He owns his swings, hits and misses throughout the customer buying journey.
What makes a medical sales professional? In Ryan Hahn’s case, it’s a lot of things: His parents, baseball, management training at a car rental company, a brief stint in personal banking and, since 2005, working for Midmark Corp. Hahn is the 2024 recipient of the Excellence of Sales Award for a manufacturer.
“Ryan is an ‘owner’ and not a ‘renter’ of the position he holds as a territory portfolio manager at Midmark,” says Steve Esnard, Midmark Medical Products & Services Central Region director. “He has approached his job and role as a responsibility to deliver the highest quality products and services for his dealer partners and end-customers. Ryan does not waiver from that responsibility.”
Born in Minneapolis and raised in the Fort Worth, Texas, area, Hahn lives in Bee Cave, Texas, a suburb of Austin. His territory comprises Central and South Texas, including the Austin, San Antonio and El Paso metropolitan areas.
It might be a stretch to say he was destined for medical sales, but it would be fair to say the stars seemed to align themselves in that direction. His father, Gary, who recently retired from Steris, spent a large portion of his career with Johnson & Johnson Ortho-Clinical Diagnostics, a manufacturer of in vitro diagnostics (sold in 2014 to The Carlyle Group). His mother, Randa, was a medical assistant in a family practice and later, worked in claims/benefits management for Bell, the Fort Worth-based helicopter manufacturer. Their son learned lasting lessons about healthcare and healthcare sales from both.
Baseball’s lessons
Playing baseball through high school, for example, he saw the similarities between the sport and medical sales. “My father would work on a deal and make the sale or not. It sounded like a chance to win or lose to me.
“Baseball is a sport of failure,” he continues. “Even the best hitters fail at the plate 60% of the time. Baseball taught me how to compete, how to lose, how to adjust when things don’t go your way – all things that correlate with sales.” Sales had another draw: “You work harder, you earn more.”
Hahn also grew up fascinated with medical technology. “My father sold life-saving, life-changing equipment,” he says. “It always piqued my curiosity to see these incredible pieces of technology, which were quickly changing and always cutting edge. And I was interested in medicine itself. I was curious about things like, what can a diagnostic test tell a human being about their body?”
From his mother he got a closer look at the patient perspective of healthcare, first through her experience in a family practice and later as a claims/benefits manager for Bell. “She saw healthcare through the patient’s eyes. When a worker’s comp claim came in, she advocated for the patient and oversaw their journey from injury to completion of the plan.”
While working as a management trainee for Enterprise Rent-A-Car, he noticed that the medical and pharmaceutical sales reps to whom he rented cars were some of the smartest people he came across. It was another clue that medical sales would be a good fit for him. “As medical salespeople, the sophistication of the products we sell – the pills going into someone’s body or the equipment that provides a pathway to healing – is at a different level than what many other salespeople deal with. And while I was at the rental car business, I felt those representatives were a big part of it.”
His goal became to obtain a healthcare sales job that sold life-saving and life-changing capital equipment. But while he was searching for that job, he gained valuable experience as a personal banker at JPMorgan Chase. “Our selling approach was to present insights for our clients about their financial picture, and then prescribe solutions. And that’s what I do today at Midmark. We present health systems and physicians insights into things they might not have thought about before, and we offer a prescription for a better way forward.”
As a new medical sales rep, the greatest challenge Hahn faced was learning what he calls “an incredibly complex industry, with many moving parts. The clinical knowledge was the most challenging part and took the longest. Immersing myself and trying to understand how Midmark products are used day in and day out by clinical users took years.
An incredibly complex industry
“A lot has changed since 2005,” he says. “Back then we focused on single-solution selling – pointing out a problem and recommending the solution. Today’s strategy is much more advanced and impactful. For example, through our design and space planning services we present an entire portfolio of products. Our current approach requires a higher level of business partnership and alignment between Midmark reps and distributor reps. This stronger level of collaboration and deeper commitment has provided the foundation for our rapid growth over the past decade and will continue to produce success for years to come.”
‘I tee it up, he sells it’
Nichole Castanon, McKesson Medical-Surgical account manager in the Southwest Region, summarizes her selling relationship with Ryan Hahn this way: “I tee it up, he sells it. He follows through from sale to implementation. He responds and delivers. If there is an issue with the product, he facilitates the solution. Professional to the core.”
Says Steve Esnard, “Ryan has been instrumental not only as a peer to others in our region but to our overall sales organization. He does not rely on the company brand and market share to pull his business in. It is the exact opposite. With the pull that the brand and market share afford him, he takes the opportunity to ensure that every touch along the way in the customer buying journey is productive, with prompt and attentive interaction, resulting in an exceptional experience for the end customer and his dealer partner.
“He has built his career around the mindset of immediate positive results and long-term success with the foundational pillars of honest, genuine, trustworthy professionalism. That ‘ownership’ is felt by his dealer partners and every single end-customer, and it is returned with the utmost trust, respect and loyalty. ’Renters’ never get to experience that reciprocated high level of professional respect from their dealer partners and end-customers like a true ‘owner’ such as Ryan Hahn.
“I can’t count the number of times I have heard from his dealer reps what an outstanding person Ryan is,” says Esnard. “When he is involved with them and their customers, Ryan not only increases the revenue/sale on a particular deal, but he makes sure the customers’ relational impact and experience is second to none.”
Help for those without homes
Since 2011, Hahn has volunteered with a non-profit organization called Mobile Loaves & Fishes, which focuses on providing food, services, employment and housing to people who have lost their homes. The organization’s Community First! Village occupies 51 acres in northeast Travis County outside Austin. It is currently home to more than 370 formerly homeless neighbors and is preparing to provide housing and community for more than 500 people who once struggled to survive on the streets of Austin. Each home has a front porch, and homes are clustered around common areas with laundry rooms, restrooms and shower facilities, outdoor community kitchens and green space.
“MLF is the first organization to discover the root cause of homelessness, which is the profound catastrophic loss of family,” he says. “Essentially, the majority of people who end up homeless are orphan adults. They experience a traumatic event, usually during childhood (or sometimes during adulthood), which leads to having zero family members to provide a backstop. Addiction is the symptom of this loss and compounds it. Their greatest need that we as neighbors can provide is relationship. For the chronically homeless, love, affection and encouragement – which normally come from family – must come from elsewhere.
“I serve as part of the food trucks ministry, where we drive out and hand deliver meals to the homeless, which allows us to initiate conversation and build relationship. I’ve also had the privilege of purchasing and hand-building permanent homes at Community First! Village.”
Hahn’s work with Mobile Loaves & Fishes meshes well with his work with Midmark and his belief that preventive care is the frontline of the entire health system, leading to less chronic disease and a healthier society.
“There are three defined social determinants of health – diet, exercise, and a relationship with a primary care provider,” he says. “I’ve always been passionate about primary care and do whatever I can do to further it. I love Midmark’s mission in preventive medicine. It has fueled my passion.”