Strategies for Building and Sustaining High-Performing Sales Teams with Rob Williamson (PART I)
What does it take to build a successful career in medical device sales while fostering a culture of integrity and innovation?
This episode features the podcast's first male guest, Rob Williamson, an industry veteran with 27 years of experience. The Girls of Grit dive deep into Rob's extraordinary journey from selling dental supplies to leading a powerhouse team at Shockwave Medical.
Rob's career, marked by tenacity, resilience, and strategic thinking, includes navigating multiple acquisitions while building a robust sales team with impressively low turnover. He shares the secrets behind his hiring success, emphasizing character over experience and the importance of mission-driven recruitment.
Gain invaluable insights into succeeding in medical device sales, from creative problem-solving to maintaining a genuine passion for people and the industry. Rob's story highlights not just professional milestones but also the cultivation of a culture of integrity and innovation.
Must-Hear Insights and Key Moments
How to Leverage Your Network: Understand the importance of using family connections or any available network to get a foot in the door and start your career.
The Power of Resilience and Tenacity: Learn how to persist through challenges and setbacks to build a successful career, inspired by Rob's navigation of multiple acquisitions.
Strategic Career Planning: Discover the importance of planning and executing career moves thoughtfully to ensure growth and advancement in a competitive industry.
Effective Hiring Practices: Gain insights into focusing on character and alignment with the company's mission over just experience when building a team.
Maintaining a Low Turnover Rate: Learn strategies to maintain a low turnover rate within your team, fostering stability and long-term success.
Mission-Driven Recruitment: Understand the benefits of prioritizing individuals who are passionate about the company's mission, ensuring a cohesive and motivated team.
Creative Problem-Solving Skills: Discover how to develop and apply innovative solutions to overcome challenges in the medical device industry.
Sustaining Passion for People and Industry: Learn the importance of cultivating a genuine interest in people and the industry to sustain long-term success and satisfaction in your career.
Building a Culture of Integrity: Gain insights into fostering a work environment that emphasizes integrity and innovation, leading to a strong and ethical organizational culture.
Words of Wisdom: Standout Quotes from This Episode
“I'm convinced that if you live an honorable life in your personal life, you're going to live an honorable life in your professional life and I don't see a line of demarcation between those two.” — Rob Williamson
“You've got to find somebody that's resilient because they're going to hear no a lot more than they hear yes.” — Rob Williamson
“If your job exhausts you, you probably are in the wrong job. If your job invigorates you, you're probably in the right job.” — Rob Williamson
“You have all that it needs if you want to be where you want to be.” — Cynthia Ficara
“If they're thinking of commission versus mission, they're in the wrong place. If they're not thinking about loyalty, if they're not thinking about trust, if they're not thinking about being the best of the best, then really they're falling short.” — Anneliese Rhodes
About Rob Williamson:
Rob Williamson serves as a Board Member, Executive Advisor, and former Vice President of Sales at Shockwave Medical, Inc., a leading player in the medical device industry. With a career spanning over two decades, Rob has been instrumental in driving sales growth and fostering innovation. During his tenure at Shockwave Medical, he led the US and Canadian sales teams, overseeing a workforce of over 300 employees and propelling the company to achieve revenue exceeding $500 million.
Rob's leadership philosophy revolves around authenticity, diversity, and inclusion, emphasizing the importance of embracing individual strengths and promoting gender equality in the workplace. As a seasoned executive and advisor, Rob continues to make significant contributions to the medical device sector, leveraging his expertise to drive organizational success and mentor the next generation of leaders. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Public Relations from Auburn University.
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Blog Transcript:
Note: We use AI transcription so there may be some inaccuracies
Cynthia Ficara: Good morning, Lisa. Good morning to all of our listeners. Welcome back to Secrets in Medical Device Sales, where we have a very exciting guest today, our first male interview. We're very happy to have him, but I am going to hand it over to Lisa to interview him as they've known each other for many years and I think she can do it justice.
Anneliese Rhodes: Thank you, Cindy. Yes, we are so excited to have our very first male VP and just a stellar guy to talk to us today about medical device sales and all the questions that I think we all want to be answered. So let's get started, without further ado, we're going to introduce Rob Williamson, who I have known for, I think, at least like 20 years. It feels like 20 years.
