Repertoire: What two or three things do you offer your distributor rep partners to enhance their sales?
Bill West: Margin enhancement ideas; value-based solutions for their end users and money-making ideas for the account; and my 30-plus years medical sales experience. For example, the doctor is usually the one reading the microscope. By switching to CLIA-waived OSOM Trichomonas and OSOM BVBlue bacterial vaginosis tests, the doctor’s staff can now do the test, since it is CLIA-waived. The doctor’s time is roughly worth $200 an hour or so, depending on which study you believe. If a doctor is running 10 wet preps per day, which each take 2-3 minutes to complete, the doctor has freed up at least 30 minutes to see more patients and increase his income.
Repertoire: Name two or three ways your distributor rep partners help you add value to your accounts.
West: Distributor reps can help manufacturer reps in system selling or group standardization committee approaches by doing what they’ve always done – identifying key decision-makers and pointing the manufacturer rep in the right direction to connect with these decision makers.
Distributor reps can also help with system or IDN selling. This type of selling differs from traditional POL selling in that a system or group owns a large amount of POLs, and they are looking to all use the same product, and getting lowest cost due to volume usage of that product. [Reps may be] used to selling single-doctor practices in the past and getting a lot more margin, due to less competition and cost-consciousness, higher end-user reimbursement per test, etc. System selling has a much longer sales cycle; [you must go] through the standardization committee process, as opposed to the old days, when you could actually walk out of an office having made a sale, as the decision-maker was usually in that office.
Repertoire: What is the biggest change you anticipate in medical product sales in the next five years?
West: We are seeing a lot more POLs being gobbled up by the larger groups. This requires that the manufacturer and distributor reps work closely together identifying key decision-makers and decision-making processes, and getting the message to those folks on how our products (the manufacturer) and service (distribution) can reduce costs and deliver better outcomes to their institutions and patients.
Repertoire: Do you think distributor reps should embrace ride-days? If so, why? If not, why not?
West: Absolutely! Distributor reps can still learn “the tricks of the trade” from seasoned manufacturer reps, which will translate to increased income for them. For our specific product lines, we can teach distribution reps the benefits of outcomes-based selling, margin enhancement and overall product knowledge.
Repertoire: Can you share a favorite ride-day story?
West: I rode with a brand new distributor rep seven or eight years ago. I wasn’t really looking forward to a day of cold calls, as this rep got $0.00 existing business. Lo and behold, we made 11 cold calls that day, saw the right person each call, and sold rapid diagnostics in all 11 accounts! Hasn’t happened since. Guess the sun, moon and stars were perfectly aligned that day.