The ONE SECRET to Earning a GOLD MEDAL PERFORMANCE in SALES
How can you deliver a gold medal performance in medical device sales?
In this episode, The Girls of Grit draws inspiration from the Olympics to reveal the secret to achieving gold medal performance in the medical device industry. They highlight the parallels between Olympic athletes and top-performing sales professionals, emphasizing the importance of self-belief and preparation.
They discuss how resilience, determination, and core self-belief are important to triumphing in both the Olympic arena and the competitive world of medical device sales. Whether navigating challenging cases or high-stakes situations, they highlight that belief in oneself and thorough preparation are essential.
Tune in to discover how to harness these secrets for your gold medal performance in the medical device field.
Episode Chapter Markers
00:00 Introduction
01:01 Olympic Lessons for Medical Device Sales
3:42 What’s the Secret to Olympic-Level Success in Medical Device Sales?
8:18 How Do You Stand Firm When the Stakes Are High
11:18 How Newcomers Can Achieve Gold Medal Success in Medical Device Sales
15:25 Turning Hurdles into Gold Medal Moments
Must-Hear Insights and Key Moments
Resilience is Key: Just as Olympians must overcome setbacks and challenges, medical device sales professionals must stay resilient to obstacles to maintain high performance.
Self-Belief Drives Success: They discuss how confidence in your abilities is crucial. Believing in yourself and your product helps you navigate high-stakes situations and close deals effectively.
The Importance of Preparation: Thorough preparation and planning are essential for success. Just as athletes train rigorously, sales professionals should prepare meticulously for meetings and pitches.
Overcoming Doubts: They share personal stories highlighting how facing and overcoming self-doubt can lead to extraordinary achievements in sales, paralleling the mental strength required for Olympic success.
Commitment to Goals: Understand how unwavering commitment to your goals and persistent effort, despite challenges, is a shared trait of top athletes and successful sales professionals alike.
Words of Wisdom: Standout Quotes from This Episode
“There's nothing wrong with you going and getting a second or third opinion on something.” — Anneliese Rhodes
“When you have that core belief in yourself, it doesn't matter how bad that nervousness gets to you, you're going to be okay and you just work through it.” — Anneliese Rhodes
“We believe in all of you to believe in yourself.” — Cynthia Ficara
“In running the hurdles, just like a gymnast on the balance beam, they look at the end of the beam, they don't look down. So none of you should ever look down.” — Cynthia Ficara
“You have to always be on top of your game because you never know when you're going to be needed.” — Cynthia Ficara
“In medical devices, you have to be disciplined.” — Cynthia Ficara
“We have to believe because every one of us has it in us to succeed.” — Cynthia Ficara
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Blog Transcript:
Cynthia Ficara: Have the Olympics inspired you by watching from home? What does a gold medal performance look like to you? What is the one thing all of these amazing athletes have in common?
Anneliese Rhodes: Join us today as we unlock that one secret that we all shockingly have as well. Whether it be in an athletic competition or our everyday business.
Cynthia Ficara: Hey, Lisa. Hey to all of our listeners out there today.
Anneliese Rhodes: Hello to all of our listeners. Thanks so much for tuning in to another episode of the Secrets in Medical Device Sales brought to you by the Girls of Grit.
Olympic Secrets for Thriving in Medical Device Sales
Cynthia Ficara: We are talking about the Olympics. Well, we're also tying it into our big secret in a medical device that you can take from the Olympics. But we have had so much fun watching the Olympics and getting inspired by them. My gosh, there's always these stories of triumph and oh my gosh, it's just so exciting. But you know, there's a parallel and a similarity in these amazing athletes. Like, I mean, do you agree, Lisa?
Anneliese Rhodes: Absolutely yes. I mean, I love watching like you, Cindy. I sat up late at night watching him early in the morning. I mean, Brooklyn and I watched the event together. I love swimming, of course, because I grew up as a swimmer but you know, it's making me like your blood pump so much faster. It makes you on the edge of your seat. You're like, yes, yes, yes, and you're right. I mean, it parallels what we do in medical devices every day. And it's unbelievable how close we are actually to these Olympic athletes.
Cynthia Ficara: I know, and we've all been so lucky to watch these gold medal performances and watch what these athletes have in common. We are going to reveal a secret that Lisa and I believe that all of us have and what it takes to have a gold medal performance. But you know, let's think about one of the most decorated Olympians Simone Biles. She had so much media coverage and it was exciting watching her come back four years later and overcome, what was it called?