Anyhow, Rob knew me when I was pregnant with Brady and Brady is now 16. So it's at least 16 years. But Rob has a huge background in medical device sales from becoming a regional sales manager, moving on to area VP of sales, and then the director of sales most recently for Shockwave.
The VP of direct and director of sales for Shockwave and oversaw, I think in your bio, Rob, it says over 300 employees, which is a lot of employees to kind of manage. You know, that's a lot of different personalities there and I know that you interviewed and hired a bunch of those folks as well. So today, I really want to get into this, Rob, for all of our listeners out there to hear some key things about what you look for as a VP of sales when you're making that final decision on who you're going to choose to hire. So without further ado, Rob Williamson.
Rob Williamson: Hi, everybody. It's a pleasure to be here. I think I have the dubious distinction of breaking the gender barrier for the Girls of Grit podcast and so I'm going to set the bar really low so that any men that come after me will have a very low bar to jump over and we'll be able to have even higher expectations than I do today.
But no, it really is a pleasure to be here with you two and with all your listeners. I hope what I shared today can be beneficial. I've been in this business now for 27 years. I started pretty much right out of college. The way that I got into the medical device business was the old-fashioned way, nepotism.
My father was a dentist, and my first job was calling on my father's dental practice and a bunch of the folks who basically raised me. It's sort of interesting when I got done with college, I wasn't ready to grow up yet I moved to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and I became a fish hippie for about a year.
When I got back, my father was going to the Henman Association meeting, which is the dental industry's version of TCT or Viva, which you guys are familiar with and my dad was like, would you like to come with me? And I was like, absolutely, I'd like to go with. He goes, I was just kidding, I thought you'd be playing golf or something this week.
And I said, no, I'd actually like to go down there and he goes, why would you want to go with me to Henman? I said, well, Dad, last time I checked, I don't have a job and you have a pretty big dental practice. I think there are some guys down there that I probably want to meet. I managed to bluff my way into my first job by basically threatening to move my father's business to a competitor.
If the person that was calling on them had not given me a job and I told my dad that story, he goes, you realize I would not have moved my business for you. And I said, I do, but I had to find a way to get a job somehow, somehow that tenacity job. So I started selling dental supplies and so I sold everything from big x-ray equipment, and dental chairs, to toothbrushes, to dental practices. It was about the greatest place that you can possibly imagine going into an environment where I was still working with ACPs, but it was with very basic sales that I had a chance to really start to articulate my communication style about engaging with people.
Learning how to call on all different levels of practice, because the CEO and the secretary all sat within about 15 or 20 feet of each other because most dental practices are really small. I got recruited out of the dental industry over to Bard, stayed at Bard for 7 years, and I sort of had the idea that a startup business seemed like a pretty good place.
And that's where Lisa and I got to meet each other at Fox Hollow Technologies. I was there as a sales rep for 3 or 4 years and had some success, and I guess Fox Hollow's background and background checks must not have been up to par because they promoted me to be a manager at that point and so that was about 2007 timeframe.
And I've been on the leadership side of the business since then. At Fox Hollow, we were bought by EV3, I survived that acquisition. We got bought by Covidian, I survived that acquisition. We got bought by Medtronic, I survived that acquisition. While I was at Medtronic, we actually had a seed investment in a little company that no one had ever heard of called Shockwave Medical.
And we had about 6 million invested in that company, and there was a team of us that knew a good bit about the peripheral business because we've been doing it for 15 or so years. And they asked us to do some due diligence on Shockwave. So we did that due diligence, came back to Medtronic, and basically said, I don't know if it's going to work or not, but if this thing does work, it's going to change the standard of care for people with peripheral and coronary vascular calcified arteriosclerosis.
So what we told him was, you should double down on your investment and get a first round of refusal if he possibly can do that. Medtronic didn't quite see it the same way, which is fine. They look at hundreds and hundreds of companies and so I ended up leaving Medtronic about that same time. I couldn't go work for Shockwave, even though that's what I really wanted to do because I had a non-compete in place.
About six months into that deal, I got released from my non-compete and immediately went over to the founding VP of sales for Shockwave. And so, I was there as a commercial sales employee number one. When I retired six, or seven months ago, we had almost 400 employees and about 550 million in revenue in the U.S. The Latest headline for Shockwave is that we just got purchased by J and J.
