JT Rimbey 00:02
Welcome to the field sales leadership guide podcast where we discuss with experienced and successful sales leaders what works and what doesn't in the sales professionals. Join us as we tap into high performing sales leaders and their passion for field sales. We've lined up for you some of the smartest movers and shakers in sales leadership to share their formulas for success and the tricks of the trade. Join us as we pull back the curtain giving you actionable insights and strategies that you can use with your sales team.
Hello, everyone, thank you for being here today with yet another episode of the podcast. I am JT Rimbey. What an honor it is to be here with you talking about one of my passions, sales leadership. I'm learning so much by speaking with our guests, and I sure hope you are, too. Paul Greenberg from Sonic healthcare was here for the last episode of the podcast. Paul's energy and excitement made for a fun episode full of insights all about CRMs and sales tools. Give it a listen if you haven't already. I'm excited about today's guest. Today we get to chat with Eric Mongeau. Eric is the National Sales Director for Aeroflow Sleep. This Cape Cod native has spent the last 20 years in sales, climbing the ladder and earning his way into sales leadership. Eric has a great wife and two awesome young boys that keep them active as they really enjoy sailing around the New England coast. I've recently learned that he is indeed a lifelong New England Patriots fan. But I will do my very best to not hold that against him. At least too much, Eric, forgive me, but welcome to the podcast. It really is great having you.
Eric Mongeau 01:46
Thanks, JT, I appreciate that dig, obviously, as a Steelers fan, have a long and storied history, as well as we do.
JT Rimbey 01:56
We do, and for those of you that obviously cannot see us, I'm making sure that I've got my Steelers helmet, front and center in the background right behind me so that Eric can stare at this the entire meeting. All right, Eric, let's, let's start off. I always like asking, what's your story? How did you get into sales?
Eric Mongeau 02:13
I guess I have sort of a funny background. As somebody who initially was a pre med student in college, and then moved into the golf course management world, as a golf course superintendent, and ultimately ended up in the business world at about 24. I was always that person who, you know, people kind of said, you know, you'd be great at sales, you have that ability to talk to people. And I've always been ultra competitive, you know, as a pretty mediocre athlete in high school, but always one of the one of the sort of high effort folks on the team. I've always had a real drive to win. And so I made that change, about 24 years old. Actually had a rainy day when I was working in the golf course industry. Put on a suit, printed a resume and went to an open house interview process, something I'd never done before. But as I was looking to break into sales, I was having a hard time finding that sort of first chance. And that interview process, it changed the track of my career. I met with a regional manager and a VP of Sales for about two and a half hours that day. Had a second interview and a week later, and gave my notice the following week and changed careers and sort of never looked back ever since.
JT Rimbey 03:37
A that's absolutely awesome. B I don't know how we didn't come across this before. But I'm actually a former Class A member of the PGA myself. And I've got years under my belt working on ground screw stuff from throughout high school and early college years as well. Let's dive in really high level background information on Aeroflow itself. Who is your buyer? And what are they looking to solve just for some background for our listeners?
Eric Mongeau 03:59
Yeah, absolutely. Aeroflow is a great company, really fascinating. Actually, we've been around now for about 15-16 years, started by two brothers out in the mountains of western North Carolina in a great city called Asheville. It's a wonderful place to have a corporate headquarters to be honest, great food, incredible scenery. And Aeroflow is interesting. We have individual divisions within the overall kind of corporate structure. And we basically all run our own businesses. And so we have four divisions, you know, essentially now, we're the largest breast pump provider in the country. So that's our mom and baby business. We're a urology and incontinence. So those are things like diapers and intermittent catheters. A small fledgling constant glucose monitoring business. You're probably familiar with Dexcom and some of the action around there thanks to one of the Jonas Brothers. And my sort of little piece of the world is sleep. And that's a business that we actually rebranded as Aeroflow Sleep on January 1 of 2020. And that's where I've spent the last about 12 years of my life is in the sleep medicine world. And we work directly with a number of key stakeholders. First and foremost, the insurance payers, the folks that give us basically a license to hunt out there in the market. If you don't have the contract, it's going to be hard to do business with you and healthcare. We then work directly with physicians and sleep labs and sleep clinics. Those could be your pulmonologist, your neurologists, your autolaryngologist, or what's commonly known as an ENT, as well as large primary care and internal med, they're doing more and more in this space than ever. And then the patient themselves. We actually have a bit of a hybrid model that Aeroflow that's, I think one of the keys to our success, is we have traditional outside sales, but we also have a large paid ads program. And that is designed to educate the patient and create patient choice in a market that's pretty heavily designed for the physician to sort of tell the patient where to go. And in today's healthcare, where patients have more and more choice, and they are more educated, they have a say in where they go. And they want to better understand what those costs are. And those implications are, we really try to sell from both sides of that equation.
