POSTED ON June 17, 2026

The Powerful Truth About Medical Sales Backgrounds

In this solo episode of the Medical Sales Podcast, Samuel Adeyinka breaks down why so many aspiring and current medical sales professionals struggle to find the right fit in the industry. Samuel explains that the issue is not always background, talent, or effort, but often the inability to translate past experience into the specific value a hiring manager needs to see. He unpacks why medical sales has many different spaces, why the right opportunity depends on understanding where your background truly belongs, and why trying to figure that out alone can leave candidates guessing, stuck, or applying to the wrong roles. This episode is a must listen for anyone trying to break into medical sales or move into a better role who needs clarity, positioning, and a stronger strategy to finally open the right door.

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Transcription:

Samuel Adeyinka (Host):
You target the wrong specialties for your background.

You tell your story in language that makes perfect sense to you, but lands wrong with the actual hiring manager, and you get rejected.

What I see is people just give up.

They say, “Look, medical sales is not for me. I do not belong here.”

It’s not because you couldn’t have gotten there.

It’s because you’re navigating alone without feedback, without a framework.

Everything you’re doing right now is a fixable solution.

And if you just learn what the fix is, because someone else can identify it for you, someone who has actually seen hundreds of people go through this, your world changes.

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.

One of the biggest myths in medical sales is that people don’t get hired because of their background.

I’ve spent years helping people break into the industry.

Hundreds of people.

Different backgrounds.

Different experiences.

Different starting points.

And what I’ve learned, what I’ve actually watched play out over and over and over again, is something very different from what most people believe.

Most people don’t fail because they’re unqualified or because their background doesn’t work for medical sales.

They fail because they don’t know how to explain why they’re qualified.

And that’s not a background problem.

That’s a translation problem.

And those two things require completely different solutions.

If you’ve been telling yourself, and this actually applies to someone who is not in medical sales and to someone who wants to get into a different type of medical sales, if you’ve been telling yourself that your background is the reason why you haven’t broken into whatever you’re trying to get into, this episode is going to help reframe that.

Not with motivation.

Not with generic encouragement.

But with a specific way to think that will change how you see the situation entirely.

Because the problem you think you have is almost certainly not the problem you actually have.

So let’s get into it.

Let’s talk a little bit about what hiring managers are looking for.

Now, I’m not going to go too far into this because we’re going to have an episode coming up that talks specifically about hiring managers.

But I want to talk about backgrounds in this episode.

So before we get into the detailed backgrounds, let’s talk about what medical sales hiring managers are actually looking for.

Just a little bit.

Because I think people have this idea wrong.

What I often hear is, “You need to be in medical sales to get into medical sales.”

Which, as you can hear, makes absolutely no sense.

Or, “You have to have been in the hospital to get into medical sales.”

But then you have people from the hospital saying, “We have to have a sales background to get into medical sales.”

And people with sales backgrounds saying, “We have to have medical experience to get into medical sales.”

Everybody has it all mixed up.

Here’s what it really looks like.

Hiring managers are not primarily looking for clinical experience.

It helps, but they’re not specifically looking for clinical experience.

It’s a little bit deeper than that.

They’re not primarily looking for sales experience either.

Of course, it helps, but not because of what you think.

They’re not looking for just that.

They’re not looking for a specific degree either.

A degree in medicine or a degree in business can help, but that’s not what they’re looking for.

And they’re not looking for a specific job title.

Outside of having done the exact job and being a rock star in that exact job, they’re not looking for that either.

And they’re not looking for a specific number of years because that can be misleading.

People with a very long tenure in medical sales often struggle just like the people who haven’t broken in because it’s assumed they might have bad habits.

If they haven’t been a rock star those entire 10 years, if they’ve been middle of the pack, then it’s assumed that they’ll just join this company and be more middle of the pack.

Who wants to hire middle of the pack?

So what they’re really looking for, what they’re trying to assess in every interview, trying to read through every resume, and really trying to reference check, is a specific set of human qualities.

The first quality, the most important quality, is trust.

And here’s the tricky thing about a resume, a LinkedIn profile, or even an interview.

It’s a small snippet of information.

A resume is literally just a page.

And if you have an awesome enough resume writer, you can have a good one.

A LinkedIn profile is literally just a scroll.

And if you have an expert who understands how that should look, you can get a good one.

Even your interview can be somewhat of a performance, and someone can be trained to perform powerfully.