One of the neat things about this ride that we had, was that it was such a fun ride, I mean, it truly has been the greatest honor of my professional career to get to lead that team not just from a sales standpoint, but from a cultural standpoint of being able to establish things differently than what most of this industry does.
My favorite statistic of all the different statistics I could point to with Shockwave is the fact that over seven years of leading that sales team, my compounded turnover rate was less than 5 percent for my sales team in an industry that typically has between 18 and 20 percent per year. So, we figured out how to do something right and keep our people engaged in that company, but most recently we were bought by J and J.
One of the nice things about having an exit, which most startup companies do have exits, is that we went to J and J, which has no standing cardiovascular team. So all of my folks are going to be able to keep their jobs over there. And so it's been a good run.
I didn't really hang up my cleats. So to say, Stacey Enzing Singh, who's one of my mentors said, it's really a preferment, not a retirement because you're not done working yet. Are you Rob? And I said, no, I'm not done working yet. So he goes, well, let's change that terminology to perform it.
And so now I'm doing some consulting work, some advisory work, sitting on a couple of boards and sort of thinking about what chapter two is going to be.
Anneliese Rhodes: Before Cindy says anything, all I have to say is I really wish that I could have worked for you longer, Rob, because just hearing you talk about your passion, not just for the company and the therapy, but for the people. And especially with that acquisition that just happened with Shockwave and J and J, as a fellow person who has also acquired multiple times, you always worry about that. That's your number one worry, obviously, as a sales rep, am I going to be able to keep my job?
And the fact that number one, your retention is amazing of what you guys were able to do with Shockwave but then number two, to be able to make sure that nobody was displaced within the buyout, that's unbelievable. I mean, that just speaks volumes to your character, Rob. It really does.
Rob Williamson: Well, I appreciate that. You know, we changed a lot of patient lives at Shockwave. It's such an interesting opportunity when you can move into a mature business like we did, which was cardiovascular and peripheral vascular disease, but to still have such sort of an untapped potential with the patients that had truly deep calcific disease within their arteries and for us to be able to come out with something that was going to benefit that many patients. I'd like to say that, the reason that we had such low turnover was not because we were paying people more than the industry norms. Our people got paid really well, but it wasn't out of the norm for where most startup companies that are really successful pay their people.
I'm convinced it's because the way that we recruited our people was about character. It was about a mission, right? We found people that were willing to point to the front of the jersey and not the back of the jersey. So if you don't get the sports analogy, the back of the jersey is where the last name is, right? That's the individual, on the front of the jersey is the team name.
I think it really does go back to us being really careful that we didn't just go after. Mercenary-minded people jump from company to company every six months, every 12 months, or 18 months. And nothing wrong with good startup sales reps.
There's a time and a place for them, but that was not the culture that we were trying to set at Shockwave. We were trying to really find people who believed in the mission as being as world-class as we believed it was, and that they believed in having a culture that was going to be just as special as the product we had the privilege to sell.
Cynthia Ficara: That is amazing. When you mentioned that earlier, that was actually going to be my question. Like what was the difference? But isn't it Yankees baseball that doesn't have any names on the back? There's one team that doesn't have any names. I think it's the Yankees.
Cynthia Ficara: You mentioned that it was the character in the mission. How was that community communicated? Because I think that there are some companies out there that believe they have this mission that we are going to have this great culture for this great character of people. But what was it different that you did? Or you see it shockwave where that was clearly communicated.
Rob Williamson: I do think it goes back to when we sat down at the recruiting table with people and we had our pick. I mean, people knew that shock had some potential. So it didn't mean that we hired our pick in every single situation. Still, mostly, we had the top people in every area that we went to in every community and we were at least willing to sit down and talk to each other. We could tell almost from the get-go when we started talking about them in those conversations that it became about commission versus mission. Then we knew that we were probably barking up the wrong tree. We were clear to say, this is what our value proposition is, this is what the opportunity is, here's the legacy that we have a chance to create in this business. Because most of the folks that we talked to had already had significant success and they really were looking for a way to make a difference and that's what we were looking for.
