Capital Equipment King To Medrep Meeting CEO With Peter Skidmore Part 1

 

It can be a serious challenge to make time for family and even yourself as a medical sales rep in aesthetics capital equipment. Peter Skidmore  lived and loved this life. But his passion for his family took him in a different direction.

 

He stumbled upon a process that is changing the game, and it turned into a business, giving sales reps more time than they have ever had. With this process, all the legwork is done for them. Imagine waking up to a schedule of appointments that were set up for you with your most important accounts, eager to discuss your product or service.

 

Join Samuel Adeyinka as he talks to Peter Skidmore about how a career as Medical sales rep in Aesthetics led him to create MedRepMeeting, a scheduling tool and service that gives medical sales reps their time back.

 

Tune in now!

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Watch the episode here

 

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Capital Equipment King To Medrep Meeting CEO With Peter Skidmore Part 1

In this episode, we have with us another special guest, and he goes by the name of Peter Skidmore. He spent his career in aesthetics device sales. What’s so interesting about him is that he did all this without a college degree. If you don’t know about aesthetic sales, a lot of you reading who want to get into the industry might not have heard of aesthetic device sales. It’s equipment in the aesthetic space. It’s one of the highest earning industries and the most competitive.

I’m not going to spoil it and say anymore. I’m going to save it for the interview but this is an interview you don’t want to miss. Peter has shown himself to be the example of working with grit, truly having a hustler’s mentality, and getting out there and making your way. That’s what you are going to get from Peter. Again, I take things too far on these intros and get so excited. I want to tell you the whole interview but I’m not going to tell you anything. You are going to have to read this.

Make sure you tune in. This is an episode you want to read. As always, we do our best to bring you innovative guests that are changing the way things happen in medical sales. All the way, ranging from pharma and testing to medical devices and capital equipment, and in this case, aesthetics. Tune in, and I do hope you enjoy this interview.

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Peter, how are you doing?

I’m good. How are you?

I’m fantastic. No complaints. Why don’t you tell the audience who you are and what you do?

My name is Peter Skidmore. I’m working for an all-in-one platform for medical sales reps nationwide to give back time.

I like it because we can always need more time. Medical sales reps are notorious for needing more time. Let’s talk about that a little bit. How exactly are you giving a rep their time back? What’s happening?

At our company, we schedule all the meetings for the medical rep based on the doctors that they want to meet with. You can come to us and say, “We want to meet with family practice, derm, plastic, chiro, optometrists, ophthalmologists, urologist, vascular or any type of vertical in the medical space that’s practicing privately. We put you in front of the doctor.”

We do the leg work that you are supposed to do on a daily basis to create volume. We pick up the phone. We will call them on your behalf and schedule the meeting. It goes right into your calendar, and you see all the notes there. On a high level, from phone calls to meetings, everything is in line with what the rep is looking for and the physician they want to meet with.

With MedRep Meeting, you'll never have to pick up the phone again. Click To Tweet

Is this something that the company gets and the reps use it or do reps come to you and they can use this?

It’s both. Some companies pay for it for all their reps, and some reps pay for it for themselves because the company doesn’t have that budget allocation or they are using that money for marketing or whatever the case may be. We are seeing more and more of the rep go to the company and say, “We need this deal.” We are seeing it both ways, though. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an individual rep or a company. We can serve both of them.

With this service, I’m assuming your reps develop good relationships with the reps that they are working for, and it’s like a team effort for each customer.

My reps work with me and your client experience director on the type of doctors, the products, and all of those things. It’s my job to train that down to my reps and the reps that are going to be scheduling on your behalf. They know everything about what you are selling to these practices or what you want to meet with these practices on, and they are booking those meetings. Communication is key in a lot of these scenarios. You will have direct access to a client experience director who manages your day-to-day calendar per se, making sure that things are going smoothly, your meetings are going well, and you are closing deals.

When you hear about this service on the surface, it sounds like a dream. It’s almost too good to be true like, “I can go into my territory, and all my appointments can be waiting for me to step into, whether it’s a no-access doctor or a doctor that’s tough to get into, or a hospital or practice. I can have it all lined up for me, ready to execute on.” Talk to us about when people haven’t experienced your services, and then they do. What are they saying afterward? What’s it like?

They are like, “This is what we’ve always needed and wanted.” Not only do we schedule the meetings but we also partnered with a company for the biggest launch in this space in history and allowing you to walk into pre-approved doctors financially but what they are saying is, “Peter, why haven’t we had this over the last few years?” The reason is they’ve tried. They’ve tried to bring it in-house. They’ve tried to have outsourced companies do this.