The twisties, you know, but she really faced a tough time and she came back even better as the oldest gymnast. And so you have to think like, of course, we saw her resilience, we saw her determination and we watched her get on that gold medal podium, but there's also an underlying secret there. There's something she had in common with Gabby Thomas, with Katie Ledecky. I mean, these women coming back and back and back, you know, multiple Olympics and multiple performances. And, you know, it's so inspiring to watch them.
And I think about it, okay, this is this fantasy world, but is it you watch how great they do? Let's think about the world that we live in. You know, we talk about what it's like being a female in a male-dominated industry. You have to work hard, you've got to do things. There are times when you are resilient, or there are times when you have to be determined. When are you going to triumph? Well, I don't know. We just want to reveal this secret and help all of you leave here today and be ready to have your gold medal performance. We're going to tell one story of mine and one story of yours, and we want to see you all up there on the podium because we believe it's possible and we are, it's just very exciting.
So Lisa, what do you think is the one secret that all of these Olympians and all of these medical device sales reps have to do, what does it take to make it as a gold medal performer?
How Self-Belief Shapes Gold Medal Performances
Anneliese Rhodes: What we all have in common is the belief in ourselves and that sounds so simple, but that is untouchable.
It is something that is inside of every one of you that, you know, you have over your competition, over your colleagues, over anybody that you come face to face with, you have that belief in yourself and nothing is going to take you away from those end goals that you're looking to accomplish.
And those end goals can be anything from getting that top customer, that big whale of a customer, to giving an Olympic performance, a gold medal Olympic performance in the boardroom when you're meeting with a CEO about a massive piece of capital equipment that might cost the hospital five to 10 million of investments.
All of these things tie into that belief in yourself. And what does that look like?
Cynthia Ficara: I think that's a really good question because I'm listening to you and I'm excited, but it's like, okay, I have to believe, well, how do I do that? And what does that take and what if I doubt myself?
Anneliese Rhodes: Well, and you will, and here's the deal. You wouldn't be normal and human if you didn't doubt yourself. You're going to always be nervous. You're always going to have the, you can call it the twisties, which she faced, but hello, I get nervous all the time. I mean, it doesn't take much sometimes to rattle me and it's just because I'm in my head. But Cindy, I'm telling you, when you have that core belief in yourself, it doesn't matter how bad that nervousness gets to you, you're going to be okay, you just work through it, and you get past it.
So let me give you an example. I was just going to say, can you give me an example because I'd like to hear it.
You know me, I have so many stories. So I was thinking about this when you and I were talking about the Olympics and like, you know, giving a gold medal performance. And I will tell you that recently in the last couple of months, I've been working with a new physician. I had not worked with this physician, but I had met the physician, but I'd never worked with a physician, and lo and behold, a case popped up that was a great case for our devices. And so he called me, which is a win in itself. I'm looking at the case and I'm thinking, okay, what are we going to put in this patient?
I did my homework and I called a couple of folks and I got some second and third opinions, which is never a bad thing to do. It's like the Olympic athletes going and working with different trainers. They may do their speed training with one trainer and they may do their mental training. Preparedness with another trainer or a therapist or whatever it is. There's never anything wrong with you going and getting a second or third opinion on something, especially if it's a brand new user or a brand new customer, and somebody else might have a little bit more intuition on what you're facing.
So I did that and I was very prepared with my plan and I will tell you, Cindy, when I presented the plan to him, he doubted me because we had never worked together before. And he said, you know, I don't know, Lisa, I'm just not sure. What if we did XYZ instead? And I'm like, no, no, we can't. And he's like, well, why?
I explained to him why I had my plan the way that it was and what the patient outcome needed to be. And I said this is what I know, this is what I believe in, you have to trust me now. I know that he was worried about trusting me, you know brand new user never worked with before, he doesn't know me, knows the old people that used to call on him, but doesn't know me and he had to take that leap of faith. And I will tell you, Cindy, I was nervous during the case. I was nervous for everything to go perfectly.
I said a lot of prayers beforehand, and I will tell you the case went perfectly well, the patient has done extremely well. And at the end of all of it, the biggest gift, the gold medal, was the phone call from the physician, not only thanking me for a great patient outcome, but for the fact that I performed, I gave him my best gold Olympic performance.
And he, in turn, had some trust in me and said, I'm looking forward to working with you again. Those are winning stories because they're hard to articulate and to kind of tell everybody about, but I can guarantee you, all of you out there have been through that. And if you haven't, when you get to that point you get that because you believe in yourself and you've done all the things that made you that gold performance.
