The medical sales industry is such a lucrative and rewarding field, but it calls for the right planning, strategies, and attitude. If done well, a six-figure career might be waiting for you down the line. Chris Larsen brings in sales coach and host of The Medical Sales Podcast Samuel Adeyinka Gbadebo to discuss what it really takes for medical professionals to break into the industry. Samuel talks about the importance of aligning with your beliefs in order to succeed, keeping a constant learning attitude, and always having the preparedness to fail. He also shares how they help aspiring individuals at Evolve Your Success to discover their full potential that will help them make it big once they leap into the medical field.

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How To Break Into Medical Sales And Build A Six-Figure Career With Samuel Adeyinka Gbadebo

If you’ve ever considered getting into the pharmaceutical or medical device sales industry or want to take the leap to your next level in the industry, you’re not going to want to miss this interview with Samuel Adeyinka Gbadebo. Samuel is the Founder of Evolve Your Success. He helps professionals and medical manufacturers reach their highest potential. If you’re interested in getting into the pharmaceutical or medical device industry or taking your career in those industries to the next level, you’re going to love this show.

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Samuel, welcome to the show.

How are we doing, Chris? I’m glad to be here.

I’m doing great. I always love our conversation. For anyone that hasn’t had a chance to listen to your wonderful podcast that hasn’t seen your background, please share with the audience where you are and a short history of how you got here.

What you’re talking about is you might have heard The Medical Sales Podcast and that’s all part of my business. I have a company, Evolve Your Success and we help people in the medical sales profession. We help professionals that want to get into the industry, professionals that want positions within the industry and we help professionals that are working as a team and they want to do better. Anywhere from a CEO that maybe has a company that’s a salesforce of 20 to 100, we can work with them or we can work with individual sales professionals or we can work with their managers.

We want people to perform well in the sales role and we want people that aspire to be in those roles. We discovered this because I was a rep and I started off in pharmaceutical and went biotech. I know that in this rep role, if you’re not careful if you’re not managing your career well, you can easily get lost in that role, get real stagnant and in 20 or 30 years, you’re in the same space. You’re wondering why in the same space but if you’re careful to navigate from the beginning and you understand some things. If you’re trying to get in, then you can have a bright career. That’s what we want to help people do.

I love it. In our book, we talked about the Make, Keep and Grow Strategy. Personally, I had a real similar path which is why we enjoy going back and forth so much. I started in pharmaceuticals myself and spent a couple of years and I chose sales because it is the best career if you want earnings, capability and flexibility. I agree wholeheartedly and this is why I wanted to have you on the show, Samuel. I wanted to share some of your secrets and what you do with Evolve Your Success and do that but why did you choose sales?

Initially, I wanted to be a physician. That was way back when I went to college. I got into a BioMed program with UC Riverside and it was a steep program. I did pretty well in it but as I started getting closer to the actual opportunity of becoming a physician and getting ready for med school, I started shadowing some. I came to the conclusion that I love medicine but I don’t see myself in this hospital setting and working in this space for the rest of my life and I’m not sure I see myself in a patient-facing role on a consistent basis either.

I was working at a lab at the time. There was a scientist and we were working on a molecule for kidney function. I was talking to him about what my options were and I’ve spent the last few years doing neuroscience, biochemistry and all these things. What do I do with it? He said, “You should look into the business side of medicine and look into pharmaceutical sales. You have a great personality for it. You understand the science easily and you might find a career in that.” I applied to three companies after that. One of them hired me and the rest is history.

That’s awesome. It’s amazing because I was in biomechanical engineering, so it’s similar. I was looking at the world of medicine back then and this is before all this stuff has happened here. I went through a similar process and I had no idea this world existed when it came to medical sales. Talk a little bit about your pharmaceutical start, how you moved into biotech and where you are now.