JT Rimbey 06:20
You're absolutely right. Buyers are way more educated with all the information at their fingertips nowadays.
Eric Mongeau 06:26
Yeah, so we're in an interesting position right now, as I mentioned earlier, this sort of business was kind of built right before COVID, right before the pandemic began. And we were able to leverage a lot of our technology and solutions to weather that storm and actually continue to grow the team through that. But from a headcount perspective, we're well short of the budget that we had originally planned for it. So we're at about 10 outside sales reps right now. I have a regional sales manager that reports into me that that covers six of those folks. But in the back end of 2022, we'll be doubling the size of that team this year. And further doubling it again, going into 2023. We're essentially in the midst of a national expansion right now. So anytime people ask me about the size of our team, I have to stop and think and kind of remember, it's oftentimes it feels larger than it is. One of the things we've realized is that we've been able to do a lot more with less since 2020. And so even though our headcount may not be where we expected it, we've actually been blowing out our top line numbers for the last two and a half years now, since the pandemic.
JT Rimbey 07:35
So really, really curious to put you on the spot there. But speak to that efficiency. You're readily admitting the team size was not where you thought it would need to be. But yet, you're blowing everything out. So how can you do more with less?
Eric Mongeau 07:50
Yeah, we, we made a big transition in 2020. I am a tried and true outside sales rep. Want to be with the people. You know, in my time of carrying the bag, it was very much based on relationships and some of the concepts around Challenger and having the relationship to be able to ask the difficult questions and drive change. What we found during the pandemic was you had to do that in a different way. And you had to go to where your customers were. And that may have meant getting cell phone numbers and texting them being better about email. We were dropping, fax marketing. You name it, we were basically doing it. And what we found was that our reps historically had a milk run. They might have called to the sales cycle, but I'll call it a milk run. They weren't going to the same places the same day of the week for the same amount of time, having the same conversations about the local sports team and the weather and where the next order was going to come from. And we really challenged our folks to leverage the solutions we had available to us and dig a lot deeper and be more strategic. Because if you were going to go meet somebody, it was going to be a big deal. You had to get permission from security, you had to have a mask on, you had to answer the 10 COVID questions that we've all been answering for the last two and a half years. It was not something you could just drop in on somebody to do. And we've now carried that through. We really encourage our folks to do more pre-call planning, to look at the data, to make informed decisions prior to getting into that call. Whether that be in their office or in their car in the parking lot in order to really use the tools available to them to be hyper-educated when they're going to see that customer.
JT Rimbey 09:41
That’s really interesting. It sounds to me like the Challenger sales method is having some influence on your sales process.
Eric Mongeau 09:48
Yeah, I've gone through Challenger training a couple of times in my career. It's not something I would say that I specifically teach to today. We do have parts of our business that we absolutely do. But as part of our overreaching sort of sales model, a lot of the concepts of Challenger, right, providing insights, being educated about your own competitors, even more so sometimes when they're educated about themselves, a lot of those concepts are very important to me, and things that we're really trying to get our reps to understand and to use. Our market is pretty tight, there's a lot of other competition in it. And we all look very similar on the surface. We have the same products. We are serving very similar functions. There is no real price involved. Because again, we're dealing with insurance companies and rates that are dictated by the insurance company. So we're really we need to be selling solutions, we need to be you know, selling a life is better with Aeroflow model. And that comes down to our reps being able to provide those levels of insight. And really being able to walk customers down that pain chain. If you've done Challenger, you're probably familiar with the term rational drowning and some of the things that are in that model. I may not go so far as to say you need to get your customers on their knees begging to work with you, as the Challenger may ask you to do, but the concept of getting a customer to speak about their difficulties with their current business partner, and then leveraging those to present your own solutions. It's absolutely part of our process.
JT Rimbey 11:36
I would imagine that if you're going directly to ENTs, that would be a slightly different sales cycle than a primary care doctor. And so if I tie that into the premise of the Challenger sale, for those listening that have never read the book, it's three main premises teach, tailor and take control. If you teach the prospect something new, their ears perk up, and you start to establish some level of trust. If you then tailor what you're teaching specific to that primary care doctor in this specific case, you're then able to take control of that sales cycle. I personally, like the optics of the doctor actually giving the rep control to actually guide them through the process better. I think the Challenger sale, in my opinion, missed that a little bit. And it makes it a little bit overly aggressive from a reps perspective. But teach, tailor and taking control is the taking control of something you earn. My assumption outside looking in Eric is for primary care doctor, the Challenger sale can be a great tactic, and building that relationship and differentiation in the marketplace.