And was there something that they could say in that initial meeting that made me realize that they resonated and you could see the sparkle in there, and all the way came down to even in the final interviews with both of our people? By the way, for the 1st three years of that company, I didn't put a single person on a guarantee.
Every single person that we hired came to work for us because of the way we structured our commission plan and not because of the way we structured guarantees. And so what we wanted to do is to show them, these are realistic expectations and these are going to be the hard things about a startup company.
I mean, our first sales pitch to our doctors was, hey, we have a product that we don't know if it works or not. It's really expensive, won't put it on consignment and we have to sell you three at a time. How many would you like? And so it wasn't exactly a really easy sales process for us to go through.
But we told them if you'll trust us and believe in what we've got, we would show them the engineering and what we were able to do on the bench. We got them to believe that if they saw the value of the future potential and partnered with us, our promise to them was we were going to listen to them. We were going to be a medical device company that they had never seen before, both culturally and clinically.
And it was the same message we gave to our people that we did to our doctors. You're going to have to give us some trust, but I promise you that we're going to be an organization that listens well. Too many medical device companies get into the habit of telling their people what they should think and telling their customers what they should think.
I think we were really good from day one to say to our people, if you come here and you trust us with this, we're going to listen well to you so that you have a delightful work experience. And to our physician partners, we said the same thing, we're not going to get it right up front, but what we're going to do is listen well and make sure that we challenge our engineers to not sleep until they get this thing right for you guys.
We were lucky enough that we made some good decisions at the beginning of that company that put us in a position where not only the clinical benefit, but the reimbursement benefit caught up to the clinical benefit, and it helped us really achieve sort of those skyscraper kind of opportunities.
Anneliese Rhodes: So what you're talking about is really an ideal company for pretty much anybody that wants to go to work in the medical device industry because it's so you just said it commission. If they're thinking commission versus mission, they're in the wrong place, if they're not thinking about loyalty, if they're not thinking about trust, if they're not thinking about being the best of the best, then really they're falling short.
And I think that all of those points are so valid, Rob. One of the things that a lot of our listeners, a lot of them, are starting to become a little younger, right? I mean, we're hitting into the next generation now. Cindy and I are approached a lot, for interviewing. Can you go over things with us? Can you help us do these interviews? So when you're interviewing these folks, other than the fact that they're not just concentrating on where's the money, what else are you looking for in terms of personality traits, characteristics that stand out to you? Things that are for you as a hiring manager. I don't know how many people you've hired in your entire career, but Rob, I can't imagine.
It's gotta be over a thousand or close to what you've seen a lot. So what do you look for when you're looking for the perfect person to hire?
Rob Williamson: I'm a little unorthodox from this perspective, so the character is that common theme, right? I'm looking for a character. I'm always looking for character.
I can give people the experience that I want them to get. Is it nice to have that experience? Of course, it is, but I'm not going to compromise the experience for the character, so that's the common thread. I don't care whether you're interviewing to be one of my area vice presidents, if you want to be my VP of sales, you want to be one of my managers, or one of my clinical, it does not matter to me.
Characters, the common thread that I look for a couple of the things that I'm always looking for is I want to know about their family of origins. Do they talk about their family with pride? They talk about being a sibling, being a daughter, being a son, being a wife, being a husband, being a father, and being a mother.
I'm convinced that if you live an honorable life in your personal life, you're going to live an honorable life in your professional life. I don't see a line of demarcation between those two. So, people who try to tell me they live a certain way in their personal life versus their professional life, that's a pretty quick way to not get a second interview with me.
When I give people the opportunity to talk about where they come from and who they are, what I'm looking for, what did you do? Tell me about your childhood, tell me about it even if it's not good. What were the things that were missing that you longed for and what you're trying to do as an adult now?
You know, what about your high school activities? It doesn't have to be sports. There are a million different ways that you can give back to your community. Did you take pride in the place that you come from or look for ways to make that better? Those to me are the signals that will continue to move forward as these people step through life, they usually don't change their stripes, right?
I mean, zebras, leopards, whatever, you know, leopards don't change their spots, I'm a firm believer in that. So once I get past that, I can see the honor and the way that they were raised or the way that they're trying to live their life. Then I'm looking for things like the ability to do creative problem-solving.