The natural progression for pharmaceutical sales is either management or more sales. That’s the natural progression or switching industries altogether and getting into something medical device, genetics or biotechnology. That’s the track I followed, I knew I didn’t want to be in management. I loved what I was doing. I love the interaction and you’re right, when it comes to a sales position in medicine, it’s the best combination of flexibility with your time, great compensation, great benefits and a bright future.

You’ve got to deliver. You’ve got to be a performer to experience all of that but the opportunity is there to experience that. I knew that I didn’t want to ascend the corporate ladder so to speak but I loved the development that comes with helping people do so but that’s not even it. I’ve got to get a little personal if you want to know why I’m in this developmental space and why I eventually did a developing company called Evolve Your Success. Back in 2012, I was married and I was doing well. I was performing. I don’t remember which year it was but I had already come off about three winner’s circles, so I was doing well. I was a foreman. This is great and I experienced a divorce.

For some people, especially nowadays, it happens so often. Some people look at it as part of life but for me, it wasn’t. For me, it was a big problem and I tied getting divorced as a failure in my identity and I internalized it. It affected my entire outlook on life and I thought that because I’ve experienced this, I’m going nowhere. It’s over for me. It’s a negative way of thinking and it’s because I always held myself to such a high standard professionally and personally.

I started looking into how people do this. How do people go through intense personal experiences and continue to perform with everything else and also personally? I found out about these development groups and you’ve heard of them. Landmark is one of them. That’s pretty popular. There are some others out there. Tony Robbins has a whole thing of courses you can take and things like that. I found one of these groups, I signed up and it was life-changing. Not only did I get to rebuild myself and my abilities but now I started doing things that were much bigger and better than what I was doing previously.

After my experience, with one of those organizations, I not only got a better position, it almost doubled what I was earning. I was moved and I was able to handle my divorce and through all the details of that. I came out a completely different person on the other side. That’s when I said, “I want to dedicate my life to this. This is where it’s at because I get to continue to stay in the space and stay in the work and I get to continue to help other people make their lives as big as they can possibly see.”

That’s amazing in a lot of ways. I want to talk about Evolve Your Success but you said something that brought back a memory and I remember talking to one of my managers. This was probably more than much more than a few years ago. I told him that I had a coach and he was like, “I can be your coach.” It’s interesting because you went outside of the company you’re working in to find developmental expertise and resources. Can you talk about why you did that? Because a lot of these pharmaceutical companies have phenomenal training programs. We have phenomenal training within a lot of the medical device industry where I spent my time. Talk about how you decided to do that?

It’s funny you say that. I was in a developmental training program with the company I was working for. It was a management training program, so they’re training you to become a manager. They include some introspective work but the development that I got to experience with these groups was deep. I’m talking about deep into work where you’re not assessing how you can help lead other people and how you can set a better example but you’re assessing what you truly believe in person and how you align your identity and what you align our identity to. When you’re asking those tough questions you have the opportunity to sit with yourself and say, “What is my life philosophy?”

From what I’ve seen, you included Chris, people that are succeeding in things and taking life to a whole new level, in any way you want to see it, a lot of them are aligned. Whatever they believe in, they’re aligned to that belief. That gives them the freedom to focus enough on whatever it is they want to accomplish. That level of depth within an organization like a pharmaceutical company. I saw it in these development organizations that focused on bringing that out of a person.

I agree with you and I was fortunate when I was with Medtronic to go through a terrific leadership development program, which was at least eighteen months long and it’s the same thing. When I was with NuVasive and a ton of value, I see Start with Why on your desk behind you. It’s fantastic and it brings to my memory, Dean Graziosi. He has a book and he talks about the Seven Levels of Why and getting down to why you’re doing what you’re doing.

The thing is, as professionals, we focus on certain metrics and what our team has to do but at the end of the day, I always believe that if you want your people to be successful, you’ve got to know their why. You’ve got to know why they’re doing it whether it’s for their children even the new boat that they’re buying or something that they’re going out there and doing. Tell us why you developed Evolve Your Success, what your mission is and what it’s all about?

