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Capital Equipment King To Medrep Meeting CEO With Peter Skidmore Part 2
I am happy to bring you part two with Peter Skidmore. We got introduced in part one. We got to learn a little bit about aesthetics, his career, and his background and touched upon his company. Here in part two, he goes into what he believes life’s about, how to be successful in aesthetics and if you even want to be in aesthetics. Also, the wonderful service he offers and provides with his company. Make sure you tune in and as always, thank you for reading. I do hope you enjoy this interview.
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You got into medical aesthetics many years ago, and now you have this service that makes it even better to be in that space. I want people to understand because the people reading now are thinking, “I want to know more about medical aesthetics. That sounds really attractive.” What should someone be thinking about considering that track, especially with their time? What happens in that space?
Get ready to not have any time because that’s what the space is. Even when we are scheduling meetings for those specific teams, they are still expected you run at the speed that you are expected to run at. That’s why I got up because to produce the volume that you need to produce to make the money that everyone dreams to make in medical sales, your time is shot. Whether I scheduled the meetings or not, it is a dedicated thing. You got to dedicate your life to it. This is not a 9:00 to 5:00. This is every day, Monday through Friday, and sometimes on the weekends. It is the hardest work in the medical sales position in the space outside of the ones that are in surgery all day and reporting to a doctor.
If you want to do that and go that route, great. You want to report to a doctor. If you want to get calls at 2:00 AM to bring in a screw to put in a back or a knee, or whatever the case may be, there’s that route too. You can go to the cadaver lab or help the physicians. There are a lot of those positions that are out there, and that’s completely a different aspect than what you are looking to do but when you look at aesthetics, that’s where med medical sales reps can make $350,000, $750,000 or $1 million. That’s why I got into it because that was the dream that was sold to me. I just made it a reality.
What kind of person do you need to be to perform well in medical aesthetics?
We needed to be open-minded. You need to be very sponge-like and soaking in a lot of knowledge, able to learn and adapt. It all comes down to accountability. You got to hold yourself very accountable. They are not baby-ing. You get thrown to the wolves and are expected to come out with golden arms. It’s not for everyone. These are the top reps in the entire space, and every single aspect of medical sales comes into aesthetics because the money is real. When you look at this at a super high level, some of the top reps in this space are making $1.5 million to $2 million a year, and there’s no other type of medical sales that you can make that much unless you are high on top of the food chain.
At the rep level, my salary was $65,000. I’m making $500,000 plus, and we could keep going and going but at the end of the day, I knew what it took to get there and was willing to put the work in. If you are not and you want to cushion 9:00 to 5:00 or you want to report to the hospital, make your $100,000, $120,000 or $80,000 salary and small bonuses, work a shift like that, then you go do that. I’m okay with that. If that’s what you want to do in the route that’s going to make you the happiest, you do that, and I tell you to do that. I don’t ever want someone to follow in my footsteps because of the money. The money isn’t where the happiness is, and it took me a long time to understand that.
A lot of people get into medical sales, and it’s very important to understand this as reps. For the readers that want to get into medical sales and want to break through, if you are chasing the dollar, you are chasing the wrong thing. One hundred percent of the time, if you are chasing happiness, money will follow that. Now, in my early stages of med sales and aesthetics, I chased the dollar. I was younger. I thought that was going to make me happy, and after having an AMG and a big house, doing all these things that I thought created happiness but in reality, I lost all the time that was way more valuable than any money that I brought it.
It took me a long time to understand that, though, For the people getting in, medical sales is different from other avenues. You can be an order taker. You can be a rep or someone that is an assistant in surgeries. You can be in pharma, dropping off samples and talking about what this does for the patients. Those are all needed things. If that is what’s going to make you happier to do that and have more of a schedule, “I know I’m going to make this every year, and this is what I have to do to make that,” you do that if that’s what you want to do. Aesthetics is the next game when I talk about finances but you have no life. You’re giving up time to make X, to create something that you want to do or love, whatever that may be.
[bctt tweet=”If you want to get into medical aesthetics, get ready to not have any time. You need to dedicate your life to it.” via=”no”]
When you look at the guys that are in aesthetics, probably 80% of them have been to more than one company because technology evolves. People jump. It’s a very savage space. It separates what they call back then the men from the boys. Although I have to use that term now because it’s sometimes not socially right to say that, but honestly, that’s how they built that space. That’s not from me. That’s from everywhere, coming from above. Separating the men from the boys or the women from the girls.
