Building a Specialized Sales Force for Success | Brian McGee | Field Sales Unscripted | E163

Speaker A: We often talk about a, ah, buying committee and the multiple roles that you need to make sure as a salesperson you're speaking to. In this episode with Brian we chat about how that works in a hospital setting. When you are calling on doctors and they have the finance person and they also have nurses that you have to get all of them on board before you can make that sale. And also the way that his organization is set up is he has a specialist sales force. So a person who's selling million dollar equipment isn't also sell $10 vials. Uh, tap into this episode so you can really understand what it means to have a complex sale. So Brian, tell us about how you started your career to how you got to where you are today.

Speaker B: You bet. Well thanks Weslean and it's great opportunity to be here on field sales unscripted. Um, I started out my career, uh, my father had worked in sales so I knew I wanted to get in sales. Coming out of college I had a marketing degree. I was fortunate uh, that I was able to get a business to business sales position with AT&T which was a great foundation for um, selling skills and uh, had a lot of wonderful mentors and I had a number of roles from um, intern to sort of field sales to leading a sales team. Um, and then made the shift into uh, the company I work for today, which I've been at for 20 years at Boston Scientific in medical device sales. Um, in this role, um, or in this company. I should say I've been in seven or eight different jobs with the company from both sales and a marketing perspective. And uh, it's been a great and fulfilling experience.

Speaker A: So what specific problems do you solve in your role today?

Speaker B: Today? Um, well, we're Boston Scientific. We're a large global medical technology company. Um, we're in eight different specialties whether it's cardiology, uh, urology, endoscopy, pain management, a number of other categories as well. What I specifically do is related to kidney stone management. Uh, um, and also um, a condition called uh, BPH or benign prosthetic hyperplasia. Basically men, sometimes as they get older their prostate swells and there's a host of implications that can happen after that. Um, so our products treat that from a surgical standpoint.

Speaker A: Okay, so you've been in this organization for 20 years. Um, my question for you is, how have you seen the industry change over the past decade?

Speaker B: Oh, it's been remarkable. Um, if you can kind of, if I can date myself and go back a little bit. If you remember around 2008 to 2012, the Affordable Care act legislation was coming in and there was really a push for a lot of, um, hospitals and other healthcare institutions to begin to look at how do we deliver the best quality care in the most cost effective manner and obviously treating as many patients as we can. So what's changed for our business is when I started in my career 20 years ago, you really only had to get the doctor to really want to use the product, like the product. And that was sort of enough. Now, um, there's multiple stakeholders within a hospital's, uh, buying process. And they call those value analysis committees. And they can have anything from folks within the surgical specialty physicians to finance managers, to supply chain folks, um, nurses. So there's a lot of constituents, uh, within that group. So what's changed for us is where When I started 20 years ago, 10 years ago, it was primarily getting the physician on board to use your product. Now it's to talk about the broader implication that it can have for their whole, uh, health system. And it requires us to really, um, differentiate sort of our conversation and our messaging to different types of stakeholders in the hospital buying environment.

Speaker A: Wow. So that is the textbook definition of a complex sale, having multiple stakeholders with many different, um, specialties and different things that they're thinking about. Because finance is thinking about something completely different than nursing. Right. So as you're thinking about working with your team or onboarding new reps, how do you really teach them and train them to infiltrate this very complex, um, I think you call it value added committee.

Speaker B: It is, yeah. And at the end of the day, it's still, it's still. And we're passionate about this. It starts and ends with the impact for the patient, an impact for the provider. Um, and it's our job to really articulate the value of our product and the additional, um, you know, enhancements that we can have for their care continuum and the patient impact and really explicitly call that out. Um, if we don't win there, it's going to be hard to win within the other categories as well. So when I'm directing our sales team, it's gaining the clinical support of the physicians and the nursing staff in the operating room, the ones that are touching and feeling the product every single day. Um, the second step that's really important is that we need to, um, educate these clinicians to speak from a business perspective to their administrators. So a lot of times they have clinical training or medical training, but they don't have a whole lot of business training. So for us, we have to communicate to them the value that their voice has within the hospital system. And um, clearly articulating that voice, but then also to be able to um, articulate the value to the hospital system, the financial impact, whether that's from a cost standpoint, a reimbursement standpoint, um, with how insurance companies are going to cover it. Um, so it's important for us to not only sort of sell to the clinician, but also educate the physician and the nursing staff on how do they sell to their hospital.

