- Primarily works with physician offices, hospitals and long-term care customers.
- Territory includes North Los Angeles County, Ventura County, Santa Barbara County, Kern County, and San Luis Obispo County.
Repertoire: What do you offer your distributor sales rep partners to enhance their sales?
Lomba: During my 27-year career at BD, I have always made it a priority to work closely with my distributor rep partners. This means always being responsive and always striving to make them look good in front of our mutual customers, as well as gaining their trust and knowing that they can count on me to help them and our accounts achieve their clinical and financial goals. Ultimately, we both benefit from their success. This includes being a resource to answer any questions they or our mutual customers have. And if we don’t have a solution, we help them find one. We work together to deliver the right solutions to our mutual customers to help grow the business. This includes:
- Informing and educating the distributor reps to help uncover good opportunities, matching our solutions to customer needs.
- Joint targeting to prioritize the opportunities.
- Providing the support needed to help the distributor reps make the sale or making a joint call to help with the clinical sale.
The key to the above is strong communication and coordination.
Repertoire: How can your distributor rep partners help you add value to your accounts?
Lomba: Distributor reps help me with account management assistance. For the most part, they have more interaction with my accounts and can help address any issue before they become a problem. They also can help with product selection, education, and consultation. They can share customer knowledge and help me better understand the customer’s organization, particularly since they often have better customer access and influence in the physician office market.
Repertoire: What is the biggest change you anticipate in medical products sales in the next several years?
Lomba: Technology will play a bigger role in how our customers interact with manufacturers and distributors. Medical sales organizations will provide clinical and economic information focused on solutions and outcomes. Access will continue to be limited, and more focus on identifying the right customer with the right solution will be critical. We will need to be more customer-focused. And, we will see changes in the way our customers access our products.