Eric Mongeau 12:49
Yeah, 100%. It's probably to me one of the more fun opportunities for our folks, because your primary care or internal medicine physicians, as you said earlier, sleep is important, right, we all can realize that fact. How many sleep podcasts unto themselves are there that are out there right now? The amount of money as a country globally that we spend on sleep is mind boggling. And so physicians understand the relationship between high blood pressure, diabetes, mental health issues, sexual dysfunction, you name it, it relates to sleep. And they know that they should be screening for it. But the real question comes down to how do I do that? You know, what do I do with that? And yeah, that's exactly where Challenger comes in. And we really enjoy putting those pieces together for them. And again, that's where it becomes a solution sale. You know, you're not selling product. You're not selling price. You're selling a whole concept. And from patient identification all the way through screening, diagnosis, all the way through treatment. And when you can set up that program, that overreaching model, you have a partner for life, essentially, and you build a lot of walls around your business when you're able to do that.
JT Rimbey 14:08
So we serve a lot of med device and med diagnostics company and we've got a really big dental medical equipment for dental practices. And one thing that is so apparent to us is if you're not top of mind, for that provider at the right time, sales are lost. So consistency wins the game and I love it that you don't have like a closed one scenario. This isn't like oh, let me shake your hand. It was a pleasure doing business with you type of thing. It is It's great to see you again. And I'm gonna see you again really soon.
Eric Mongeau 14:45
Yeah, 100% as we've gone through our process of defining our sales funnel, and even you know so far as to building that out into, you know, our CRM. It's kind of one of my little pet peeves that the CRM does not allow me to change the wording on that final step in their process. And it's almost become a joke internally. Because we don't ever really consider any customer as a closed one. There is never a moment where my team has the ability to your point to say thank you. We're moving on, on to the next one. It is an ongoing relationship. And it's a very transactional relationship. So that opportunity can present itself in any moment. And you can lose a customer in any moment. And so consistency and relationships are so critical. It's something we really look at when we're actually recruiting, you know, is understanding, does the rep have the ability to not just go out there cold call, kind of be the Rainmaker to bring in new business, but do they also have the ability to build long-term relationships and support their customer. And so they have to have a little bit of that operator mentality, a little bit of that more entrepreneurial mentality of providing stellar customer service to then keep that customer and grow them over time.
JT Rimbey 16:13
Hiring the right people can be such a challenge to ensure not only the right cultural fit, but also that their sales acumen matches up with the types of customers and selling experiences specific to that position. What do you look for Eric, when hiring a new salesperson? And what does that interview process look like with Aeroflow?
Eric Mongeau 16:35
I mean, for us, we're in a little bit of a niche market. We're in the Durable Medical Equipment world, I mean, that is what we do. Generally, people don't know what that is, unless you've had a loved one who was on oxygen, or on CPAP, or something that's in the DME space, you may not have ever even heard of what we do. And so we're not looking for instantaneous transferrable experience on a resume. I'm more interested in enthusiasm, coachability, true self awareness, self determination, self motivation, somebody who really is excited about people. We actually use an assessment in the hiring process. And there's sort of three values that are spit out of that, and one of them is people service. And what we find is that humans, people we’re interviewing and putting these assessments, if they're high in people service, they generally have a really good mind for customer service. They also have a lot of empathy. They tend to be emotionally intelligent. They tend to read a room well. And those are the folks that do the best we find, again, because it's an a long term, ongoing relationship sale. A lot of people can kind of fake it for a couple of sales calls. You can kind of by accident, maybe hit a home run. But what we find is over the long-term, that's where we really prove out sort of who our folks are. And trying to interview in the course of, you know, a month, maybe two months max, how somebody's going to perform over the next two to four or five years. It's a little bit of crystal ball. So we try to really mix the art and the science during our interview process.
JT Rimbey 18:22
Are you able to share with us what assessment tool you use?
Eric Mongeau 18:26
Yeah, it's from a company called Wiley. If you've done Disc, you've probably heard of Wiley. They're one of the biggest ones out there. The actual model is, it's called Profile Select.
JT Rimbey 18:38
All right I’ll have to check that up. Okay, so you hire a new rep, they pass the self assessment test. They've got all the intangibles that you're looking for. What does that training look like for somebody as they come up with Aeroflow?