So trust is not given.

And what every hiring manager is worried about is, no matter how good the resume looks, no matter how good the LinkedIn profile looks, no matter how good the interview went, will I be able to trust this person?

Is whatever I’ve seen and liked really who they are?

Can this person build genuine trust with the physicians I put them in front of, the surgeons I put them in front of, the nurses, the other team members, and clinical staff in environments where trust is literally everything and credibility is earned over time?

That’s number one.

Trust.

Which is really hard to come by.

In fact, I’ve heard managers say, “Samuel, what I’m really looking for are people that you already know, where you have an idea of how they’ve already shown up.”

In our program, we connect people with hiring managers if they’ve shown themselves to be a certain way within the program and within certain specialties.

And those hiring managers say, “I don’t just want anyone. Of course, someone can put on a good game or speak a good game, but do they really show up that way?”

So trust is number one.

Number two is resilience.

I’ve said this in episodes in the past.

Can this person take a no, process it, and come back stronger?

Certain experiences in past jobs you’ve had can make that automatic because of the nature of the job.

But they’re really looking for resilience.

It doesn’t have to be from the job.

It can be life experience.

Job experience.

Just how they got to the table that you’re interviewing across from, or the computer screen, whatever it is.

Can a picture be painted that supports that this person has a lot of resilience?

This is a really resilient person.

Can they handle a bad quarter, a difficult manager, a competitive territory, and not fall apart?

And that’s real stuff.

Again, that applies to people who are in medical sales.

If you’ve never been in President’s Club, if you’ve never had an amazing year, and you’re just kind of floating in your medical sales job right now, and a hiring manager sees that, and you’re trying to switch companies, you have to be able to explain that in a powerful way because the resilience is not really showing.

So we’ve talked about trust and resilience.

Next is coachability.

Can this person be developed?

This is critical.

I think development is dramatically understated.

A 10-year rep in the middle of the pack, it can be assumed they have a lot of bad habits.

And it can be assumed that you can’t even coach that person out of those bad habits.

Whereas someone who has to enter the industry and comes from a really humble space is a blank slate who can be trained on a lot of new things.

But if you’re someone who has never been in the industry, and you’ve been a performer where you’re coming from, and you have this cockiness or arrogance about you, or you’re like, “Yeah, I know that,” or, “I can do anything,” that screams that you don’t have coachability.

Nobody wants to take on or adopt a problem child.

You have to be able to showcase that you can be developed.

Are you the kind of candidate who absorbs feedback and not only receives feedback but applies it?

Or are you the kind of person who gets defensive and stalls?

So we’ve talked about trust, resilience, and coachability.

These are things hiring managers are looking for.

The next one is influence without authority.

Can you work in an environment with other people and influence them and their behaviors without being the person who has formal authority?

Can this person move people toward a decision in rooms where they have no formal power, only the strength of relationship and the quality of their argument?

This is probably one of the most critical qualities of being in medical sales.

Whether you’re in medical device sales, invasive medical device sales where you’re in the operating room, non-invasive medical device sales where you’re selling a product outside the operating room, pharma sales where you’re selling a drug, or diagnostics where you’re selling a test, you have to be able to influence people without authority.

And then think about your own team.

A lot of these medical sales roles involve teammates, whether you have an associate rep working with you, a senior rep working with you, a clinical specialist working with you, or just other salespeople working with you to collectively run a region.

You need to be able to influence them as well, especially if you’re someone who has a year or two of good performance.

That’s influence without authority.

Do you have the ability to do that?

And if you do, that’s a manager’s dream.

So again, we talked about trust, resilience, coachability, and influence without authority.

And then the last one is relationship intelligence.

Can you read a room?

Some people call it relationship intelligence.

It’s in the same vein as emotional intelligence.

Can you read a room and adjust in real time?

Can you make someone feel genuinely understood rather than sold to?

This is critical.

You have to think about what medical sales is demanding from you.

You’re dealing with staff that is extremely busy, usually in a flooded medical office with a surgeon or doctor, and they do not want to entertain a rep.

Now, for some spaces, the rep is the answer, but you have competitors.

If you’re new, and your competitor is doing a very good job, and they already use that person’s service or product, and now you’re showing up trying to peddle yours, if they don’t feel understood, if they don’t feel appreciated, if you can’t read the room, and they feel like you’re just selling them, trust me, you’re not going to be there many more times.

So relationship intelligence.