 

The issue is that the people in the business that we are doing this haven’t seen it on the surface at that high of a level to understand how to create volume. When we look at this and say, “The average med rep schedules 2 or 3 meetings a day.” You have rep A and rep B that schedules 15 to 20 a day. Who’s going to win? It’s the rep that schedules 15 to 20 because there’s no way that rep A with 2 or 3 and the same vertical can create the same revenue with 5X less meetings.

To answer that question better, companies and reps are seeing this and saying, “Now we can go out and pull the best talent in medical sales and tell them they have a fully booked schedule.” Now, I can go after the top reps in the whole space and say, “You never have to pick up the phone again. We will have all your meetings on your calendar with the doctors you want to meet with.” We are saving the rep 10, 15, to 20 hours a week on the phone.

Now, they have more time to manage their current customer database, on upsell, customer service or whatever that case may be or maybe they have more time to take their kids to basketball practice. They have more time to spend with their wife, go hiking, go out on the water, go to the beach or take vacations. All of these things that I didn’t have over my time of being a rep doing 8 million, 12 million, 13 million or 10 million, all of these years, that’s the key. What I missed was the time that I had to spend on the phone to get that amount of meetings. When that same rep is doing the same exact thing scheduling 2, 3, or 4 meetings a day, I’m popping 25, 30, and 40 meetings a day. That is where we are at in that regard.

You said your time. You learned all this and created this business from your experience in the industry. Let’s take it to you now. Take us back to college. I ask every guest this. Was it medical sales in college? Where you are saying, “I can’t wait to be the best medical sales rep ever or is it something you stumbled upon?” What was the focus in college?

A lot of you who may be reading are thinking, “I just graduated. I like med sales. It’s attracted me my whole college career.” You guys went the college route. One month or one quarter into college in 2007, I realized that I could make more money than all of my brother’s friends that graduated from college by selling cell phones. This was when the flip phones came out, the texting phones, the Palm Treos, and the Blackberries with the balls. It turned from the rich people being able to have cell phones to now we are adding lines for $10, and now everybody can get a phone. I hopped into it in 2007, ’08, and ‘09 when the market crashed but everybody had a cell phone.

I was in a recession-proof space, and at that age, I didn’t even realize that. I was working every day, doing well at work while people were getting rocked in the stock market. I had no clue because I was focused on my goal of making more money than my brother’s friends that were getting out of college. After a few years of doing that, I moved out to Arizona to help my brother, who had just finished school to help him financially and ended up getting on the phone.

Aesthetics is the solution to practices that are suffering from managed care. Click To Tweet

Remember, I only went to one semester of college. I was in that company for a while. I was growing stores and selling phones. When I got out to Arizona, I had a job opportunity with a company that was later acquired by a web technology company. I was calling doctors, lawyers, and dentists. I was selling them marketing over the phone. I did well, and a year later, I got recruited by another company that did similar things. I did well there. There was a time in my life when I didn’t know where I was going and the direction I wanted to take. I was still making plenty of money on the software side.

You only had one semester of college. You didn’t even have a degree.

I didn’t have a degree. I got a phone call, and he knew my brother was the best man at his wedding. He picks up the phone and says, “Peter, your brother tells me that you are good at sales.” I want to invite you to the MLB and the New York Yankees. This is the biggest territory we do the most revenue but you have to move from Washington to Maryland. Pre-marriage, I picked up my bags, got on an airplane, and flew to Maryland. I took a job that is the lowest level of the totem pole in aesthetics, with a small base salary and OTE of $120,000, $150,000. The average rep schedules 3 or 4 meetings a day. I came in, scheduling 10, 15, to 20 meetings right away.

There are readers that don’t understand what it means to be a med rep in aesthetics, especially when you talk about the OTE. People are not familiar. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about what it means to be a rep in aesthetics?

Aesthetics is the craziest space in the medical. The golden arch is that everyone is searching to get in med sales for. Sometimes, it’s to help patients and doctors give a better quality of care to their patients. Sometimes that’s the goal for a medical rep. For me, when I looked at medical reps, I thought about the cheddar, “How much money can I make?” When he told me that in four years, some of these OTEs are $500,000, $600,000, $750,000 or over $1 million, my head lit up like a light bulb. I was the best everywhere I have been. I was number one, and now I get to go to the New York Yankees and be the twelfth man and prove to them that I’m the best.

Medical and capital aesthetics are very different. You are selling a product that can range anywhere from $60,000 to $350,000. It’s all about the story and excitement. When you go into medical aesthetics, it’s a learning game. Your knowledge is so powerful. You got to remember that these doctors meet with aesthetic reps all the time. What makes you different? What makes your product or your story different?

What kind of doctors are you calling on in aesthetics?