Eric Mongeau 18:52
Yeah, we'd like to say the training is over your first 90 days. And it takes on a number of different forms. We try to mix everything we do is multi-modality. So we try to mix a lot of different methods to help people that may be more visual learners that may be more experiential learners. And so we start with your typical kind of Google Classroom, going through modules and getting some of the very healthcare specific stuff for our industry, along with the regulatory kind of check offs that we have to do. Then we get people into the home office. We actually have them spend a week within our operational team. And they get partnered up with a customer service rep. They learned what that person does day in and day out, how that system works. They get partnered up with our clinical team. They actually sit with the clinicians when they are physically interacting with patients, so they can see what's important to a patient. What are their questions like? What does that fear factor like when they were about to be set up on a medical device that they've never seen before? Then they take all that and they get out in the field with one of our regional sales trainers, one of our experienced successful sales folks that's been with us for a while and his high-performing. And then they see it in action, right? They see all the things that they saw in the home office, all the solutions we have, how that actually plays out in the day to day. What is access look like within the customer? What does it take to work your way to the decision maker? What are those individual conversations really like? Then they're back in their own market. Their sales manager travels into their market with them. And we have sort of a transition period that occurs, where they've now been exposed to all of this information, all these solutions, all these concepts. And then we want to slowly have them start taking over the lead of what that is going to look like every day, until we make that transition from their sales manager having some of those conversations with the customers to wear them they kind of chip in to then eventually, over the course of that month, the new rep is really taking the ownership and the sales managers I like to say it's it's the fly on the wall, more there to critique and be there as a safety net if the conversation gets a little bit deeper or more complex than they were expecting. And we do 30-60-90 day check ins from there. And we have very specific bullets that we want to make sure that we're hitting on, and that people are on track to be where we would expect them to be based on those metrics.
JT Rimbey 21:19
So if we tie in from the assessment perspective, if you've hired who you're after, with people service and empathy, I love that you have them sit in with a provider and a patient, because man that's gonna make it so real of the value and the impact that an Aeroflow product can have on the actual patient themselves. That's got to be a great incentive to say like what we sell matters, and what we deliver to the end patient matters. So that's that I love that you guys do that. That's great.
Eric Mongeau 21:53
Yeah, as a very fast growing company, one of the things that we've probably put the most focus on in the last couple of years has been purpose. And to help people really understand purpose, nothing hits home better than actually seeing the end user and seeing a patient and the challenges that they go through and how the services and products we provide can be truly life changing to those folks.
JT Rimbey 22:21
Your hiring and training process is absolutely first class. What technology tools do you provide them with to be successful?
Eric Mongeau 22:29
Our expectation is not that someone comes in with a book of business. So our model has been around getting people from sort of zero to hero in a short period of time. And so it started with the CRM for us, frankly. When we did implement Map My Customers, and that's been successful, and really creates the foundation for getting people up and running quickly. And we power that with the claims data that we acquire as well. So when a new rep starts on day one, we'll review all of that decile ranking claims data. And so what that tells us is, of all the physicians offices of all the NPI numbers, which is just an indicator that you're a healthcare provider, basically, that they can see where the business is being done, and who their competition is, and at what percentage of share. So they're really armed and dangerous. In many ways, that's probably two to three years of experience that they get almost instantaneously just because of the data. And from there, it's up to them to apply that. And we're going to really support them through that process. At Aeroflow, we write all of our own software in house. So we have our own back end system. You know, we provide all of our own dashboards and data solutions internally. And that gives us the ability to really customize a lot of what we provide to our reps. And so we give them opportunities to upsell by crunching a lot of those numbers. We're proactive about letting them know when a subset of patients may be struggling so they can bring that to their referral sources to their ultimately to their customers. And they can prove how educated they are on how those folks are doing. So we're always trying to add value. And that really helps us to get people up and running quickly.
JT Rimbey 24:22
There's one thing that I've learned over the last 14 or 15 months specific to outside sales, whether it's in automotive, med device, med diagnostics, manufacturing, all sorts of different industries. The term CRM, there's like two just polar opposite sides of the fence of people that are like of course, it's critical. And others are going no, I hire adults. I don't need a CRM.