Give the audience an example of what it means to be in a savage space. It’s important to understand that.
It’s very cutthroat. When you hop into aesthetics, and you think you are the best at where you came from, you need to humble yourself because you are getting in the pool with a bunch of sharks, and you better know how to swim well. There’s no holding back. They don’t register freshmen. They bring people in that are high level because to turn a doctor in 48 to 72 hours to $200,000 to $400,000.
These aren’t long sales processes. This is not something that’s going to drag out at a hospital for 6 or 3 months, “Great. You got a couple of deals a year.” It doesn’t work like that. In 2017, I sold 112 lasers with an average sale price north of $100,000. When you look at that and you say, “How do you do that? That’s selling more than 1 or 2 devices a week.” You have to create volume, and the people that don’t are going to lose because I’m going to eat their lunch like the top reps in the space. Know that walking in is not for everybody.
If you come in thinking that you are going to crush, you need to humble yourself because you are dealing with the best in general. This is the elite when you look at that and talk about, “The New York Yankees or the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, or am I going to play baseball or going to the Yankees? You talked about NFL when Tom Brady was at the Patriots. Do you want to play there? Do you want to go to the Dolphins that were 1 and 9?” It’s similar things like that but that’s what it’s like.
What I’m getting a lot from you, Peter is that you have a strong work ethic. It’s so interesting to hear that you didn’t have that college experience and went right into working. You had the tenacity and correct me if I’m wrong but almost like a chip on your shoulder that, “I’m going to go out there. I’m going to make things happen in light of whatever resources I started with,” because you didn’t have a lot of resources.
To have no degree and not a lot of experience in the space and to jump in there, “I’m going to make something happen and make the money I want to make.” It sounds like you took that work ethic right into your company. Talk to us a little bit about what it was like to truly build out your company to what it is now.
It all started as an idea. We started adding clients and reps and building out a foundation of a culture of happiness. We operate it very similar to aesthetics. My employees’ dollar med sales. My employees don’t clock in and clock out every day. If they are doing well, let them do well. We don’t baby people. We don’t register freshmen. How we built this thing is we built it based on the struggles that I went through over the last years. We are building little pieces of that to create the sales rep’s dream of not having scheduled meetings, not having to go to a bank to find out that their doctor is not qualified to purchase, and not having to do expenses.
There are a lot of things that we are building to create time for the reps and the companies. The companies can go out now and get the best talent and say, “You never have to pick up the phone again. Your schedules are booked. Go do your thing.” For other companies, it’s like, “My reps aren’t selling because there are not enough meetings on the books. Let’s pump it up.” Top-level reps, “Peter, I’m doing well. I make all my meetings myself. I’m comfortable where I’m at but I want to make more and don’t want to pick up the phone.” They call us, and we handle all that for you. From where we were to where we are now, we are scheduling 2,500 meetings a month.
We have a quality assurance team. If we can record in that state, it gets recorded. It goes to quality assurance. They made sure it’s a hard-set meeting, and then it goes into your calendar. We have a client experience director. From the time that you sign up to every month that you are working with us, every week that we schedule meetings, you get an email on Friday from your client experience director saying, “Here are all the meetings you have set this week. Here are all the credit approvals for all your meetings next week.”
Everything is very streamlined to the processes of making your life easier as a rep by creating more time but, at the same time, adding opportunities to your pipeline to drive revenue. In the last four months, we’ve done north of $10 million in revenue for our clients, and I would expect that to double to 5X over the next few months.
When I hear the service, I do think, “The front end of the customers you are getting for these reps.” Maybe it’s an office manager, a medical assistant or something like that. You are removing an element of relationship development from the rep because you are taking over and initially booking these meetings. How is that working out for the rep as far as developing a relationship with that account? Does it become, “I have a relationship with this account, and so does your company, and together the customer sees us as a unit, or does it look somewhere else?”
No. Because we work for the company. That rep is in charge of creating their own relationship with that doctor. All we do is put you in front of that doctor to create the relationship. Just because we talked to Stephanie and Stephanie put us on the calendar, it doesn’t mean that we have a tight relationship with Stephanie. That only means that we are good on the phone, so we can get book a meeting with Stephanie to get to the doctor.
Relationships are great in certain aspects of the sales process in med sales. Sometimes they are not. Sometimes you want to get in and out. If you have an objective and you go in, do that. Relationship-based selling is important because those clients will come back to you time after time but when our reps call to confirm, pharma or the rep working in pain management, maybe they call the chiropractor and say, “Johnny, this is Peter over at Summus Medical Laser,” or whatever that company is saying, “It looks like my colleague had scheduled a coffee. I want to make sure that there are no allergies.”