After I had this visit with the developmental organization, I wanted to get into that work. I said, “This is it. I want to be in work.” I said, “How can I do this on my own?” Because I have the entrepreneurial bug. I always want to start my own thing and I said, “How can I take what I’ve learned and use it with something that I want to start.” I started consulting sales reps. It wasn’t only medical sales reps, it was any kind of sales rep, so people in the resort industry, real estate agents and the food industry. You name it, they were from everywhere.

I consulted on performing higher now I know that’s a cliché. High performance is a cliché word but what we were doing is, “How do you get numbers? How do you get better sales numbers? How do you appreciate what you’re doing as a professional?” I got to experience some interesting things. For some people, we were able to go from the middle of the pack performance, the top 10% performance but other people decided to realize that they didn’t even like what they were doing. That’s why performing and we started entertaining where they would perform. They transitioned industries and now they’re killing it.

While that was happening, I started to see that a lot of people wanted to get into medical sales and I started seeing the need that this career is getting harder to get into people. The secret’s out. People are learning that they can find a career that allows them to talk to doctors on a regular basis, utilize their own brain and learn all this information about how science works, how medicines work and how devices work and also be challenged to run and make magic happen.

When you think about it, that’s a beautiful game. A lot of people started to find out about it and now everybody wanted to do it. I started to say that I want to be a part of that. I want to help people get into this space because I see these highly qualified people that do not know how to communicate. They didn’t know what to show and they didn’t know what to do. It was rough because I’m saying, you’d be excellent at this but you can’t because you don’t know how to deliver yourself so someone can believe that you’d be a great candidate. That’s where part of Evolve Your Success started.

We were already working with a few small teams and we’re working on all these different sales professionals so we’re saying, “Let me take all my credibility and all my experiences, which is medical manufacturing and let me put it into that industry. Let me help people that want to get into this industry do the same.” That’s where the training started and the program opened up where we help people get in and got the ball rolling.

Probably about the end of 2018 is when we started putting it all together after our experience with sales reps in 2016. By the time COVID happened, we were rolling and COVID ramped everything up because we were already virtual. Everybody was forced to become more virtual and we got a lot of exposure. People started the program and people experienced success both in the developmental side, with teams, sales professionals, people getting positioned and we went full force and that’s where we are now.

You do a phenomenal job. I think back to when I was trying to break into the industry and when people called me for advice and I said, “You’ve got to be patient. It’s going to take you a while.” I feel fortunate I have somebody to refer him to that has a process to help them out and do this.

Especially now, people have been displaced. Competent people have been displaced. The best of the best from different industries want to get in and it’s extremely competitive. Some people tell me, they’ve been trying. Some of the clients we work with have been trying to get in for 2 to 3 years and it’s not working. They work with us and 3 to 6 months later, they got the position of their dreams. There’s a science to this now there’s a way to present yourself and it’s about showing these things to get the position. It’s about learning how to show yourself the right way and you’re going to see all these opportunities right in front of your face and that’s what we’re teaching people to do.

I always tell people, “If you can’t sell yourself, you’re not going to be able to sell a product.” There is a science to it. There’s a way about it and it doesn’t have to be complicated. What I love is that you talk about mindset, which you and I are huge on, systems and communication. Walk us through your methodology with Evolve Your Success.

We have it broken up into three areas and you can align those areas on what you mentioned. The first thing we believe in is your personal brand. You can correlate that to the mindset too. Everyone has a brand and what we believe in is and what we found to work is when your brand is consistent with being a performer and someone that doesn’t want to get into the position you want to get into but someone that is ready to get into the position you’re getting into. There’s a big difference.

You can be a medical device sales rep that’s selling implants and want to get deeper into med-tech and you’re going around telling everybody you want to get into med-tech and you’ve already established a brand. Could that get you a position in med tech? Maybe if you know the right people and you demonstrated great work ethic but imagine how powerful your message would be if it wasn’t about, “That’s Jack and he was going to med tech.” It was, “Jack is so ready for med tech. If an opportunity comes up, I know I want to plug Jack right away.” That’s a personal brand. What we do is help people create that on all facets. You have your personal brand, what people say about you but you also have a personal brand online. Let’s go back to where we are now. We’re more than ever.