Speaker A: So teaching them how to, I like to call it, um, like so for me when I do training I talk about like the internal champion, decision maker, the team of influencers. And it's our job to teach our internal champion how to sell internally for us. Right? So we make them our advocate because they're special, speaking on our behalf when we're not there.

Speaker B: You bet, you bet. And it's so important. And a lot of physicians um, are very busy and nurses are very busy in the course of their day just taking care of patients. So a lot of times they don't have the experience or even just the training on how do I go about and communicate this. A lot of times they don't even know who sits in certain, you know, uh, rooms and who's in certain roles within their own hospital. A lot of times we know that process better than the physician does. So sort of teaching the teacher uh, you know, on, on how to accomplish that and really how, how do they navigate their internal buying process.

Speaker A: And so when we think about how is your sales team team structured to kind of match that buying committee, what do you have internally for your sales team?

Speaker B: That's, that's a great, so we have a, we're, we're fortunate. We have a lot of diverse roles ah, within our sales team. So um, in our business, um, for the end user standpoint, there's capital equ that has a much different buying process than a disposable product that might be used just once per patient. So we have a team that's dedicated just to capital sales. That can be a longer sales process, that could be a 6 to 12 month sales process where the cost per product could be anywhere from 200,000 to over a million. Right. Longer sales process, a lot more involved there. So we have a specialized team that will drive that. We also have the disposable salesforce that they're there supporting the physicians and the nurses in the operating room on the day to day use of our disposable products and making sure Things are going seamlessly from a procedural, ah, standpoint. And then the third component that we have is a national account team. And that's the group that actually is contracting with hospital administrators, um, health system networks, supply chains. Um, so we're fortunate that you know, with larger company and we. When I started with our business unit, we were a $200 million business unit, uh, 20 years ago. Now we're a two and a half billion dollar business unit. And a lot of that is by discipline, execution. And because we've been able to do that, we've been able to afford, um, to sort of resource these, these specialized roles because they are very different buying processes, um, different types of stakeholders. And we want to, we have the right expertise that's talking to the right, uh, customer.

Speaker A: I really like that. I call it a specialized salesforce instead of a generous instead of generalist. And I find that when you have your sales team very aligned to a specific, um, Persona, if you will, or product line, it helps them win more because they have the knowledge and the expertise rather than trying to do everything and then it's like they're a jack of all trades and the master of none.

Speaker B: You bet. You bet. Yeah, it's really important to have that level, specialized level of expertise. But what's also equally important is that there's really a continual alignment and communication amongst the team about what's going on. Because at the supply chain level, they may hear about something that's happening in an operating room that we don't want our national account person to be blindsided by that information and be sort of aware of that going in. And that could be positive, negative or whatever. Um, also, um, our field teams can pick up on competitive activity quickly, on changing physician habits, on new trends that are happening, that they can begin to communicate to their teammates, um, that maybe sort of have a different role within that buying process, but that sort of holistic knowledge of the customer and what's going on is really important.

Speaker A: So how do you drive that communication within the organization? That's not an easy thing to do. So what are some of the things that you guys have done?