 

It’s wild when you look at this thing, everything from optometrists, ophthalmologists, vascular, cosmetic surgeons, plastic surgeons, cosmetic derms, medical derms, and family practices that don’t understand aesthetics and that are doing any aesthetics. Also, OB-GYNs, GYNs, chiropractors or any practice that is suffering from managed care, we are going after. When you look at this thing, high-level and reimbursements, most practices are suffering from that.

When you look at the trajectory, we have a solution, and aesthetics is a solution to that. To outpace the deficit in facts of managed care, aesthetics is a way that doctors can do that. We can get them into a place of financial freedom but at the same time, they don’t have to give up their practice to a hospital, private equity or a big group. That’s where aesthetics come into play.

You got yourself into aesthetics. Go back to where you were saying you were in aesthetics.

I jumped in and didn’t have any meetings. I didn’t know anything. All I knew was I had to meet with doctors. Creating a script and doing all these things, trying to schedule meetings with doctors, and in a week’s time, I was scheduling 10, 15, to 20 meetings a day. That evolved over the six and a half years in the space where in the end, I was able to schedule 25, 35, 40 to 50 meetings a day.

It changed the trajectory of my team and me because now, my team can worry about selling and not setting. I thought, “This is great.” I’m on every deal because I scheduled the meetings, and they are happy because they never have to pick up the phone. We were winning, and everyone was happy because when people are happy, Samuel, the money will always follow.

When you look at this thing and say, “I want to get into medical sales. Medical sales are going to make me happy.” Whether it’s pharma, aesthetics, pain management or whatever that case may be, if you don’t understand what that job is like at the macro level, then how do you know it’s going to make you happy? When you can worry about your happiness more than the job, that’s when you are going to be successful.

When you can worry about your happiness more than the job, that's when you know you're going to be successful. Click To Tweet

You are killing it in aesthetics. You are starting to see this discrepancy with booking meetings and seeing, “The more meetings I book, it makes you happy. It makes the team happy, and everybody is doing better work. The company is making more money, so the company’s happy too.” You did six and a half years of this. When did you transition from, “I love this. I see a need. I’m going to go capitalize on it?” What happened?

It’s crazy how this happened, and sometimes in life, it takes time to understand it. I moved from Maryland to Washington State. I went from the DC Metro Area, Washington State. Two years up there, and at the point when I was up there, we were in Washington State, for the first time was number one. We were crushing it. My wife and I have always said, “We want to get to Florida where the sun shines and can go to the beach on the weekend. We can take the kids to Disney and Universal. My son could go meet Spider-Man.” All of these cool things that we couldn’t get up on an island in Washington that’s an hour away from Canada. I left Washington. I transferred to another company in Florida.

At that point, Florida was less than $3.5 million. I come in July 1st of 2021, and by the end of the year, we ended up doing north of $10 million that year. A lot of changes started happening in aesthetics. People are leaving. New companies are evolving. A lot of these writings are on the wall, and I’m starting to think, “Do I want to be a rep anymore?” I was talking to my wife, some of my mentors, and my family and I explained to them, “Money is great. I’m making a lot. I’m in a position that not a lot of people get to have that don’t go to college. I created some great relationships but I don’t need to do this anymore. I don’t need to miss time with my family.”

I want to get into that. I want people to understand what that means. You said you are making great money. You are helping these practices. You are in this dream field of capital equipment and aesthetics. What was going on? Was it because you were booking so many meetings that from 6:00 AM to 9:00 at night, you were gone? What was going on that you said, “I want to transition to something else?”

When you look at med sales at a super high level, and you have big territories or small territories, it doesn’t matter. I was out of my house on Sunday and would return back home on Thursday. From Sunday to Thursday, I was away from my family but to produce the volume that we were producing, I had to be Monday morning for a coffee at 8:00, at 9:00, at 10:30, lunch at 12:00, and then an afternoon meeting. I was running 4 to 5 meetings a day, where the average rep is 1 or 2 meetings a day.

After doing this for so long and being away from my family, my wife, and my kids, watching my kids, and missing them growing up and missing so much time, it was a click in my brain. I said, “I can’t do this. Now, I’ve missed all this time with my family. I made a ton of money. We are going to be all right. I need to give that back. How do I give that back? We have plenty of money. We can survive for a good amount of time. Let me not work anymore. We are good. I can always go back and med sales. I did well, and people know who I am in the space. It shouldn’t be an issue if I ever need to get back in and do that.” We have that option.

 

Two weeks went past. We went to Disney and Universal. I have lots of time with the family, the beach, and all of these things. I woke up one morning and said, “I could probably make six figures and work ten hours a week and make calls.” Three calls later, we were there, and that’s when my company evolved. I said, “Now, I have to go get an LLC and do all of these things.” In my LinkedIn inbox from CEOs, VPs, and SVPs, “Peter, we have been waiting for something like this. What is this? I want to find out more.”