We’re way different from twenty or so years ago.

Come on. We’re way different from a few years ago. We’re more virtual than ever and things keep happening that are forcing us to get even more virtual. This whole online brand, what your online brand used to be something, “You have an online brand? No. Yeah, no, maybe.” Now it’s, “Do you have an online brand?” If you don’t, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Half of the business that’s conducted nowadays is done through an online platform like what we’re doing. Why wouldn’t you position yourself to be an extremely relevant power ready for an opportunity? To do that you need a personal brand so that’s the first thing we do. We focus on your personal brand and your personal profiles. LinkedIn is a huge part of that and also your resume. The different things anyone can see about you, who you are, who you say you are and what you believe you can do.

After that, we go to foundational skills, so what we mean is especially when it comes to getting a position and making the case that you can do it. There are these foundational skills, the six things you need to understand. How to answer certain interview questions, how to communicate with a decision-maker before the interview and understand how to enroll people to vouch for you when you’re trying to go for that position. We consider all of those foundational skills and most people don’t know them or even experienced people.

If you’re a performer and you’ve been doing your thing for 6, 7, 8 or 10 years, you haven’t interviewed for a long time. You’ve been doing your job and you’ve been doing it well but when you’re now put on the spot to make the case for why you believe you should be in this position you don’t know what to say. You find yourself stumbling, mumbling and you’re a mess. You’re wondering what connects here and that’s where these foundational skills come in.

However, you might not love that you might still love the science and you might want to wait and account offices and sell drugs either as a pharmaceutical sales rep. It doesn’t mean that you have no options. There’s a whole world of like I said out there that you might enjoy. That’s something that we’re trying to do. We educate people on all the different industries you can get into and honestly, Chris, it’s less about what’s the hottest thing and it’s more about what’s best aligned to how you want to lead your life.

It’s the best fit. That’s perfect. I talked to a lot of people, they want to get into orthopedic sales because they hear it’s lucrative and I always say, “Have you thought about this? Have you thought about that?” You have to think about what you enjoy. It’s like a sport. You may be good at a sport but you might not like it but that doesn’t mean you can’t be good at another one. My personal story, my dream job was selling orthopedic implants, hips, knees, shoulders. After a year, I got called and introduced to the spine industry, specifically biologics and I was like, “That’s not in my mind.” That’s what I thought but I started to learn about it. I was like, “What a complex industry that has all this in front of it and it turned into a wonderful career with a lot of wonderful friends and a challenging environment.”

That may be the most important thing that I’ve heard you say, which is to think about what you enjoy and what you’re good at but be open to what’s out there and consult with somebody like Samuel that can give you some of this perspective. Samuel, we’ve talked a lot about the industry and how to be successful, which is what you do. I’d love to hear how you balance all this. You have a fantastically successful career, you have this business that has been growing over the past few years and you have a family. How do you balance it all? What are your secrets?

Be open to learning how to balance it better. That’s the secret. The secret is don’t ever stop learning. There are so many philosophies out there on how we should be conducting our daily lives. One of the things that can work with me well is understanding that a lot of life is about conditioning. What you conditioned yourself to do on a regular basis is going to produce a lot of the results that you experience. If you conditioned yourself to go to bed at a decent time so you can always wake at a decent time and you can condition yourself to take in new information and dedicate time to learning something new every single day then that’s going to bear fruit.

If you condition yourself not to do any of that and fly by night seeing what your day brings, that’s also going to produce fruit. The best thing I would say around how I do it is I try to find the best ways to maximize my conditioning and the things that I said, I go to bed. I try to go to bed at the same time every night. I try to get up early every single day. You don’t have to do 4:00 AM or 5:00 AM but consistency is powerful.

