Great tips to fast-track your career-part 2

6 Hot tips which will help you fast track your sales career.

This post is a follow-up to my last post.

In the last post I discussed about transitioning your sales career midway to explore different options in medical device industry. Here, I have come up with 6 interesting tips which will help a lot in making a transition from Pharma to Medical device sales.

#1 Accept and look for cha(lle)nges quite early in your career

You have chosen a sales career and you love the Lifesciences industry. How does it matter whether you sell a Prescription product or a Audiology equipment. After all, customers are more or less same. Change is the essence of life and change will keep you excited. The change will give a phenomenal longevity to your sales career. Keep passionately exploring changes from early on in your career.

#2 Develop the ability to learn technology faster

Do you have the zeal to explore the latest version of Software or Operating system(windows 7 or google chrome for example) moment it is released in the market. . Do you often have an urge to play around with the gadgets from your latest cellphone to gaming videos. Probably you are already hooked on to technology. Medical devices industry faces obsolence in technology as much IT industry faces. Unless you love to embrace this change and learn newer technology faster, you will never be able to communicate this passionately to your customers.

#3 Strong knowledge about the therapy areas

Yeah, selling medical devices and equipments, giving demos to surgeons in the operating theatre, imparting application training may all look glamorous. You may want to grow faster in your career and earn tons of money. You are quite aggressive about your pursuit. But the truth is, you will never be able to achieve this unless you vastly expand your horizon on the work you do. Focusing and acquiring knowledge narrowly relevant to your product range won’t help. You need to develop a 360 degree view of the industry, various disease and therapy areas, challenges the physicians and patients face, etc.

#4 Strategic Account management

Medical device customers deserve and expect more dedicated attention from companies. The customer in this case could be an individual physician, surgeon or a big hospital group. If you have the savviness to getting closer to these influential customers to understand and better address their needs, you will be able to hit it off very well.

#5 Ability to handle multiple buying influences

Unlike prescription pharma products, purchase(or usage) decision of medical device or equipments are not restricted to one individual. Often you will find complex sales situations with multiple buying influences. Gaining knowledge of a bigger picture and addressing the needs of these various buying influences could become one important success factor for sparkling in medical device sales.

#6 Partnering for success

Remember, the choice of buying a medical device is directly linked to the potential revenue the centre might earn following the purchase of your product. But most importantly, your product should be a solution to their problem. Vehicle for achieving this is a thorough “customer-centric” approach, where the buyer/customer views the relationship as partners in success.

That sums up the 6 points which wanted to discuss. Now its your turn to give your feedback. I might have missed an important point or might have got something completely wrong?

Please share your stories, feedback and encouragement.

I really appreciate your time and attention. If you would like to get these posts via email, just click here or on the link on your right and subscribe for the feeds.  If you like to share this post with friends you may use the links below.