Field Sales Leadership Guide

10. Building Relationships and Staying Organized as a Sales Manager with Drew Cline from CONMED

• Map My Customers • Episode 10

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If ever there was a recipe for success as a Sales Manager, Drew Cline has perfected the ingredients and the process. The key ingredients are a passion for connecting and building relationships, organization and hard work. While that might not be hugely surprising, Drew is proof that there is no easy button or shortcut to success. Drew’s love of organization and socializing in his personal life mirror his professional life. This career in outside sales is natural to him, but it's still hard, persistent work. The phrase “do what you love” is certainly true in this case.

 

“Relationships are huge, especially in our industry, but I think it's just my natural instinct to form relationships. I love making friends. I love hosting parties. It's like I treat it just like I do my personal life. I genuinely like getting to know people. So in any of these offices, I was wanting to get to know these people and it's my job to be there. What else do I have to do? You know, it's important to me to be good at my job and be successful. Those relationships are valuable,” says Drew Cline, Capital Sales Manager at CONMED.


Learn about Drew’s organization, motivation and how he has been a high-performer in his career. Can you use this recipe for success to be successful in your role as a sales rep? 

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About the Podcast

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. The Field Sales Leadership Guide podcast discusses with experienced and successful sales leaders what works and what doesn't in the sales profession. Listen in as we tap into high performing sales leaders and their passion for field sales. Join us as we pull back the curtain giving you actionable insights and strategies that you can use with your sales team.



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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 profession. 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. 


Welcome, and thanks for joining us again, on today's episode. Today's guest well, we really should have done this much, much sooner. Historically, we focus on speaking with sales leaders, and what they do and how they're responsible to drive success through their outside sales teams. Today we get to get tactical, from an individual contributor level, a territory manager level. What can and should territory reps do to drive success? How do they organize their day? How do they know who to see and when to see them? How do they communicate with their managers? What do they want and need from their managers? Our guest today, he's managed a really large three state territory in North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, with well over 1000 accounts to cover which included existing customers, stale or former customers and obviously driving net new business. He's motivated, ambitious, energetic, trustworthy, and extremely organized, which are all characteristics that make Drew Cline a perennial top performer as an individual contributor, specifically, in the med device space. He's recently earned the seat of leading others and has a passion for helping others perform at a really high level. Drew, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us.


Drew Cline  02:01

Hey, JT, thanks for having me really super pumped to be here and ready to talk about sales as always,


JT Rimbey  02:06

Absolutely. One of my neighbors in the Raleigh Durham area here as well. Drew, start out sales background, I always like hearing this, like what got you into sales in the first place.


Drew Cline  02:17

Honestly, to dive into sales was like something I always felt like in my heart I wanted to do and my inner self talked myself into thinking about going into dental school and all of that. But when I got into college, I was like, you know, I don't want to keep going to school. You know, I make good grades, but I'm bored and I want to go out there and make some money. So I decided to switch gears and go towards the path of sales and had seen a lot of people be successful in it and looked like what I wanted to do. So I chased it and made it.


JT Rimbey  02:44

Awesome. Okay, so different types of positions within sales inside and outside. What's your experience there?


Drew Cline  02:51

So inside I worked with Honeywell, we sold like healthcare IT technology, mobile printing solutions for hospitals and industrial spaces. That was an inside sales role. And then outside sales has been with Brassler or with dental sales in the medical sales device categories. And then today, I'm with Conmed, doing orthopedic capital equipment, working with the team here out of North Carolina.


JT Rimbey  03:14

Awesome. Okay, so compare the two. Do you like inside sales more? Or outside sales more? 


Drew Cline  03:17

Outside? No question. 


JT Rimbey  03:22

So you didn't hesitate there? 


Drew Cline  03:25

I just feel so limited inside. And I think that's a reason that I didn't go to medical school and like do the dental thing, because I loved the healthcare space and making people smile, whether it's being a dentist or a salesperson or what have you. But whenever I was stuck in the same spot every day, I just felt very stale. And like I wasn't making an impact and you know, a very high energy person anyway. So to be out in the field every day different and constant change is good for me. And it keeps me stimulated, if you will. So I think outside just fits my personality type and keeps me motivated.


JT Rimbey  03:56

That's awesome. All right. So let's do this high level details for the listening audience. It really helps the audience understand, like, give me an idea of number of accounts you've been responsible for on the high end and the low end, we'll start there.