That’s trust, resilience, coachability, influence without authority, and relationship intelligence.

Now, notice something.

None of those things require a medical sales background.

Not one of them shows up on a degree, a certification, or a specific job type.

Every single one of them is developed through lived experience, through navigating complex human situations under pressure in any number of environments that have nothing to do with medical sales.

And this is the misunderstanding.

It’s the reason people with extraordinary capability keep disqualifying themselves before a hiring manager even gets a chance to meet them.

I have to say one more thing about this.

This has to be a deep-seated belief you have.

You can be trained on how to present yourself.

You can actually have the qualities I described in spades.

You can be trained on how to deliver it.

You can have everything looking good, from your resume, to your career portfolio, to the business plan you created, to your LinkedIn profile, to the network you created.

Everybody can be championing you.

But once you’re in that interviewing room, or once you have that hiring manager, talent acquisition leader, sales rep, or CEO leader on the screen, you have to believe it.

Because if any part of you still feels that you’re disqualified, it will show.

So now I want to give you an example.

I want you to really think about this one.

Imagine a stay-at-home mom decides she wants to break into medical sales.

She has been out of the traditional workforce for a few years.

Before that, she was a go-getter.

She had a good career, maybe two or three different careers.

She was a rock star in each one of them.

But she took some time off to raise the kids.

And it’s a resume gap.

It’s on her resume.

Traditionally, you would think a hiring manager looks at that and is immediately turned off and filters her out before he even reads the first bullet point.

On paper, she might even look like a long shot.

But let’s go a little deeper into what her background actually contains.

She spent years managing multiple stakeholders with competing priorities.

Children.

She’s on the city committee.

She’s on the PTA.

Schools.

Pediatricians.

Household systems.

Community organizations.

And like I said, she had a strong career before this.

She hasn’t had any formal authority since she’s been a stay-at-home mom over any of these different roles she has taken.

And even when she was in the workforce, she wasn’t a manager.

She was just a good individual contributor.

So she can’t mandate anything.

All she has had in her capability to exercise is influence.

She can only build relationships strong enough that people move in the direction she needs them to.

She’s learned how to read the room under pressure.

She knows how to de-escalate tension between people with competing agendas.

She knows how to maintain relationships through serious conflict, frustration, and moments where everything is going wrong at the same time.

She has operated for years without any guaranteed outcomes.

No promise of compensation.

No salary.

No performance review.

No external validation.

But she shows up and does the same thing every day anyway.

Now tell me, which of those qualities does a medical sales organization not want on their team?

They want all of them on their team.

If you think about it, she was managing stakeholders before she ever entered medical sales.

She just didn’t call them stakeholders.

And that’s the translation gap.

The capability was always there.

And this is not some made-up scenario.

She ended up translating the gap so powerfully that a stay-at-home mom of three years is now a Stryker sales rep and has been a strong performer for the last four years.

And she’s not the only story we have with someone who has done this and has been in exactly her position.

Or here’s another example.

A teacher.

Teachers spend their entire career doing something that almost nobody outside of education recognizes the commercial value of.

They stand in front of a room full of people who did not choose to be there.

They stand in front of a room full of people with competing priorities, varying levels of engagement, and zero obligation to pay attention.

And they find a way to make complex information land, and land hard.

They simplify without dumbing down.

They read the room in real time and adjust when something is not working.

They hold attention in environments where people are losing it and the path of least resistance is disengagement.

And they build enough trust and rapport that people come in, and the resistance they had before they walked through that door dissipates.

They leave engaged to go and do homework or whatever was discussed in that time.

Now think about what a medical sales rep does in an in-service, also known as a lunch and learn, within a physician’s office.

In a product presentation to a committee.

In a one-on-one conversation with a surgeon who has three more minutes, a skeptical expression, and decades of experience that they are not shy of hovering over that rep.

It’s the same skill applied to a different room.

The teacher who has never thought of herself as a salesperson has been selling ideas to unwilling audiences for her entire career.

The problem is she doesn’t realize this is what she has been doing.

She doesn’t realize that if she translates this powerfully enough, a hiring manager looking for an entry-level role will absolutely entertain her in medical sales.

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.

Here’s another example.

This one I’m going to address directly.

Let’s talk about the person who does not have a bachelor’s degree.

I think the no-degree belief is one of the most persistent and serious ones because there’s some truth to it.