They know that the meetings are set. They’ve followed up and confirmed the meeting, but then they also know that they are coming in now. They are taking over that account before they even walk in and create that relationship on their own. Do I have lots of relationships that I could call and say, “Dr. Smith, you’ve got to meet with these people?” This is what it is, and it’s great, and all but that’s not sustainable. I couldn’t do $13 million, $10 million or $8 million in a year by doing that, working off of relationships.
I could be average and sometimes top but that doesn’t take away from the fact that new business is what drives the most revenue in some of these cases. In some cases, it’s the relationship. Whatever you are going after, whether it’s relationship or volume, you do that. We don’t tell you the effect on that side of the space, whether it is a relationship or not a relationship type of sale. That’s your job to go in there and create the relationship. We can’t do that over the phone like you couldn’t do it, Sam couldn’t do it. It’s very difficult over the phone to create a relationship with a doctor that’s treating patients, and all you get to talk to is Stephanie.
[bctt tweet=”Money isn’t where happiness is. If you’re chasing happiness, money will follow.” via=”no”]
You are saying it’s easy to develop a relationship with the Stephanies of the offices and the handoff to the rep still allows the rep to develop a relationship with Stephanie as well. You guys are seen as people that work for the rep’s company.
Yeah or the company. That’s all very cut and dry. It’s all clear. We work for the company. It’s our job to handle their scheduling process. When they ask, “Do you work for blank?” We say, “Yes. We handle all of the scheduling for blank.” “We are the scheduling team for blank.” It’s understood very easily.
What are some of the challenges? Every business and service has its challenges. What are some of the challenges that you guys have seen with your company?
The challenges that we’ve seen are multiple things. There are a lot of uncontrollable in med sales. You have to understand that in some parts of the country, some of the things that happen in the world affect how your meeting is going to go that day, and that’s not controllable. We saw it in Northern California. We scheduled 100 meetings, and they saw a 60% cancellation or reschedule. It was higher than ever, and it was with their reps and my reps. It was with both.
Do you know what happened that month? The stock market went down tremendously. Physicians who’ve worked their entire careers to build up the foundation and financial freedom in the market got rocked. They lost $500,000, $1 million or a couple million in a couple of days. They see a rep coming in and trying to talk to them, “It’s not a good time. Stay home,” because that physician is not in a very good mindset because of what happened.
In the world, it’s something that we can’t control. Having that understanding, Samuel is important for the medical reps who are watching and maybe the companies that are watching. There are a lot of uncontrollables. Whether I, my team or you said it, there’s going to be an average of 15% to 40% cancellation reschedule, and it’s a space that we live in. Doctors get busy with patients. They go into surgeries. They have things come up in their personal life that is more important than meeting with a rep.
Having a very clear understanding of that is going to help everyone but the main struggle is understanding that those things can happen and not getting frustrated when it does. When you waited all week to meet with this doctor, and then he gets pulled into surgery and has to reschedule a month out. You are like, “I was banking on this meeting for this deal.” You should have three other ones in the pipe, in case this one cancels, so you can call one of them, order them lunch or coffee and go there.
Have a backup plan. When I was working in the space, I had 3 coffees, 3 lunches, and 3-afternoon meetings. I knew to expect a 15% to 40% cancellation so I can expect that out of those 9 meetings, I’m going to have 5 that day. This is why volume wins because of the uncontrollables. That’s the biggest struggle. If I were to give any advice, it’s accountability, execution of what you are doing, and figuring out what your main goal in life is, and you go after that. Whether it be med sales or outside of med sales, it’s more important to me as a person and a human to understand that you are not a number. You are a human like your boss or their bosses’ boss, and your happiness is more important than the job.
Spoken like a true go-getter. Have you ever read the book The Go-Giver?
I have not.
You sound like the pages right out of The Go-Giver. This is good stuff. Your message is to chase happiness, not money. Chase the happiness, and the money will come. I love your outlook on life and how you’ve taken your experiences and transformed them into a philosophy that’s giving you an evolution of the experience of life. That’s what I like to call it. You’ve literally evolved your success. For the readers out there, I want you to share something on what is your driving philosophy outside of chasing happiness. What allows you to keep that perspective, stay high functioning, and grow this company to all the success it’s having? What’s helping you do that?