Drew Cline  04:08

Okay, so low end would probably be with Conmed right now, simply because it's more of a focus strategic role, focusing on capital equipment to the hospitals here in North Carolina. That's about 30 to 50 accounts, depending how you count them. Some of them are satellite locations of larger networks. So the UNC, Duke of those. And so that's how that smaller territory impact but Brassler it was, you know, up to 1000 counts plus that were in my zip codes that I covered and covered those three states and helped manage that business over there.


JT Rimbey  04:37

So 1000 plus accounts across three states. average number of days in the field. Let's talk specifically Brassler or average number of days in the field for that account base.


Drew Cline  04:48

Four/four and a half depending on the day in the week. But usually what I tried to do is like four days in the field solid out there hustling and then had one day to get my gears doing my administrative either follow up emails or pre planning the next week and pre calls and you know us that day is usually Fridays where dental offices weren't in on Fridays anyway. So I would go and make all the admin stuff that dates where I would make the most impact when they were in office, and I could catch them and get the most time.


JT Rimbey  05:15

So four to four and a half days a week, across over 1000 accounts, average number of stops a day when you were in the field.


Drew Cline  05:23

So you know, usually the targets 15 to 20. Some days, you know, you'd have eight or nine, if it was a busy day, you had a lunch, something took a little longer, you spent a lot of time hands on with the customers. And then you'd have days where nobody had time. And you felt like the mailman stopping in those 20 offices just delivering, you know, that month's specials or trying to drum up business for the new products or if we had a product launch, but yeah, usually about 15 to 20. 


JT Rimbey  05:47

15 to 20. Was that the KPI of the company, or was that your own personal goal?


Drew Cline  05:50

So that was actually originally the directive of the company. So they encouraged us to shoot for that number. But you know, my manager there was really great about understanding that, hey, if you have eight, nine good quality calls, you know, it might take some of your day. So it was more of a hey, let's shoot for this. But quality over quantity always. So it's really nice to have a manager that got that and helped support the overall impact to the business of being able to have that quality time and not feel like you were just checking boxes trying to hit a ticker.


JT Rimbey  06:20

I've had conversations in the past with other med device med diagnostic, really specific in the dental space, it can be hit or miss if you don't have a set time with Dr. Smith. You walk in there, if he just went in with a patient, you're looking at your watch going, do I run to the next dental practice and try to get back by the time he's out with that patient? Do I try him next month? And just roll the dice and hope I get to see him then? How did you determine should you stay? Or should you go?


Drew Cline  06:49

So usually what I did is if they indicated they just went back with somebody I would ask if this was I had the relationship, you know how long it's going to be? I have a couple other stops that I have appointments for? Is there a better time to stop back in? Or if they're like, no, he can probably see in a minute, you know, wait 15 to 20 minutes after about the 15-20 minute mark is when I wouldn't step back up there and say, Hey, don't want to waste your time I've got another appointment, I've got to step into pop over there. And then can I come back at this time, or can I come back at the end of the day, or if they didn't know I would go back towards whenever I saw, hey, it looks like on the door, they close at four o'clock, let me get there like 355 to where all the patients are done for the day. So that if I do have to wait, it's not impacting my calls and other locations, but also at the end of the day, they might give you an hour where they would have normally given you 15 minutes. So you know, it kind of depends on who it was and what it was. And then the relationship with the office staff. Sometimes you have really good office staff in those locations that can be the right hand for the physician or the dentist that know what they need. They keep a good inventory. They're like, Hey, we're regular customers just want to reorder this. And then I can kind of lay the foundation of a seed of something that I wanted to talk about that maybe they weren't using and say I can swing back by but let's set up, you know, a lunch and learn or an appointment for me to be here, either next visit or at the end of the day.


JT Rimbey  08:03

We're already trending into this next topic, just the way that you started to answer those things. But you spoke about having a relationship with the front office staff. It's got to be difficult to establish a rapport and relationship when you have 1000 plus accounts in three state territories that are hundreds of miles away from your home in Raleigh Durham. How do you do that? What made you so successful?


Drew Cline  08:27

Well, I mean, like you said, relationships are huge, especially in our industry. But I think it's just my natural instinct is to form relationships. I love making friends. I love hosting parties. So it's like I treat it just like I do my personal life. You know, I genuinely like getting to know people. So any of these offices, I was wanting to get to know these people, and it's my job to be there. So what else do I have to do? You know, it's important to me to be good at my job and be successful. So, you know, those relationships are valuable. It's not like I'm just creating the relationship to sell them.


JT Rimbey  08:58

I love that you're leaving out something very specific, because I ended up getting a sneak peek at your level of organization. It's probably two years ago. I somewhat know my way around Excel. But you took this organization to a whole new stratosphere. And you were doing that apart from your employer CRM. Talk about your organizational level and what you created by yourself.