Speaker B: It's very hard. It's very hard. You know, this isn't necessarily rocket science, but I do really feel like, um, the first thing that a lot of folks I, um, think miss on when they're not communicating well is that they're not aligned around the right priorities. So we really focus on radical prioritization that it's really hard to do 10 things well, but you can probably do three to five things really, really well if you focus there. So it's making sure we have a manageable list of priorities for our. The second thing is I'm a big believer in carving out real estate on your calendar that we know, hey, every two o', clock, uh, on Wednesday or on Friday, we're going to talk about this particular customer with this core four or five group of, um, our sales stakeholders. And we're going to stay on that topic each week to share new information that each one of us learned to talk about what our broader strategy is and then, and then continue to tighten up the plan. It doesn't sound like rocket science, but I think when you're making sure that you're prioritized correctly, it frees up room on your calendar to make sure that you have the space to be able to follow through on that sort of intentional and real deliberate communication.

Speaker A: So it's the preplanning, right? It's not just in the moment, oh, we have a dumpster fire. Oh, there's a customer emergency. But actually thinking about anticipating the needs of the customer and as well as the sales team. So you can ensure that you guys are always in front of things before they happen.

Speaker B: Exactly. Yeah. And in that instance, you know, if something does go sideways, which it does from, from occasion, if you've got a cadence and a coordination with the team m. When that new thing comes entering in, we can just sort of adjust on the fly and then take care of it right there in the moment. The problem is when you're not mobilized in advance, you know, and that threat come in or that, you know, something goes sideways, now you gotta regroup and get everybody together and it's a much bigger project to get that, that started. So, um, I forget the famous person that said an object in motion is, you know, tends to stay in motion. Um, but that's what also happens with sales teams too. If you've got, if you're aligned around the right priorities and you're continuing to move, um, you're going to be able to react quicker to a new opportunity, a new threat, um, as it arises.

Speaker A: Um, so tell me, with these three different sales teams, if you will, how you ensure that each of them are getting the training that they need? Because I'm assuming that the training is different for them since they're working with different kind of clients. What do you guys do to ensure that everybody gets what they need?

Speaker B: That's a really good, uh, point. So we have three tracks of training. But. And think of it from. And I'LL use your terms, the specialist and the generalist perspective where the capital rep doesn't necessarily need to know all the ins and outs of the disposable business, but they need to know sort of enough to be dangerous. So we have them with a specialized curriculum from a training standpoint. And we do trainings all the time. We'll do them in person a couple times a year like with the national sales kickoff meeting or sometimes a summer meeting. We do a lot of virtual breakouts where we're going into a lot of detail on that specialty. But then there's also broader trainings that we will do. We'll give sort of like a 101 level of that topic so that everybody has at least a basic foundation of the knowledge. But then in the category or in the um, focus area of one of those three reps, they'll go deeper into their tract. So we do think there's um, a lot of benefit in flexibility and a little bit of that generalist thinking, but then also creating space to really go deep and have a deep level of expertise with that focus group that supports it.

Speaker A: And so uh, I'm curious because some organizations, they'll like hire a cohort of salespeople they take them to through training and they kind of figure out which business unit they fit best in. Is that the way that you guys do it? Are you hiring a capital rep for capital equipment sales?

Speaker B: Yeah, so we're, we, we've kind of identified that already going in. So um, typically um, we will have um, there'll be a demonstrated capability that there's roles that are dedicated to a capital equipment. They have that experience. Um, the disposable reps, the same thing. Um, we have a national account perspective that we're looking for people that have negotiated contracts before and have that experience at the supply chain level. One actually a fourth level I didn't mention earlier that I do think is important is the associate level. And this is someone that's really earlier in their career. They maybe have one or two years of sales experience. They want to get into like a medical technology type of role. This is an opportunity that they can come on and support the team around them. But it's also a developmental role for us too. And that because we're a fast moving business and chances are the person in front of them gets promoted or their territory splits or they move off to a different assignment, we now have a great bench of talent for that next person to come in. So I always encourage everyone that um, I counsel from a Career standpoint is identify the company that you want to work for and then, um, look for the opportunities that you can build sort of a foundational level of, um, understanding and skills. And sometimes that is an associate level. And for some people, they do take lateral moves or they, they do take what looks on paper to be a step back. But in turn they're putting themselves in a position that's going to create a whole lot of additional opportunities. I remember my father when I was trying to, um, you know, I was coming out of college and looking for different business to business type sales job. And at the time at&T, I think was a Fortune 10 company. Great. Still does. Has a great reputation. Um, and I remember my father said, you know, Brian, if you can get a job sweeping the floors at AT&T, that's a great place to start. Start because you want to be in that ecosystem that you're going to be able to learn, build a foundation of skills and then move on. And the same thing with these associates, that there's a long, long Runway that they have if they're in the right organization and they're around the right m. Mentors.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I think that a lot of companies really don't realize the need for that. Right. Because we want things to move fast. We want to backfill if somebody retires, if they leave, we don't think about building the bench and having the bench. So somebody's like, I'm ready, I'm up, I'm ready. Right. Um, so being able to pull them up and also having them shadow existing reps and seeing the things that are happening in the field so that they really are ready to take over in moments. Um, noticed.