My end goal is time because, with time, I can get anything I want. I can go travel the world with my wife. I can lay in bed all day if I want. I can watch football all day on a Sunday. We can take a cruise. Understanding my end goal now is my driver and understanding how to get there, how much time it’s going to take to get there, and what we have to do to get there.
All of these drivers drive me and why we are building this, but now, with 25 employees, the drive has changed a little bit from that to now, I have both. I’m worried end goal and getting there but I’m worried about the happiness of 25 people because whether they work for me or somebody else, I’m more worried about their happiness.
If somebody is unhappy, then we have to fix that and figure out why that is and execute. My driver is really for everyone to find the most valuable thing in life, which is time, because when you can have the most valuable thing in life, then you can have whatever you want that’s going to make you happy. That’s important. That’s my driver.
Also, I have my children and a wife that I look at every morning and night and know, “This is why I live but I’m living for the time because the more time I have, the more time I get with them.” When you wake up every day knowing that this day could be the last day that you wake up, let’s go after what that looks like, and always the answer is time.
You dropped a lot of pearls of wisdom. Everyone is well-versed in your company. From hearing how you’ve created this business and grown this company, it’s hard not to want to work with you. We are going to have a little bit of fun now as we close. I’m going to ask you a series of four questions. You have less than ten seconds to answer them, and then we are going to go ahead and wrap it up. What is the best book you’ve read in the last few months?
[bctt tweet=”Figure out what your main goal in life is and go after that. It’s more important to understand that you’re not a number, you’re a human. Happiness is more important than the job.” via=”no”]
I can’t remember the name but it was written by Scott Leese, and the name of the book it’s about positioning and mindset selling.
I’m going to have to check that out. What’s the best movie you’ve seen in the last few months?
The best movie that I’ve seen in the last six months is going to have to be Two For The Money.
It sounds familiar but I don’t know it.
It’s when Matthew McConaughey was young with Al Pacino. You will like this movie.
What’s the best meal you’ve had in the last few months?
I’m not going to lie but my wife got some HelloFresh delivered and gets to cook it. It was a teriyaki sesame rice bowl, and it was unreal. I like a nice home-cooked meal, and sometimes we get HelloFresh because it all comes ready to rock. It was good.
I did it for a minute and then stopped, but now, I’m encouraged again to revisit it. I will check it out. Lastly, what’s the best experience you’ve had in the last few months?
The best experience I’ve had is wrapped up in a lot of things but the experience of strengthening my relationship with my family, with my wife and kids, this experience as a whole has been something like no other because I have the time now to do that. It’s enabled me to create that, which is important.
Peter, it couldn’t be said better. Thank you for the time you spent with us
Thank you for having me, Sam.
We can’t wait to see more from your company. How can people find you and your company?
You can go to my LinkedIn profile, @PeterSkidmore. You will see the Creator of Time.
Thanks again, Peter.
Thanks, Sam.
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That was Peter Skidmore. Don’t chase the money. Don’t chase success. Don’t chase anything that is of a materialistic value. Chase happiness. That’s a philosophy that’s not easy to not get behind. I like that. For anyone reading, think about that. Assess how you are operating. Do you chase happiness? Are you chasing something more materialistic? In fact, I would even challenge you, readers, out there. You can also visit our website EvolveYourSuccess.com and leave us a note. You can go to the podcast page and leave us a voice note. I would challenge anyone reading to leave us a voice note and tell us what you are chasing. That’s number one.
Number two, we have been doing these episodes for a while now. We had our 100th episode. I still can’t believe it. We always get feedback from our readers. There’s something that was mentioned to me, and I’ve heard it more than once. That’s why I’m bringing it up at all. They wouldn’t mind our episodes being longer. I’m not sold. I always believe that as a medical sales rep or even as someone that’s busy that wants to get into medical sales, you only have so much time, and it’s very important to me that you get everything that we discuss on the show.
However, I am also a blog reader, and I recognize that I probably have one of the shortest episodes out there but it doesn’t mean that we will not continue but I want to hear from you, our readers. Should we lengthen our episodes? Feel free to leave a voice note or send an email, or just go ahead and reach out to @SamuelAdeyinka on LinkedIn or The Medical Sales Podcast on LinkedIn and let us know what you think.
If you are someone out there that wants to get into the medical sales industry and have been reading, you already know what I’m going to say. I’m going to say something different this time. I’m going to ask you to invest in yourself. If you are serious and have given yourself the opportunity to get out there and not getting interviews, you’ve given yourself the opportunity to interview and are not getting past the 2nd or 3rd round. You are asking yourself, “What do I get to do to get in? Maybe this space is not for me.”