Drew Cline  09:23

Yeah, so I mean, organization to me is right up there with my relationship status. Like it's huge. I have to be organized, it gives me anxiety when I'm not so you know, I even joked and I'm OCD like my house and everything I keep super organized, labeled, what have you and it makes me happy to be organized. So when I got this list, you know, they gave us just a raw list from Excel data that was basically a sheet of all your customers and you know, their address, their phone number, whatever. So that to me when I look at that many accounts or three state territory, I'm like, Okay, this is insane. Like, I'm never gonna figure this out unless I make some sort of organization to it and carve it down. into cities and then carve their cities down into boroughs. And then you know, use all the color coding and make sure that I rank the customers based upon the cadence that they need called, or how much business they're doing. If they're buying, if they're not, if they are overdue to buy, you know, and dissect it down basically down to where I knew basically what color that customer was, what kind of customer it was going to be, before I even had to read any notes or log into a CRM or whatever.


JT Rimbey  10:26

That's actually a really good transition to this. So over my two plus years with Map My Customers, I've had the privilege of doing a lot of ride alongs with reps. When you hear CRM as an outside sales rep. What's your initial response?


Drew Cline  10:43

Initially, just knee jerk reaction is cringe. But now that I've really adopted it, especially with like, Conmed here lately, I really found the value with it. Initially, I think it was more of a tool for management tracking to see what our field sales are doing versus a tool for us to have in the field on our end. So I think that there's definitely an opportunity there to marry the two and make it valuable for everyone.


JT Rimbey  11:09

Let's talk about that marriage, because I find the needs being strategically different between you're experience at Conmed. And then when you had the three state 1000 Plus accounts, so strategic at Conmed. Like you get to attend surgeries, is that right? Am I making that up?


Drew Cline  11:26

Yep, I scrub in right along with the surgeon in the team. That's amazing. It's fun, I love it. It's one of the reasons I love my job.


JT Rimbey  11:33

So strategic sales, you obviously have scheduled surgery, so you're not just knocking on a surgeon's door and then opening up the OR for you to just walk in and talk while they're performing a surgery. So what we typically see in a strategic sale, CRMs actually meet the need much more frequently than handing a list of 1000 plus accounts, or even 150 accounts to a rep kind of giving them the good old boy pat on the rear end saying All right, go get them and the rep going, where you want me to see these in person where how do I even start doing that, which ultimately inserts the Excel wizardry that you performed in order to actually attack those efficiently. Okay, so given your success as an individual contributor over the years, you've now stepped in as a team lead, and you're now leading individual reps as well. So I guess my question is, and I've seen this all over the board, give us some wisdom on some of the best managers that you've worked for, or maybe things that you're deploying to your team? What have they done? And maybe what don't they do?


Drew Cline  12:43

Yeah, so I'm in a unique situation now where I help manage a product line for the territory managers, but I also report to their same manager. So it's more of a specialist role than a direct manager, if you will. But it's so nice, because I've had great managers to learn from back where, you know, in the past, I've had managers who are super patient and knowledgeable, which is sometimes rare in the industry, patience isn't really a thing and sales, no matter where you're at, but especially medical sales, I feel like so to have a patient understanding manager who's been in your shoes is huge. I do notice a big difference in managers who haven't worked your exact specific role or even in your company and like, carry the bag, as we say, versus the ones who have the ones who have know the pain points of it, they're a lot more understanding. And they'll be a little bit more present to assist with customer deals or overcome challenges, but also make sure that you feel heard and can almost like not sympathize, but they hear you out and they understand your pain points, and they can give you some guidance on how to get over it, which is great.


JT Rimbey  13:46

Awesome. On the flip side, any kind of battle wounds or advice on maybe what not to do,


Drew Cline  13:55

I would be lying if I said no. So I think that one huge thing is like, not treating your salespeople, like a number, make them truly feel valued and be supportive for them. You know, I've had managers in the past it's been you know, nothing but a PO chaser, I felt like and it was like, you know that you get no support. Otherwise, it's like, hey, I want results, but am I otherwise, and then you have, you know, managers that don't tell you the necessary full transparent truth, even though they claim to be transparent. It's like they tell you what you want to hear versus what the actual reality is. And I've always said, don't lie to me, tell me the truth. Even if you're like, This is the worst scenario. And this sucks, you suck. Everything sucks. And I'd be like, cool, I respect you. And we can be friends after this. But if you're gonna lie to me just to get your own best interest, then I just don't have any time for it.


