumed was driving results.

And in that process, I discovered something I had never consciously tracked before.

I like to call it the relative number.

So what is the relative number?

Here’s what I mean.

I started tracking all my interactions.

Not visits to physicians and accounts and discussions.

Not just calls.

Not that.

But interactions that I defined.

I defined an interaction as any activity that had a reasonable chance of moving a potential patient onto therapy.

That was how I defined the interaction.

It didn’t matter what was discussed or who I talked to.

Thought leader.

Non-thought leader.

The key physician.

Someone even in a clinical trial close to what we were selling.

It didn’t matter.

If the conversation, regardless of who it was with, even the office manager, led to a potential patient being put on therapy, really identified a candidate, whether it was a follow-up that kept a physician engaged, an in-service where a new case was discussed, or a message to an identified patient, it was considered an interaction.

And I started noticing the pattern.

When my interaction number was high, of course, my results were high.

My numbers were higher.

More patients were put on therapy.

And when my interactions dropped, even slightly, fewer patients were put on therapy.

Obviously.

And I just kept adjusting.

I kept tracking.

I kept refining until I literally found the specific threshold that produced consistent output in my territory.

As long as I had this many interactions a week, I would be this far beyond the goal.

So it wasn’t even about making goal or just simply exceeding goal.

It was about hitting my personal goal, which far exceeded the goal.

And it was great because I stopped guessing if I might get where I wanted to go within my territory.

I literally started engineering the success within my territory.

And every day was built around one question.

Did I hit the relative number of interactions?

It didn’t matter if the day felt hard or light.

It didn’t matter if I had good conversations versus bad conversations.

All irrelevant.

A conversation was good if it was considered an interaction.

Anything I did during the day was good work if it was considered an interaction.

It really did become, “Did I hit the specific, measurable, non-negotiable number of qualified interactions that I knew from experience would produce results in my territory?”

Some days, it meant I was making things happen as early as 6:00 a.m. as far as my business was concerned.

Some days, it meant staying in the territory and in the field way longer than I wanted to.

Some days, it meant making phone calls as I was driving to different accounts.

But every day, the number was always the number.

And the goal was to hit this number of interactions every single week, rain, hail, or shine.

And when I hit it, the results followed.

Now here’s where it got crazy.

I was doing this with our original therapy.

It was a device slash drug.

It was awesome.

And like I said, we were in rare disease, a very complex disease state.

We were approaching the end of quarter two.

At the end of quarter two, a new product was launched.

It took us into quarter three.

And they structured President’s Club around, of course, our original product.

So I was killing it.

First quarter.

Second quarter.

Then we get this new product.

And we’re still responsible for the old product.

So now we have two therapies, and performance, President’s Club, or any kind of good metric is literally around as many patients on therapy as possible.

So I took the exact same system, this interaction threshold, the staff enrollment I had gotten really versed in, working with and actually paying attention to my mid and low-tier producers, as well as of course focusing on the highest-volume producers.

And I applied it to this new launch from day one.

Let me tell you, I didn’t wait for my product to do whatever.

I just applied this from day one.

And I didn’t ease into it either.

It was literally from day one.

I had a plan before we were even allowed to start selling.

And it was amazing.

I blew both products out of the water.

Q3 was ridiculous.

And because the system on the original product was already running at full capacity, my territory literally went through the roof.

I went from back into the higher percentage of the nation to literally number one, top of the nation.

I think I fluctuated between number one and two.

And then, of course, going into Q4, I absolutely crushed it and made President’s Club.

So I want you to sit with me right now for that moment.

When I was on stage getting the award, it was surreal.

Just a year earlier, the same organization had my name at the bottom of the rankings at the same kind of national sales meeting.

And now I was accepting recognition for something I genuinely earned.

Not because the conditions got better and things were perfect.

Not because the market started to cooperate.

Not because my competitor disappeared.

But because I developed a system that worked regardless of the conditions.

I found my relative number, and I literally refused to stay at the bottom when any reasonable person might have just resigned to being there.