We continued growing, focusing on executing, scheduling the meetings at a super high level, and adding in the financial piece but more importantly, creating the most valuable thing in life for the reps in time. For me, as a rep, I never had any, but now, for the first time in medical sales history, you can have more time than you’ve ever had because now you can only worry about going to your meetings. That’s why this whole thing evolved. It was a mind switch of time.

Now, I work from 8:30 to sometimes 2:00 in the morning, and I don’t have much time but I have time to give my wife a kiss. She makes me coffee in the morning. I have time to take my daughter to school in the morning. I have time to watch a movie at night. In certain situations, I have more time than I’ve ever had with the people that I love because that time is irreplaceable. Once I’ve understood this at a high level, it’s changing the aspect of how a lot of reps look at life now because they have more time than they’ve ever had.

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That was Peter Skidmore. That was part one. Make sure you tune in for part two. He was barely getting warmed up, so you are definitely going to want to tune in for part two because he really gets into the industry, aesthetics, and what his company is doing that’s changing the game. Maybe you are reading this and thinking to yourself, “I didn’t even know there was aesthetics capital equipment, and I want to be all in. I want to be in aesthetics. I want to learn more. I want to understand if that is a role that I could do one day. Help me out.”

I talked to so many professionals and what I hear more often than not is that they are not clear on where they want to be. They’ve heard of medical sales. They heard of being in the OR. They might even be a nurse that’s in the OR or a customer service rep that’s interactive with a medical sales rep in the waiting room or something that’s happened that’s tuned them into medical sales.

Whether you are a sales rep, a teacher, a nurse, a customer service rep, or someone that’s a tech, a physical therapist, or even a chiropractor, it doesn’t matter what space you are in. If medical sales have come across your radar and you are in this place in your own life where you are saying, “I love what I do or maybe don’t love what I do but either way, I’m ready to do something that’s more impactful. I’m ready to do something that’s going to allow me to do more for my family. I’m ready to do something that’s going to give me a full-blown career with endless possibilities.”

I say take action and make something happen. Go to EvolveYourSuccess.com, select Attain A Medical Sales Role, and schedule some time. Have a conversation with one of us and learn what is possible for you. The reality is this. Much energy can be spent trying to get a position. You are not even sure how your resume is supposed to look. You go online and flip through job postings. You are not sure what they mean, what they are saying, or if it’s for you or not for you. You might talk to a sales rep or two and don’t even know what questions to ask them.

You might even get yourself an interview opportunity and get stuck at interview 1 or 2, maybe you don’t even get past the recruiter. Who knows what your situation is? I don’t know, but I know that if anything about what I’m saying is resonating with you in any way, shape or form, it’s time to do something different. It’s time to take an action. It’s time to go to EvolveYourSuccess.com and select Attain A Medical Sales Role. Submit the application and have a conversation with someone that can show you exactly what you could be doing within 90 days.

As always, we do our best to bring you guests that are changing medical sales with innovations that are blowing the mind left and right. I am overjoyed to bring them on the show and showcase them to you so you can learn what’s happening in this industry. This is not even the science tech. These are things that are ancillary to doing the job. It is a vast space, and there’s something out there for everyone that wants to be in medical sales. Medical sales is so vast that there’s a fit for you regardless of what space you come from.

For those of you that are in a role now and are doing your best to make things happen, it’s time to crack it up. It’s time to turn up the juice. It’s time to turn up the volume all the way to max. It’s time to really go all out but you are not sure how to make that happen. You know you are supposed to be going all out but you are not clear on how to organize your day-to-day tasks. You are not clear on how to generate that new business or where your business is even coming from.

You are not clear on how to take your sales interaction from, “That sounds nice. I’m mildly interested,” to, “I can’t wait to utilize your device, product, drug or test.” Again, stop wondering. Stop sitting there, hoping that things will be different. Take action. Go to EvolveYourSuccess.com, select Improve Sales Performance, and have a conversation with one of us. Make sure you tune in with Peter Skidmore in part two. He gets juicy. It’s going to be good. Thank you for reading.

 

 Important Links

• Peter Skidmore
• LinkedIn – Peter Skidmore
• EvolveYourSuccess.com
• Attain A Medical Sales Role
• Improve Sales Performance

 

About Peter Skidmore

As the CEO and founder of MedRep Meeting, I serve medical sales organizations and representatives who spend hours cold calling and time on administrative tasks. We help set up prequalified and quality appointments, so sales representatives can focus on closing business, increasing revenue, and spending more time with their families.
With 15 years of outside business-to-business sales experience, I found myself enjoying the process of calling doctors while others would get burnt out.

Seeing how important cold calling was, and how FEW medical reps were both talented at cold calling and closing the business. I founded MedRepMeeting to put an end to cold calling for good. Allowing medical reps to never pick up a phone to book ever again.

 

 

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