Are they able to look at a challenge and say, hey, there's a way for us to get through this? How do I look at it? Do I look at this as the end of the world, or do I look at this as something that it's just a new challenge for me to figure out how to get through this? If it was easy, everybody would do it. It's not easy, it wasn't easy in the early days of Shockwave. People see a 13 billion acquisition of this company, and they think, wow, look at all the millionaires who were made. But what I would say is before the millions came, there were a lot of hard days, really hard days and uncertain days, because we didn't know if we were going to get reimbursed.
We didn't know if the product was going to work. So I'll look for that ability to problem-solve resiliency. Think about this, this is the only business that I know where the failure rate you think about how many customers you have versus how many you get into to actually work with. Think about the number one shareholder in the stint market right now is about 35%.
That means you're number 1 and you fail 65 percent of the time. Think about Tavern, the Tavern business. The number one market shareholder, there is about 70%. That's the highest I've seen in any business and Shockwave will face some of those challenges one day when we have some competitors, but you know, you've got to find somebody that's resilient because they're going to hear no a lot more than they hear yes.
Another thing I look for is creativity. How do you look at life? Do you look at that as a way that I'm going to do the status quo because that's what everybody else is doing? Or am I looking for creative ways for me to be able to create opportunities, not wait for opportunities to come to me?
The last piece is just, do they really love people? I've seen people in sales that don't enjoy other people. There's only so long that you can fake that, either you enjoy people, you love people, or you're engaging with people and that's usually pretty easy to see.
And it seems like it's simple and straightforward, but the truth is there are a lot of people that force it for the money. The reality is if your job exhausts you, you probably are in the wrong job. If your job invigorates you, you're probably in the right job, and if the people that you deal with on a daily basis, they're going to be jerks some days.
Your coworkers are going to be jerks some days. Your boss is going to be a jerk some days, but either that gets you down and makes you not love your job, or you just say, you know what, that's okay. Tomorrow will be a better day and you're still passionate about your job. To me, that engagement piece of truly being invigorated about what you do. Those are the things that I look for. Do I look at experience? Yeah, do I care if they were number one or number two in the country? Not really. I want to see a track record of success, but I want to see the character traits. I can take care of helping them get to where they want to be successful.
Cynthia Ficara: In those last few minutes, you said everything that is so important that I hope if somebody's listening, they will rewind and listen to that again because I just want to begin with number one. Thank you for starting with a character and you know, Lisa and I have talked about this before that you have to come in authentically. What you and the people need to remember is that the only person who can be you is you, so you automatically go in with a one-up if you're genuinely you. And then if I can remember what you said, you said character, problem-solving, resilience, creativity, and then your love for people. And I can clearly hear your passion for this job, as Lisa mentioned before.
And I just hope that somebody listening can take this and realize you have all that it needs if you want to be where you want to be.
I guess my question is when you are interviewing these people and everything that you said is spot on, how do you see through those people who try to be somebody they're not?
Rob Williamson: Part of that is instinct, I mean, there's part of this that you just have instincts. And to me, it's about peeling back multiple layers of the onion. You've got to be willing to ask secondary and tertiary, you have to go as deep as you can until that sort of sense in your gut is satisfied or sometimes, you've got that sense and it's wrong, but if you don't dig deep enough, you're never going to know. I think I'm going deep, and that's no different than in the sales process. If you take no, or you take, hey, here's why we can't do this because of budget reasons, is it ever really about just budget? No, it's never just about the budget.
You just have to peel back far enough to figure out the causes. You gotta swim and ask questions. The other thing in interviews is just to listen a whole lot and get off saying a lot of words here, they will usually end up in circular talk and sort of almost contradict themselves in many situations.
I would tell you about the interviewers that are your listeners. Actually, listen to their answers and let them go. Don't be afraid to let that pregnant pause happen in a conversation, because that's going to happen with our customers too.
It's not just about you impressing them with your company. It's also about seeing how they handle uncomfortable conversations. If they handle that situation, if they're okay with a little bit of a pause in a conversation, those are good signs. If they tend to talk circularly and contradict themselves, those are things you don't want to see. And so I asked a lot of situational questions and I shut up and let him talk.
Anneliese Rhodes: I love that.