Speaker B: You bet. You bet. Yep.

Speaker A: So when you think about at this point, at the time of this recording, we're about halfway through the year. Um, kind of, you know, we get the summer slump. Uh, what do you think is driving your sales team?

Speaker B: M Driving, uh, from like a motivation standpoint, like what's going on in the business. Yeah.

Speaker A: So what's driving them to hit their targets? What's that momentum right now that's getting them moving?

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a good question. So there's tactical elements of that. So we have a lot of new products that we're launching and they're very differentiated and they provide a lot of proprietary and a lot of times physicians, customers. They want to talk about what's new. Even though we may have other things we want to talk to them about. It gives us sort of an opportunity to get in front of them, there's always something new to talk about, whether it's a new product program, um, new article, a new piece of research that just came out to have a conversation about. So I think that's really important. The other side on the business perspective on sort of what gives them the opportunity is really, um, sort of resetting on your priorities. I think that natural middle of the year is a great opportunity to look back and say, okay, how did the first half go? What was I focused on? What went well? What could have been better? How do I want to fine tune my game plan for the second half of the year? Um, what do I want to make sure that I stop doing? Ah, going back to the prioritization thing and eliminate some of those things that maybe we've been spending a lot of time on but really aren't moving the needle for us. Um, and then um, think about how do we properly resource ourselves for success. So in order to get these priorities accomplished, what additional resource are we going to need? Sometimes it's bringing in somebody from our market development team that talks about future technology, somebody that's bringing in someone from our health economics team to talk about, um, you know, the financial implications or insurance implications for a customer. That is important. A lot of times there's resources out there, side of the sales team that could be helpful in educating a customer. So I think it's a natural time to sort of reset your priorities, um, along those factors because there's still a lot of time left in the year. Um, but this is a good sort of natural break, a halftime, so to speak further to make those decisions.

Speaker A: So when you think about your organization, your business unit in the next five years, where do you see yourself?

Speaker B: So I'm very excited about it because we are in our business, we're um, leading a initiative to really reinvent, um, what's called ureteroscopy. So ureteroscopy is basically treating a kidney stone, uh, surgically, uh, for a patient. Um, and we're excited about the technology that we're launching that we're moving away from just having individual products that are used to now more ah, having sort of an ecosystem effect, um, where the products are all sort of connected to one another and um, they're providing additional value. It's similar. The analogy I use is Apple's iOS system that you might have an iPhone, you might have an iPad, you may have Apple Music, but when you combine them all, they work better when they're within the group. And that's really what we're trying to do with taking our business really to the next level and really reinventing a procedure for our physicians that we think is going to improve patient outcomes. Um, it's going to become a lot more efficient, um, that we can reduce time off of the procedure. Because one challenge that we have in our field, especially with physicians, is there's higher and higher rates of burnout. Um, we're seeing more and more, um, or more physicians sort of retire from a, from a demographic, um, standpoint than are entering into the workforce as new residents. It's just the demographics. But on what's running parallel to that too, is that you have a lot of the patient demographic is getting older as well. So you've got an aging population that needs care, that may have fewer providers being able to help. So our job is, what are ways that we can help sort of make a more efficient procedure, make a more efficient operating room that's going to have less burnout for providers and be able to treat more patients.