JT Rimbey  14:41

Yeah, I will say that leading people can be a very difficult thing to do. And I've seen it with all of the sales leaders that I've worked with over the last two and a half years in this specific role. And I think the outside leadership role is a particularly challenging one and again, I regularly see leaders that came from a successful individual contributor role, they get into the leadership seat, and they only want to be viewed as a best friend. So therefore, they don't share the hard truth with reps that really do need to hear it. And then you've got the flip side, the individual contributor who was a top performer comes into the seat and forgets that they're still a relationship, and a person that is driving those PO’s on the back end. So I actually relate to everything you just said, I think there's, there's challenges leading all over the place. Yeah, flawed people leading flawed people.


Drew Cline  15:39

Right, we're human. But I think there's an aspect to it that if you put yourself in their shoes, you can kind of be a better asset to your team, in your role.


JT Rimbey  15:50

Thank you for that. So having the ability to get to chat with and interact with sales leaders, just across the spectrum in various industries. And oftentimes, those sales leaders became sales leaders, because they were fantastic individual contributors, it's always most exciting for me, whenever sincere genuineness comes across in helping others and Drew that fits you to a tee. So on the heels of the good, and the bad managers conversation, talk through how you're leading your team.


Drew Cline  16:21

Basically, like, you know, I tried to stand out as a leader, because I have a team of a lot of young driven counterparts that I work with, and we all report to the same manager. So it's nice for me to to see myself in them, and basically, again, because back to the relationships, I want the relationship with my team to be us, you know, resource for them to help grow their business, not just in the product space, that I'm the specialist managing that business for them, but also support them in growing as a salesperson in general. And that's one thing that even my current managers, like, tells them to ask me questions learn from me. And, you know, I spent a lot of time in the industry, as we've discussed in different sales roles. So it's like, I have a little bit of good, bad and ugly from all sides and what works and what doesn't. And, you know, by no means perfect, but comparing myself to where I was at their age, it's like, if someone had taken the time, like, I would like to spend with them and help them grow, I think I'd be even further than I am now,


JT Rimbey  17:16

The best sales leaders that I have, really I've ever worked with, or have spoken with are selfless people that put others first and it's just a joy to speak to you, man. I love the approach. Drew, in addition to your Excel expertise, and the CRMs, any other platforms or tools that you've leveraged, to really help you in the field and help you be successful.


Drew Cline  17:42

I'm very fortunate to grow up in the technology age, just because we are able to have social media and use LinkedIn and other platforms to be able to not only connect, but to get information we would have never got before back before computers even existed or information was readily available. So super fortunate there. But I also go, you know, listen to podcasts that are industry specific or sales specific to get tips and tricks. I call it the shopping cart mentality. I take what I think what worked for me and try it and what I don't, you know, I toss it out and keep going past in the aisles, if you will. And I try to check out a lot of books that seem like they would relate to what I do and tools like, you know, I've had experience using Map My Customers in the past. And that was a huge one for me, because I felt like it tied, what I wanted as a sales rep to what my management was seeking from me information wise to say, hey, we can track what you're doing and see, you know, what you're doing is effective and what's not effective. But also I was able to stay focused on my job and not the administrative side of it by just logging my activities and keeping my notes for my own personal records. But it also helps everybody see on a clearer picture of what it is. So yeah, there's a lot of great tools out there.


JT Rimbey  18:50

Awesome. Thank you drew very much. Drew, thank you so much for joining us today. It's always good to get additional perspectives. Your individual contributor background coupled with your passion for helping people absolutely invaluable. Thank you very much.


Drew Cline  19:04

Yeah, thanks, JC I appreciate you having me on and I look forward to see where you guys go.


JT Rimbey  19:08

Thanks a bunch. Thank you again for listening today. Thank you to our sponsor Map My Customers as well. Remember traditional CRMs were never designed specifically for outside sales reps. SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, HubSpot. Pega. The list goes on. They're too complex, too cumbersome, and way too administratively time consuming, along with a glaring lack of mobile friendly options. Remember that half of our customers leverage 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 CRM. Designed specifically for outside sales reps with a mobile first platform, helping to strategically segment accounts along with routing and mapping, activity logging, and much much more Remember that ease of use drives adoption, adoption delivers data and data delivers the insights. Visit MapMyCustomers.me. for more info. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast share with your friends, your colleagues, and your family members. If you do have additional questions or comments for Drew or myself, please shoot us a message. We'd love to hear from you and answer any questions you have, and certainly learn what you think about the episode. Come join us again soon. Thanks for listening.


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