There are some spaces where they won’t even listen to you if you don’t have a degree.

Some spaces have a lot of red tape and are highly conservative.

If you don’t have a bachelor’s degree, they won’t even listen to you.

But again, the beauty of medical sales is that it’s vast.

Over 40 different specialties.

And the cool thing about that is a number of them know this.

Most people assume a degree is a hard requirement in medical sales.

And like I said, in some industries, it absolutely is.

So I’m not going to pretend that it’s not.

But here’s what a degree actually signals to a hiring manager.

Let’s get behind the behind.

It signals commitment.

The ability to follow through on something difficult over an extended period of time.

The discipline to operate within a structured system and produce results.

That’s a degree.

That’s why medical sales roles often require bachelor’s degrees.

Just because someone had a degree in biology doesn’t mean that the person in economics, history, or English won’t get into the same medical sales role.

Because it’s not about what you studied in the degree.

It’s about the fact that you have a degree.

You were in a commitment that led to producing some modicum of results.

We’re talking about translation here.

This episode is all about translating the gap.

So if you can translate why your specific degree and whatever you learned in it matters, then yes, it’s going to take you somewhere.

But most people can’t.

And in reality, most people don’t.

But they still are able to get into medical sales.

And the ones that aren’t getting in, if they were able to translate it, they definitely would begin getting into medical sales.

But again, the real signal is not just having the degree.

Because I just said what a degree is.

I didn’t say a degree is a degree.

I said a degree demonstrates a level of commitment to something that produces results.

So the logic is, what can be demonstrated or shown that proves you were committed to something that produced results?

A person who has built a career without a degree, who has navigated a world that was not designed to accommodate them and produced results anyway, has demonstrated exactly those qualities.

If you really think about it, they did it through an even harder path.

The real world.

Not a credentialed path.

Not an outlined path like college.

And I personally watched someone without a college degree break into medical sales.

Not because the requirement disappeared, but because they had enough evidence, preparation, and positioning.

They were crystal clear on why they belonged and what they could bring to that space.

It made the credential gap, this whole “you need a bachelor’s degree” gap, disappear, and they got the job.

You can even see this person if you go to my LinkedIn recommendations.

It’s awesome.

Because hiring managers don’t actually buy degrees.

They buy evidence.

And evidence can be built regardless of what your resume currently says.

It is all going to be contingent upon your translation.

I’ve got one more example.

This one is cool again.

These are all cool.

It’s exciting to talk about things that people still don’t know.

And these are things that surprised me at the time.

I’m sure if you hear them, maybe they won’t surprise you, but at least they’ll be intriguing.

Think about a camera technician.

Not even a camera technician for 20 years.

A camera technician for just a few years.

Not a medical camera technician.

A normal camera technician.

No clinical background.

No sales background.

No obvious connection to medical sales in any sense of the word.

And he decided he wanted to break into the medical sales industry.

He felt completely lost at first.

He was getting interviews here and there, but not moving anywhere in them.

Tons of applications.

Nothing happened.

He would get past the first few rounds when he did get an interview and then just fall apart.

He didn’t know why.

He had no idea what was missing.

But why did that same person, a camera technician with no additional work experience, land a job as a joint replacement rep with Stryker, one of the largest medical device companies in the world?

Why?

Now, the other version of the story is, “Well, anyone can do it. Believe in yourself. Anything can happen. Just keep going.”

And you know what?

As much as I stand behind “keep going,” I don’t stand behind keeping going when you have no idea what’s going on.

I think that’s silly.

I think that’s part of the definition of what it means to be insane.

And I think that gets a lot of people nowhere.

Here’s what actually happened.

When you looked at the background as a camera technician and actually considered the ability to be precise in high-stakes environments, really specific information, the technical aptitude to learn complex systems very quickly and deliver on them, the discipline to show up prepared for unpredictable situations because you don’t know what you’re getting when you’re a camera technician, and the coachability to be developed by people who knew a lot more than him and were his seniors in that type of space, it matched what Stryker looks for in candidates and what they look for to build careers around.

He was not hired because he was an expert in cameras or because he spent time fixing them.

He was hired because of what operating cameras actually required.

That translation gap was the only thing standing between him and an offer.

And once that translation gap was properly closed with everything that goes into doing that, he was employed with the biggest, most competitive device company.

So I’ve said it like five times, maybe more.

The translation gap.

Every example I gave you points to that.

It’s not a background problem.