They might have looked at it like, “Maybe I should look for a new position. Maybe I should just do something else. I don’t know, because it looks impossible to climb out of this.”

And in the same national sales meeting where I felt I couldn’t show my face, my face was being blasted on the big screen, and I was grinning from ear to ear, receiving the President’s Club Award.

It was an amazing, surreal moment and a true testament to what someone is capable of.

And I think more importantly, when we talk about identity and this identity of a performer, it was truly challenged.

And I’m proud to say that I got to stand my ground in the belief that I truly was a performer.

So here’s what I really want you to understand about what this whole experience actually created.

Again, it wasn’t just a comeback.

For me, it was a transformation in how I understood what performance in this industry actually means.

Before that period, my first year in this space, I was performing and I believed in my own ability.

And it sounds like a cool thing.

I actually don’t think it’s enough.

I think there’s more to it.

Because after that period, I literally was something different.

I was a rep who knew specifically, mechanically, operationally how to build performance from scratch under conditions that were literally working against me.

And I do think that’s a little bit different than just simply believing in yourself.

I think it’s beyond that.

It’s knowing yourself.

Knowing that you’re capable.

When everything is going wrong, you are capable of figuring it out.

It’s a different kind of confidence.

I almost like to call it real confidence.

Knowing that you have a process.

Knowing that the number exists, and if you can find it and consistently work it, you will get the results.

Not maybe.

Not hope it will happen.

The reps who only perform when conditions are right do not fully know what they’re capable of.

It’s something I firmly believe in now.

They know they can execute when the territory is healthy.

And look, that’s nothing to scoff at.

A lot of people can’t even execute when the conditions are right.

You still have to have some chops in this space.

In medical sales, you still have to have some chops.

It doesn’t mean you’re automatically going to start killing it in your territory.

But when the accounts are not accessible, when someone is disrupting what you’re trying to do, and when your relationships are not holding, that’s when you really get tested.

And the reps who have not experienced that, I truly believe they never had to face and answer the harder question.

Can I perform this way when things aren’t working the way they have been?

And look, I’m not saying you need to go through this.

I’m just saying, if you’re going through this, stop looking at it as “woe is me.”

Stop looking at it as, “Oh my gosh, what am I going to do?”

Start looking at it as, “This is my opportunity to showcase how I really show up.”

The rep who goes to the bottom of the sales force and builds back to the top of the nation has answered that question.

And that cannot be taken away.

And then think about what you can do for other people who are literally going through the same thing.

You clearly understand something they haven’t even experienced yet.

You can speak to that, inspire them to make moves they just never thought they could.

Because now they know, not theoretically, not motivationally, but operationally, that they can perform at will because you performed at will and created a system that actually existed.

I think about Napoleon Hill and those recordings I listened to alone in the car during the worst stretch of my career.

And it wasn’t Napoleon Hill I listened to.

It was Tony Robbins I listened to, and Napoleon Hill I was reading.

And I think about what would be said about that period now.

One thing that Napoleon Hill talked about, and I think Tony Robbins talks about too, is that adversity is a gift.

And yes, it’s cliche.

I’m sure anyone hearing this right now has heard that before.

But look, it’s real.

Adversity really is a gift.

It wasn’t the comeback that was the gift.

It was the adversity.

Being put in that situation was the gift.

Because without the adversity, you can’t create a system.

You can’t discover how capable you really are.

You can’t get to this level of confidence that is, in my opinion, just untouchable.

And you don’t have the knowledge that you can perform regardless of the conditions, which is a beautiful thing to truly understand about yourself.

The rep who survives a competitive disruption becomes dangerous.

The rep who survives a bad quarter and rebuilds becomes dangerous.

The rep who goes to the bottom and comes back to the top becomes dangerous.

If you’re listening to this right now and you’re having a rough season, you have the opportunity to truly become dangerous.

And when you’re dangerous, whatever you want happens.

You want to be a manager?

Good, you got it.

You want to work for a better company with a better product and more money?

You got it.