Speaker A: That's awesome. So you guys are on the cutting edge of technology. And so when you think about all of these great, um, innovations and things that you're doing in the business, how do you anticipate or what are you going to do with your sales team to ensure that you can keep up with the demand?

Speaker B: It's a great question. And I think it's really important to make sure that you're going back to first principles. It's really easy from a sales standpoint to say, hey, I've got a new product and it's got this type of tip, and it's colored red, and your last one was blue. And this one's, you know, five millimeters, that one's seven millimeter. These are all features. But I think what's really important is that we get back to the first principles of the problems we're trying to solve for. And the problems that we're trying to solve for in our business is we have an aging demographic of healthcare providers that we have a lot retiring. We have less coming into the system. As far as residents that are coming into. It's just the numbers. Um, we have more patients that are getting older and needing care. We've got higher and higher rates of burnout. So that's the problem. Problems that we're trying to solve for the features of the product help us support the underlying problem. So what we try to make sure that we're continually reorienting our team with is make sure we're solving really first principles of our customer and not necessarily pushing our own personal agenda.

Speaker A: Oh, that's so good. It is. Um, that the problem centric, customer oriented way of selling, right. Like what are the problems my customer is having? And let me step into their world and not think about my quota, not think about what I have to do or the products that I'm selling. But I want to solve their problems. I want to step into their world.

Speaker B: Yes, you bet. You bet. Yeah. And then from that customer centric standpoint, it just makes it much easier to take that customer on that journey because they're all going to be coming at it from different places.

Speaker A: So when you think about the past couple years, is there anything that you would have done differently or change?

Speaker B: That's a really good question. Um, I think there's always things that you go back and then you look on and I think, and I keep. And I know this has been a familiar theme that I've had. I think we live in a world where we're in information overload. And I talk to a lot of people at a lot of different organizations and everybody's trying to do more with less. They want to move fast, they want to disrupt the market, and we tend to solve problems. Unfortunately, I feel like the world does this by just piling on more things, um, where a lot of times execution comes down to prioritizing what's really most important and seeing those things through. Um, the challenge when I mean, I do this in my own personal life too, is I feel like I'm not moving the needle on some of the objectives that you have. And it's usually because I'm trying to do too much at once instead of really pulling it down to what's going to be most important at this point in time. Because success is really, it's a foundation and uh, it's almost like a pyramid that stacks on each other. And if I don't get part A right, I'm not going to get part B right. And if I don't get part B right, I'm not going to get part C right. So if we're trying to do A through C all together, that's where it all becomes a jumbled mess. So, um, I think from, from a planning standpoint, it always comes back to prioritization. Um, and then the second thing is, you know, and this is something that we continually work on with a team is how do we communicate the, um, price tag of our products and what they deliver back to our providers. From a patient care standpoint, I'm really doing a good job of articulating that. Um, we have a wonderful health economics team that helps to. They're kind of like our copilot a lot of times in these sales conversations that help us articulate that story a little bit better because we live in a world now where, um, the clinical demands and the economic demands are sometimes working against each other and sometimes being able to articulate that story a little bit tighter, a little bit better, um, is uh, beneficial for our customers. And it's something that we continually learn the lessons on as well.

Speaker A: Oh, that's so good. That's so good. That's good. Um, you know that they say hindsight is 20 20, but I think when we look back we're actually able to say, okay, these things went really well. These things didn't go so well, so what am I going to do in the future? Right. Not necessarily to beat ourselves up for what didn't go well, but really to think about how can I make this different moving forward?