I am at the point now, having been in this seat for six years, seeing hundreds of people from every background you can imagine.

I’m serious.

Think of any job, and I’ve probably seen some version of it.

And over and over and over again, I see the same thing.

The translation gap is the distance between that background and what it actually contains, the skills, the qualities, the demonstrated capabilities, and what medical sales hiring managers are able to see when they look at you.

From entrepreneurs to chefs, they get into medical sales too.

In really competitive beginnings with salaries over $150,000 starting base.

When the gap is large, when the hiring manager cannot connect what you’ve done to what they need, you get filtered out.

And that’s just what it is.

That’s one of the reasons why resumes are not everything, but you do have to have a resume that speaks volumes to the position you’re trying to get.

Because if it’s easy to see on that resume that there’s this big gap and you’re not there to explain it, and it’s just the resume itself, why would they waste any more time?

They have so many people who are interested in the job.

Why spend any time on you if that’s not properly being showcased?

But it’s not because you’re unqualified.

It’s because the translation is not there.

But when you close the translation gap, when your story is told in the language that makes the hiring manager immediately recognize the value of what you bring, the background almost stops mattering.

That’s what happens.

They are no longer looking at a resume that doesn’t fit the template.

They are looking at a candidate who clearly understands where they belong and exactly why they would succeed if they were given the role.

That shift from unreadable to undeniable is not about changing your background.

It’s about changing how your background is understood.

The stay-at-home mom does not need more experience.

She needs a translation that makes the hiring manager understand she has been building the exact skills they’re looking for in a context they can’t overlook, and that makes them say, “Wow, this person has it.”

The teacher does not need more sales experience.

She needs a translation that makes a hiring manager understand she has been selling ideas to resistant audiences and succeeding her entire career.

And the camera technician does not need a clinical background.

He needed a translation that made Stryker see the qualities they actually hire for hiding inside a background they would have never, ever sought.

So the translation gap is the problem.

And unlike your background, which is fixed, translation can be built.

For anybody listening to this right now, you can’t change your past.

It’s your background.

What I want to tell you is that translation can be built.

For those of you who are not in medical sales, translation can be built.

For those of you who are in medical sales, don’t like your current position, and have been trying to get out of it, translation can be built.

The most important thing I want you to take from this episode is that translation can be built.

So if a translation gap is the real problem, why do so many people stay stuck for so long without ever realizing that they can’t translate there?

Because from the inside, it’s very, very difficult to see.

What I mean by that is you, as the person who has the background to translate, have a hard time catching it.

Here’s what being stuck in the translation gap actually looks like in real life.

You apply everywhere, not because you’re unfocused, but because you genuinely do not know which specific part of the industry your background is a good fit for.

So you cast this super wide net and hope that something sticks.

And most of the time, nothing sticks.

Sometimes when something sticks, it’s the worst fit in the world, and it turns you off from medical sales forever.

This is not because your background is wrong.

It’s because you’re targeting roles where your translation does not land and avoiding roles where it would be very, very obvious, or at least a lot easier to close the translation gap.

But then sometimes it works out, and you get an interview.

But every time you get an interview, not a single offer.

You walk away feeling like, “What happened?”

Because when you walked in, you felt prepared.

You answered the questions.

You followed up.

And you still did not get the job.

I would say it’s not because your interview was bad.

It’s because the version of yourself you presented did not make the hiring manager feel immediately certain that you belong in their specific environment.

The translation was close, but it wasn’t enough.

Or your resume is not landing.

You’ve rewritten it three times.

You’ve spent $1,000 on resume writers.

You’ve had people look at it.

Your friends.

People you just found from random spaces in the industry.

And it’s still not producing results.

Again, I would argue, I bet it’s not even poorly structured.

It’s telling your story in your language.

And it’s not telling the story of what the industry you’re trying to enter needs in their language.

And let me be specific.

The specific space you’re trying to enter, in their language.

The hiring manager reads it and sees a person.

They do not immediately see a candidate who is a good fit for that specific role.

Or what about the other piece?

Your networking.

Your networking is not converting.

You are connecting with people.

You’re having a ton of conversations, but nothing is moving.

And again, it’s not because you’re doing something wrong.

But the story you’re telling in those conversations is not creating the right impression on the right people.

None of these problems are background problems.

Every single one I just mentioned.

Every single one of them is a translation problem.

And the reason they are hard to fix alone is the same reason.

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.