You want to go to a different space entirely?

You got it.

Whatever you want can become yours because you’re dangerous.

And you remove the one variable that stops people when things get hard.

You’ve killed self-doubt.

It’s really difficult to go back to self-doubt when you go through something like that because you realize, “I can do this.”

Not, “I may do this.”

Not, “I hope I do this.”

Not, “I really want to do this.”

But, “No, I actually can do this.”

Last thing I’ll say about this story.

I showed up to the national sales meeting feeling like I could not show my face.

And I showed up the very next year accepting President’s Club.

Same industry.

Same product.

Same territory.

But a different rep.

Listen, if you’re in a tough stretch right now as a sales professional in the world of medical sales, I don’t care if you’re in device.

I don’t care if you’re in supplies.

I don’t care if you’re in pharma.

I don’t care if you’re in biotech.

I don’t care if you’re in diagnostics.

I don’t care if you’re in health SaaS systems.

If your numbers are sliding, or there’s a competitor in your territory, or the best accounts you thought you had amazing relationships with have gone quiet, or there’s a manager asking questions you do not have good answers to yet, I want you to hear the most important thing I’ve said in this entire episode.

Stop explaining it and start mapping.

Go take it all the way back to day one.

Every account that has ever shown you any interest in what you are selling, map it.

Find the ones nobody has touched.

Enroll the staff.

Find your number.

Hit it every single day without exception.

And if you’re driving to accounts right now that are not returning your calls, put something in your head before you walk through the door of any of your accounts that is stronger than the voice telling you it’s not going to work.

I don’t know if it’s Mel Robbins, Napoleon Hill, Stephen Covey, Tony Robbins, whatever it is for you.

Find it.

Listen to it.

Get lost in it.

Not as a substitute for a strategy, because you still have to develop one.

But as the thing that keeps you functional, forward-facing, really positive, and focused on solutions long enough for you to actually find the strategy.

Because I’m going to tell you one thing.

The miracle you’re waiting for is not going to come.

There will not be a miracle.

What is coming, if you do the work, is a system.

And the system is going to be worth more than a miracle ever would have been.

If you’re trying to break into medical sales and you’re listening to this and thinking about what this career actually requires, this is what it requires.

Not the highlight reel.

Not the sexy stuff you hear about the money, doctors, and whatnot.

This is the real version.

This is the stuff that is not often talked about.

And those of you who are in medical sales, if you’re new, this is coming.

Some version of this is coming for your career.

And those of you who are experienced, you’ve probably been in this.

And if you weren’t able to get out, I hope you listen to this episode and take notes on utilizing it to help you get out.

The reps who last and the reps who win are the ones who figure out how to perform when conditions are working against them.

That is the rep we help people become inside the Medical Sales Career Builder.

That is the rep we help people become inside Medical Sales Bootcamp for you reps who are in the field right now.

Not just getting in.

Not just getting better.

But truly thinking like this.

If you want that kind of help, and you want to do more than what this episode offers, there’s an application in the link.

You can also go to EvolveYourSuccess.com/application.

If it looks like we can help you, and you talk to one of our program advisors, then we absolutely will do so.

Go to that link.

Schedule a call.

Talk to one of our program advisors.

And let’s get you the help you absolutely deserve.

The comeback is possible for everyone because I’ve lived it, I’ve trained it, I’ve coached it, and I know it.

I’ve built everything I know from that middle period.

I never want to get back to it.

And the success on the other side is an amazing feeling I want everyone to experience.

As always, thank you for listening to the Medical Sales Podcast, and make sure you tune in next week for another episode.

I hope you enjoyed today’s episode.

And remember, I have a customized and personalized program that gets you into the medical technology industry as a sales professional, or any type of role for that matter.

Become a top performer in your position and masterfully navigate your career to executive-level leadership.

Check out these programs and learn more by visiting our site.

Fill out an application, schedule some time with one of our account executives, and allow us to get you where you need to be.

Stay tuned for more awesome content with amazing interviews on the Medical Sales Podcast.