If you can develop great habits around when you sleep when you wake and what your day should look like, we talked about this before, Chris. You’re a big fan of planning your entire week well ahead of schedule. One hundred percent if I didn’t plan the majority of my year ahead of schedule, a lot of things that I’m able to accomplish wouldn’t happen and that all comes with conditioning. People should be aware of their conditioning and always be thinking, “At this moment, is what I’m doing something like to who I want to be? Also, is what I’m doing going to benefit the results I want to create?” If you find yourself saying, “No, no and no,” you know what you need to do.

It’s hard to be honest with yourself. It’s hard to look in the mirror and do that. I asked everybody this question. If you had to go back to your 25-year-old self and he was looking in the mirror and you were looking back, what advice would you give him?

I’ll tell myself, honestly, I would say, “You need to give yourself some grace. Set your goals. Whatever you’re trying to accomplish and as you go after it, give yourself some grace.” If I can look back and think about what I didn’t do a good job of, I didn’t give myself grace. At least what I fell victim to is I would beat myself up about certain things. Sometimes it would be warranted for development but a lot of times it was not and it was counterproductive because when you beat yourself up, you tend to get in this. You’re not proactively going after things and your creative, innovative and off. You’re working in survival mode. That does not bear a lot of fruit compared to being in this thrive mentality and you’re ready to tackle the day and conquer your day. Giving yourself grace is critical and definitely something I would tell myself if I can go back 25 or so years.

I love it. You talked about habits, building success and taking something that’s a little more qualitative and talking about being forgiving when you have to get up and get beat down. Sometimes, it’s okay. That’s the process that life goes in.

It’s even cliché now. Fail fast and fail often. You can get good at that and be and progress well if you’re giving yourself grace as that’s happening.

That’s terrific advice. Samuel, you’ve given so much good advice here. If people are reading they want to get a hold of you. They want to learn more about the programs that you have at Evolve Your Success or maybe even work with you one on one personally, what is the best way for them to get a hold of you and learn more about what you do?

They can go to EvolveYourSuccess.com and find me on LinkedIn. They can send me a direct message or they can email me at Samuel@EvolveYourSuccess.com.

Excellent. I appreciate you sharing so much value with our audience and it’s always a pleasure to speak to you.

Definitely, thanks for having me.

This episode is sponsored by Money Insights and their investment optimizer strategy. In my book, I share how I use this same strategy starting over a decade ago to invest my money in two places at one time. This strategy has been used by the wealthiest for generations for estate planning, minimizing taxes, preserving wealth and increasing stability for their investments. You can do the same thing. In addition, you can build a plan to build an emergency fund, pay for college, fund a business, plan for retirement and ultimately optimize your total financial picture. To find out more information, check us out at the Banking link at NextLevelIncome.com.

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Important Links:

• Evolve Your Success

• The Medical Sales Podcast

• LinkedIn – Samuel Adeyinka Gbadebo

• Samuel@EvolveYourSuccess.com

• Money Insights

• Next-Level Income

• Apple Podcasts – The Next-Level Income Podcast

• https://EvolveYourSuccess.com/company/

About Samuel Adeyinka Gbadebo

Personal challenges empowered Samuel to focus on human development and performance which led him to become an ICF certified professional Coach. Hence, Evolve Your Success was born.

As CEO of Evolve Your Success transformational programs, Samuel Adeyinka Gbadebo takes his 14 years of medical sales experience to empower professionals to enter and thrive in the world of medical sales, Samuel has identified the solutions to address the challenges of sales professionals crossing over into medical sales and thriving in the industry.

He has helped professionals attain medical sales positions utilizing mindset and proven systems. He has also helped medical sales professionals achieve success and personal fulfillment through his trans-formative coaching methodology.

Samuel is the host of the highly-rated “Medical Sales Podcast”. In his free time, Samuel enjoys spending time with his family and pursuing an active lifestyle in Long Beach, California.

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Tagged: medical industry, full potential, medical professional, six-figure career, beginner’s mindset, embracing failure, Group 2