I am going to call you on that and stop that whole train of thinking. I’m going to ask you to invest in yourself. Visit our website and select Attain A Medical Sales Role. Submit the application, have a conversation with someone on the team, and let us change your life. If you are someone that’s out there in the field reading this or maybe you are at the gym or about to approach your next account and you are thinking, “I know I can do more before the year ends. I’m so close.”
Again, invest in yourself. Go to EvolveYourSuccess.com and select Improve Sales Performance. Submit some information, schedule a call, and have a conversation with a team that knows how to help you transform your experience and get you exactly where you want to be. As always, thank you for tuning in. Make sure you tune in next time for another episode.
Important Links
- The Go-Giver
- Peter Skidmore
- @SamuelAdeyinka -LinkedIn
- The Medical Sales Podcast – LinkedIn
- Attain A Medical Sales Role
- Improve Sales Performance
About Peter Skidmore
As the CEO and founder of MedRep Meeting, I serve medical sales organizations and representatives who spend hours cold calling and time on administrative tasks. We help set up pre-qualified and quality appointments, so sales representatives can focus on closing business, increasing revenue, and spending more time with their families.
With 15 years of outside business-to-business sales experience, I found myself enjoying the process of calling doctors while others would get burnt out.
Seeing how important cold calling was, and how FEW medical reps were both talented at cold calling and closing the business. I founded MedRepMeeting to put an end to cold calling for good. Allowing medical reps to never pick up a phone to book ever again.
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Medical Territory Manager!
I was a Regional Sales Representative for Long-Term Care pharmacy services. I had dreamed of getting into the med sales industry when I went into my career as a nurse, but the pharmacy sales job came to me, and I had just settled. Fortunately, I had a job shakeup that allowed me to determine that now was the time to pursue my original vision.
I absolutely would not have this position without Samuel and the Evolve Your Success community. A lot of people my age would just stop trying, but EYS believed in me.
EYS allowed me to break into the industry in 90-Days after I had been trying on my own for over two years! I had lots of recruiter screenings, and a few interviews with hiring managers, but I was never offered a position.
Before EYS, I didn’t realize I was doing the bare minimum to get hired. I was applying everywhere, hoping to get noticed and waiting. It just wasn’t working! I didn’t know that that was not enough to compete in an industry this sought after, and against people who knew what I didn’t know about the process.
Of course, I had to think hard before making a financial investment that’s reasonably substantial. But when I read the testimonials of real med sales reps on the site and learned that I wasn’t the only one taking a chance on my success, that EYS was sharing that risk also, I knew I had to do it. Though you might be able to cobble together some of the steps of getting a role in med sales from online research on your own, you just can’t know what you don’t know!
The process of going through EYS presents this insider knowledge to the student, as well as giving you a progression of difficulty as you obtain the information, and you begin to master it. Not only that, but they give you access to amazing mentors and instructors, allow you to practice your interview skills, and teach you how to market yourself through social media and your own website! I cannot stress enough that EYS was the factor that made the difference in my successfully landing my dream job! The support, structure, and knowledge gained was invaluable!
I would recommend this course to ANYONE looking to break into medical sales
Thank you so much, EYS! This journey has been life changing and has resulted in the successful culmination of my 18-Year ambition! 
Sports Medicine in Phoenix! I extend so much gratitude to the Evolve Your Success group as I land this role and get ready to pursue my dream job. I am a Physical Therapist who became a little stuck in the profession due to issues with reimbursement and the difficulty for continued growth upwards. I turned to EYS to assist me in learning about the medical sales industry and gain knowledgable mentors who were able to help coach me in this process. I am a strong believer in surrounding yourself with the best and good things will happen. I did work hard, but with the support of my mentors and other colleagues going through a career change, I felt a sense of community and it confirmed my drive to get into this industry. I have already learned so much through the interview process, and feel very blessed to have had the resources this group provided. I have made lifelong friends and I cannot wait to continue to follow others’ journeys to pursue this incredible field. I urge you to give Evolve Your Success a try to gain mentorship, guidance, and support through any career transition.
and am excited to make a difference in patients’ lives as a Pharmaceutical Sales Specialist.
! Though I truly enjoyed working as a physical therapist, I can’t wait to start my career in the sales world as a Clinical Account Executive.
. I owe this opportunity to Samuel, the program, and the incredible mentors at EYS.