You did the planning, you did the strategizing, you called on a second and third opinion and you were determined. All of that plays into the fact that you gave that gold medal performance.
Cynthia Ficara: So I'm going to dig a little deeper with you because there was something in that story that I think every one of us is going to have at that moment. So yes, he calls you and I'm just listening. This is the first time I heard this story. So he wants you to do a case with them at that moment when you're there and he says another plan, how did you feel, and what made you stand so firm? How did you at that moment just say, this is a better plan for the patient?
How Do You Stand Firm When the Stakes Are High
Anneliese Rhodes: It rocked me back and I went, oh snap, actually I said something else, but I think it hurts on this episode. So you know, in my head I said that and I thought, no, I've gone over this way too many times.
Now I know that if we do this, the outcome is not going to be as optimal as we need it to be and I can't afford to have the patient have a suboptimal result. He can't afford to have the patient have a suboptimal result. And by all means, the patient can't afford that. I knew it because not only did I look at it so many times, I looked at it with others and I prepared and I just knew that it was the best plan, but did it make me nervous? Did it rock me back? It did and I had to have faith in the fact that I prepared enough to push forward.
Cynthia Ficara: So tell us, you have the faith, you have the fact, what are you physically looking like? Are you calm? Are you looking in his eyes? Are you confident? Like you say you have, what does that look like? If that belief is a moment where you need to believe in yourself. What does it look like?
Anneliese Rhodes: That's a good question. I never really thought about that, I don't know. I think for me, you know, well, we were sitting down when he looked at me and said that we were in the control room. It was the day of the case, by the way, it wasn't like days before it was the day of the case.
I mean, I had what I had. I mean, I had backups, but you know, I knew it, I knew what I wanted to do. So I think, you know, I looked at him and I just slowly explained to him why I chose what I chose and how I chose it and the thoughts behind it. And he then listened a little bit more and thought, oh, okay.
And then Cindy, I also told him, we will make it to where, and if it doesn't do exactly what we need it to do, we have another option. And I gave him a little bit of a backup. I think that also made him feel, it was like a life preserver, right? It's like, I'll throw you this life preserver. You don't need it because you know how to swim, but I'm going to throw it just in case you need to grab on and take a breath.
Cynthia Ficara: You know, it's so great about your story. So for anybody listening, you know, Lisa has been in her field for many years and is an expert in her field. And what I think is so cool is that she gets to go in and be confident and deliver when she needs to have a gold medal performance, which really could make or break ever going back into that Olympic arena or the OR again, because you know, a lot of times we've mentioned this before, it's almost like an interview.
It's almost like a trial. Well, if you go into the Olympic trials, right, the OR is your Olympic trial. If you need a certain time or a certain cut to make the Olympics, it's the same thing in an OR. You need a certain result, you need a certain presence, you need a certain belief and you need it to go well so you can make it to the next big event, right?
Anneliese Rhodes: Absolutely, but let me throw this back at you. Now, there were brand new athletes in the Olympics. There were young athletes in the Olympics with nothing behind them. No years that Simone Biles had. It's the very first time they may have trained, but they didn't have the background and the tenure just like me, right?
How do you handle that when you're brand new? And yes, you've been through training and you've done what you're supposed to do, but how do you handle that belief in yourself when you don't have the years to back it up?
Building Confidence and Achieving Excellence as a Newcomer
Cynthia Ficara: Oh, now you got me thinking Lisa. So I'm training, I'm new, and I can be on my own. And there was a specific doctor, very skilled, you know, a high-level doctor that I worked with that, you know, took a little, like he didn't trust me. He didn't know anything and it took a little time for him to be able to look me in the eye and call me by my name.
There was a gradual progression probably over two years. But you know, getting better, proving yourself, I think that's the key, like all these other athletes, they practice every day. You know, this is like training, you go in and you show your coach what you're capable of, right?
Well, it's kind of the same thing. I mean, you're auditioning for this spot. And so I will never forget this. It'd been relatively new, this was the first time something in a case went bad, really fast. I had no backup in the room and all I had was me. All I had was my knowledge, all I had was my confidence and all I had was my product.
You don't have time to think and so it wasn't even about me. It wasn't even about the doctor, it was about that patient. So the focus was on things going right for the right reason and I believed I knew. I was in that room to do what I needed to do anyway. And I remember things went bad and I got calm.
