Manufacturer Reps to Watch
Greg Stulic
Territory Portfolio Manager
Midmark
Tampa, Florida
8 years in medical sales
Primary call point: Physician/clinic
Snapshot
Born/raised: Long Island, New York/East Lake, Florida
Undergraduate degree: Criminology degree from the University of South Florida.
First “real” job: My father’s printing company. I was 13 years old when I started working there. I handled project typesetting, shipping/receiving, printing press and check-encoding machines. No doubt I was the only kid in my class talking about invoices, rush orders, project numbers and deadlines.
Complete this sentence: The one thing I did NOT expect when I got into medical sales was/is: How rewarding it is. There’s nothing like walking around a practice that you’ve been able to influence by improving their workflow, making them more efficient and improving the experience between patient and caregiver.
Family info: My amazing wife, Melina, who’s always in my corner. We’re blessed to have three children – Lorenzo, Luca and Gia. Had two cats but down to one. Her name is Spaghetti. (RIP Meatball, still love you pal!)
Hobbies/activities: Woodworking, exercising, golf, cooking, coffee mornings with my wife and wrestling with my boys. We’ve also recently moved, so I’m in a constant state of changing/rearranging things in the new house. I’m wired to continually look for ways to improve designs and processes from working at Midmark, and I can’t help but bring that home with me.
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Repertoire: When, how and why did you get into medical sales?
Greg Stulic: I wanted to make a difference and have a positive impact on the lives of others.
Repertoire: Mentor or role model?
Stulic: First role model is my mom, Anita. Her work ethic is unparalleled, and even in retirement, she’s working harder than ever as a grandparent. Next would be Mike Hughes, who hired me at Midmark, showed me the ropes and went with me every step of the way through months of training around the country. More recently is my manager, Dave Cantwell. I met him years ago, when he was my Midmark rep and I was a brand-new distributor. The knowledge that he shared with me regarding Midmark’s value proposition really opened my eyes. Last is my colleague, Chris Huppert. Since I started at Midmark and even today, I consider Chris a wealth of knowledge and perspective.
Repertoire: What are the 2-3 most important things you can do for distributor reps to enhance their sales?
Stulic: After college, I worked as a food distributor for five years, selling to restaurants and hotels. Then I made the transition to medical sales, selling to physician offices. The experience of working with many different vendors as a distributor has given me a unique appreciation of how I can support the reps I work with now. The best vendors treated me as their customer as well as end user. In addition, I should be the distributor’s subject matter expert, as well as being available and reliable. Lastly, flexible. The reps I work with should think of me as an extension of themselves, which is why we always strategize before any call and decide together what will have the biggest impact during our time with the customer.
Repertoire: How can distributor reps help in your sales efforts?
Stulic: Never assume that a customer won’t invest in the full Midmark portfolio. You’d be surprised what can happen when we get in front of the right mobilizers. And that’s the biggest way to help. Search out and cultivate mobilizers. These people aren’t easy to find and can come from different backgrounds (purchasing, clinical, IT, planning and design), but you’ll know they are a mobilizer because when they understand your value prop, they’re your biggest cheerleader in their organization.
Repertoire: What is the biggest change you anticipate in medical products sales in the next 5 years?
Stulic: Since Midmark has adopted the Challenger ideology, we recognize that customers are typically 57% of the way through the purchase process before ever contacting a rep. The challenge becomes getting further out in front of the decision-making process.
There’s been an evolution from feature-and-benefit selling to insight-driven marketing. Customer loyalty is driven now by the purchase experience. As sales professionals, we need to work harder to discover the problem that the customer is trying to solve. That includes delivering timely insights from like-minded individuals and groups. When a customer asks to meet with you, they aren’t looking for you to recite what’s in your literature. They are really asking you, “Tell me something I don’t know. I want to learn something. Your product may be great, but how does it fit into my world and solve my problem?”
Repertoire: Ride-days with distributor reps: What’s to like? What’s not to like?
Stulic: Spending one-on-one time with reps gives me an opportunity to tap into their customer base, and better understand their challenges and how to support them. I’m seeing a much more targeted approach to ride-days by distributors than in the past. We may have one opportunity in mind and a couple of secondary stops that are either early in their decision-making process or towards the end. We have a strategy and goal in mind for each of them. The rest of our time is spent enjoying the camaraderie, talking about future deals and past deals, or the last vendor fair where Midmark dressed up as a “gold digger” providing tools with the current promotion to strike gold.
Repertoire: Care to share a memorable ride-day story?
Stulic: A rep and I had a meeting with a customer to discuss how our digital ECG connected to eClinicalWorks. We came up with a plan to discuss the difference between our integration versus interfacing, with the intention of walking out with an order for an ECG. The conversation went better than expected, and a big reason for that was because we were dealing with a mobilizer, and we began to unravel a much larger problem for them. As many Midmark conversations do, it began around one product, then quickly transitioned to another, and soon enough the entire portfolio.