Eric Mongeau 24:49
Yeah, I mean, I very much subscribe to the concept that I am here to support my team. I am here to build my team to drive culture and mostly to fight for them internally to make sure they have the resources to be successful. When I joined Aeroflow two and a half years ago, and went out in the field with at that time, just a few reps that existed, sort of, in this new business we were creating, I saw a lot of legal pads, which is fine. I saw a lot of stacks of paper and passenger seats. I saw a lot of things that in my mind could use some modernization. And I kept going back to having a CRM having something that was in the palm of your hand on your phone or on your computer. And by and large, my team agreed, and they were looking for a solution like that. So then became the process of going out and finding one. And to your point, there's lots out there. And there's some big names we're all very familiar with. And any of us have probably used. And I when I carried the bag when I was on the road as a territory manager and consulting. And I had a real love hate relationship with the CRM, because I felt like I was entering data into a system for someone else's benefit. And I was not a real fan of doing something like that. And so when we were shopping at Aeroflow, one of the biggest things that I wanted to make sure that I check the box on is that this was going to add value for my team, because if it added value for my team, and they were going to use it without me needing to use the stick mentality, then I will get more value out of it as a sales manager and as a sales leader. So that was really what we were looking for.
JT Rimbey 26:39
So you got me all juiced up there, Eric. Remember I come from Salesforce.com. You mentioned the notepads in the back of cars and tablets. I was absolutely shell shocked when I came into this industry serving specific outside field sales teams, where I was learning that people were literally operating their entire day with a post it note slapped on their dashboard with five or six companies or accounts on it, then they had crossed it off after they visited that was their version of organization and CRM. CRM portion would be an email summary, at the end of the day, to their direct boss. What you just said, was so profound that you started with the value proposition as to what your team needed for them to see value in a CRM and I will tell you Salesforce, SAP, Dynamics, HubSpot to a far lesser degree, I think HubSpot hits, hits home runs at times with ease of use. But all of those major CRMs, sales leaders get enamored with look at the data will be able to display on this dashboard and this report. And where all of those major, big huge CRM platforms missed the mark is ease of use for the actual field rep. Those big CRMs were made really for, for a lot of technology field reps, because they're behind the laptop 90% of their day, not in the field meeting after meeting after meeting. So I love that you started out with does this provide value for the team?
All right, so as we wind down, what are the biggest challenges that your field sales team faces today, and, and maybe one to three years from now?
Eric Mongeau 28:33
We innovate as an organization. And what we find is when you're innovating, you have to work twice as hard. Because you're selling not just your own company, but you're also selling a new model, a new solution, a new product, something that's different from what that customer is used to doing. And so that's been a big challenge. I think just in general. It also makes our reps better, I think. I find it's really hard to kind of fall into a rut working for us. Every day is different. It's a lot of fun. And it's enjoyable for me and my career. I've always tried to sell the best in any market I was in. And I really sought out organizations to support that I felt like we're at the top of their game. And I think that that's what we find with our folks is they really enjoy the confidence in knowing that they're working for a company that is innovative and that is different. And if it means that they have to work a little bit harder to sell that difference. There's actually something really satisfying and gratifying about doing that. So those are kind of our short term challenges. Our long term challenges probably are around where are we going in healthcare? What does reimbursement look like? Is Amazon going to take this all over? I mean, these are the things that you know, from a high level I think about how do we again go to where the customer is and what we've done to do that is to get online, is to be in their paid ads, to be in their social media, to not just do it the old school way of just going to the physician, but really trying to be where the patient is finding their information. So we're writing a ton of blogs. You know, where we've got some amazing physician, influencers that we work with. Dr. Weiss is one that if you go on our Instagram, you'll find her on there very regularly. Those are the kinds of things that we think are really moving the needle. And that should future proof a lot of what we're trying to do.
JT Rimbey 30:36
I'm grateful you pointed that out, when when you're bringing something innovative to market, you're calling it selling twice, there's a there's a really large education and awareness, tire spinning, before somebody can actually go in and they earn the trust, and earn the partnership for that specific new innovative product line. So I appreciate the way you articulated that.
So Eric, a big thank you, to you huge pleasure learning from you today. I am 100% confident that your team loves working for you.
Thank you for listening today. And thank you to our sponsor, Map My Customers. Traditional CRMs were never designed with outside sales reps in mind. They're too cumbersome, complex and time consuming. Along with a glaring lack of mobile-friendly options. Half of our customers use Map My Customers as the CRM of record. And the other half use Map My Customers as the tip of the spear for their existing CRMs. CRMs like Salesforce SAP, Oracle, Dynamics, HubSpot, Zoho, the list goes on. Designed specifically for outside sales reps, a mobile-first platform helping to strategically segment accounts, routing and mapping, activity logging, and much more. Remember, ease of use drives adoption. Adoption delivers data. Data delivers the insights. Visit MapMyCustomers.me for more info.
Be sure to subscribe to the Field Sales Leadership Guide podcast. Share with your friends, colleagues, and your family members. If you do have additional questions or comments for Eric or myself, send us a message. We'd love to answer your questions and hear what you think about the episode. Tune into the next episode as we bring on Bryant Davis. Thanks a bunch for listening today.