So I'm describing what I asked you, what I looked like. I remember being calm on the outside and shaking on the inside clearly, but I knew that if I stood confidently I would come across as confident, I knew what I needed to do. And it was amazing how it's almost like that pressure. You just rise to the occasion when you need to.
It was the Olympic moment, it was that moment and it was do or die. Say what you need to say. Say it right, do it, and everything is okay. And, you know, I walked out of there and I remember him thanking me for being there and we debriefed. And I was like, that was my gold medal performance because I rose to the occasion when I needed to, because I believed in myself.
And what did I do to get there? I did all the right things. So to all of you listeners out there, it's all the right things. It's the little things you do day in and day out. It's reading the journals, it's understanding your area. It's knowing what your doctor believes in. It's following the journals that tell you what the standards of care are. It's knowing your device. It's not being lazy. It's not saying, oh, don't worry, I knew that for training, I memorized that and I don't need to know that anymore.
You have to always be on top of your game because you never know when you're going to be needed. I believed in myself and it was a great result and I had a gold medal performance.
You believed in yourself without even realizing it until we talked about walking through doing it and you had a gold medal performance. So, you know, I just really think that for everybody listening out there, you're going to come across obstacles and you're going to come across tough times.
And again, do you think these Olympians didn't have tough times? Do you think they didn't have obstacles? Do you think they didn't make sacrifices? I mean, think about this, many of these kids, and I'm saying kids because they're teenagers, you know, think back when you were 18, 19, did you want to go socialize with your friends or did you say, I have to be disciplined? I have to be in at this time. I have to get up at this time and I have to practice, practice, practice. You know what? In medical devices, you have to be disciplined.
What is your practice? It's reading. What is your practice? It's studying. What is your practice? It's just talking through things. It's training and it's going through the motions and then you get to that point where you've trained for your performance.
Overcoming Hurdles with Olympic Confidence in Medical Device Sales
Anneliese Rhodes: I just love everything you just said. I'm nodding my head. Yes, yes, yes. And here's the deal, you're kidding yourself if you think you're never going to face an Olympic performance hurdle, it's going to come.
It doesn't matter if it's a small situation or a big situation, you're going to face it over and over again in this business. And what we're talking about today is that core belief in yourself. And yes, the experiences give you more and more, but at some point, you're going to be brand new at it and you have to find it within yourself to say, I got this, I did all the right things.
And you know, Cindy, what you talked about with reading the journals and being prepared and all that, we talk about a lot of this stuff in our episodes. We give you guys all these tools that you need to build up to that Olympic medal performance. We are giving all of you all of this stuff because we didn't have a whole lot of that when we started, you know, it's not in the textbooks and they don't tell you in training. We want you guys to have everything you can so that every time you face that hurdle, you are gliding over that thing like it doesn't even exist.
They don't even look at their feet, it's like they're flying. I mean, they know precisely down to the millisecond, where their feet are going to land on that track and how many steps it takes to go over the next hurdle and it's like clockwork.
It is literally in their limbic system, it's in one and out the other. They're not even thinking about it and you're going to get to that point in your medical device career. You're not even thinking about it, you just have that determination, that resilience, and that core belief in yourself that you're going to make it through and you're going to give that gold medal performance that you deserve.
Every single time you walk into the OR, you go into the boardroom, you talk to the CEOs, and you grab that big whale of a doctor.
Cynthia Ficara: Like you said, you know, in running the hurdles, they look ahead, just like gymnasts on the balance beam. They look at the end of the beam, they don't look down. So none of you should ever look down and how, you know, I'm going to ask all these listeners out there.
You're probably driving to a case or driving to work. I want you to honestly ask yourself, do you believe in yourself? Do you have belief today to have what it takes, I should say, to have a gold medal performance? Should the opportunity come your way in the next couple of hours? And if you don't, why?
Be honest, you can answer yourself out loud in the car if you want. So maybe you need to pinpoint, maybe something I learned in training, I forgot to go back and study. So guess what? How do you get belief? I'm going to tell you how you get belief because this is the secret in medical devices.
It's very simple, you put in the work period, you put in the work and confidence comes every other step that takes with it. And you've got it and there's your belief. I'm just so excited that I want all of you to keep your eyes open today in summary. It's just that I could sit here and talk about the Olympics forever.
But what we want to say is that we believe in all of you to believe in yourself. Sometimes it's not rocket science, and if we take too long to look down at our feet and think about all the little, we're doing wrong, we have to look ahead. We have to believe because every single one of us has it in us to succeed.