Speaker B: Yeah. And I think if you're anybody that's worth their salt is continually trying to do new things, they're piloting new, um, opportun. I was just interviewing someone earlier today for a role and I was on an interview panel and they were asking like, well, what would you like to see from me in this role? And I say I want to see somebody who's willing to take some risks, who's willing to pilot some new ideas and being willing and fail and fail fast and learn from that. But if we're looking back and we didn't do anything wrong, then we probably weren't taking as many risks as we needed to. So I think it's having a healthy appetite for risk, um, and then, you know, making the assessment on work and what didn't. And when you see what didn't, it's not a personal indictment or reflection on you or your skills. It's just say, hey, that didn't work, we'll make a tactical shift to do something a little bit different next time.

Speaker A: And so in that, and you know, looking back at what you would do differently, I'm, uh, curious. What advice would you give young Brian, just starting out as a frontline sales manager? What advice would you give yourself as a sales manager? Sales manager, yep.

Speaker B: Okay. So I think back to this all the time. I think a lot of mistakes that first time managers make, and I certainly did this too, is you think you've got the game winning system, um, that you're just going to install everywhere. And um, you know, I had my process my way of doing things. And I would meet with my team and I would go through this install phase of, you know, the, the planning, the preparation, how do we engage with the customer? Our talk tracks that sort of thing. And I quickly realized that not everybody thinks the way that you do. In fact, they may have radically different approaches to it. And if you're trying to shove your process down someone's, uh, you know, someone's on the receiving end, that, that may not be their style. You're not going to have a whole lot of success and you're also not going to build a lot of trust with that individual too, because they're not going to feel like, hey, this person sees me for who I am and what I bring to the table. Um, I love diversity of thought. I love diversity of background on my team. We have people from various backgrounds of sales and it's great because they're great problem solvers. But my job is to really try to understand how they see the world first and then talk about how do we back in, what our priorities are with the way that their style, um, their process. So that's one. And I think I've made plenty of mistakes over the course of my career and all the roles that I've had. But that's the way you've learned. And I think that's probably the first one most first time managers learn is, oh, wow, they're going to do it a little bit different than I did.

Speaker A: I say, um, don't make a team of mini mes. That was a mistake I made too. I was like, oh, everybody's going to be just like me. You're going to do it the exact same way. And I think if you have children, you realize how widely different that is.

Speaker B: Yeah, you bet, you bet. That was probably the learning lesson for me is when I had children I was like, okay, this is. They're going to do it differently. Yep.

Speaker A: Yeah. It's like, if I can't get my own DNA to do it my way, how can I get people who aren't even related to me?

Speaker B: Exactly, exactly. Yeah. It's a constant exercise.

Speaker A: It is. Well, Brian, this has been a fantastic conversation. Um, if people are interested in getting in contact with you, what is the one best way?

Speaker B: Yeah, best way to get in contact with me is, um, they can find me on LinkedIn, uh, Brian McGee. I also have a website, BrianMcGee.net uh, you can learn a little bit more about me. I just recently wrote a book on leadership called Modern Maslow that's now available and on Amazon, so you can read about that. But, um, my website, BrianMcGee.net or my LinkedIn profile, uh, is probably the best way to connect with me.

Speaker A: Well, thank you so much for your time, talent and expertise today.

Speaker B: You bet. And uh, thanks, Weslean, uh, for all you're doing for the, uh, field sales community. I think these are great opportunities for everybody to connect and learn some new ideas and sort of share what's working. Because sales is an important profession. We live in a world where there's a lot of status quo and a lot of people are resistant to change. But what we do as sales professionals in any industry is we bring on positive innovation and positive things that can really change the world. And uh, it really, um, it takes a special individual to have that courage and have that mindset to be able to go out and do it. So, uh, anyway, I appreciate, appreciate you putting this, uh, forum and this community together for, uh, for this podcast.

Speaker A: Thank you. It is definitely my, my life's work, my passion work.

Speaker B: Excellent. Excellent. Well, thanks so much. Thank you.