Zach Selch, VP of Global Sales at PharmaJet joins me, Jen Spencer to discuss partner channel goals, growing a channel, educating your partner sales reps and more on this episode of The Allbound Podcast.
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Jen: Hi everyone, welcome to the "Allbound Podcast." I am Jen Spencer and today I am joined by Zach Selch who is the VP of Global Sales at PharmaJet. And if you don't know Zach, he's been working in sales for the last 30 or so years, and with a lot of that time spent in the channel we're gonna have a ton to talk about with him. Zach, you've just recently transitioned into your role as VP of global sales at PharmaJet, and I know you're working on building up new channels, expanding, and empowering existing channels. Before we get into all the meat we're gonna talk about today, can you share a little bit about PharmaJet and about your role in the company?
Zach: Sure. So PharmaJet is a company that was put together to develop and sell needle-free injection technology for the vaccine market. And the basic idea is that you have literally billions of people getting vaccines, and there are a lot of dangers involved with the needles. They make it a little bit less safe. There are issues with disposing of needles. There are issues of accidental sticks, those types of things. And there's also advantages with vaccine to where in the flesh, where in the layers of the skin or the muscle you deliver your vaccine.
So if you can make it easy to deliver the vaccine in the right part of the body, you can make it more effective with less training. So that's essentially what we do. And right now our focus really is in growing the international vaccine market as well as the domestic flu market.
Jen: That is very, very interesting. And I love this innovative approach to medicine. So channel comes up in this? I think there's so many different interesting applications of growing a channel. You know, what's kind of the overview of your role there? What are you setting out to achieve for PharmaJet?
Zach: This is an interesting product for a couple of reasons. When we're dealing with the international market, we're looking really at ministries of health; government. And, you know, when you're selling to a government, they're...it can be a long sales process. You don't really have a relationship, you're looking at a very, say, long investment in the issue of developing trust. And when you're dealing with a channel, you're essentially onboarding the trust and the relationship that that channel's already developed with your customers.
So if you know who your customer's going to be...and in this case I do, it's a very specific part of the Ministry of Health of countries and you can find the right channel. So you find somebody who's actually selling to them another product today has been delivering the trust, they know that they're delivering good product and, you know, they're honest and so on and so forth. If I could get those type of channels, that accelerates my sales process, it cuts down my cost of sale because I don't have to be there 20 times. You know, I can manage the ongoing sales process through my channel. So that's the focus of what I'm doing.
Now, domestically, I have a similar thing...or actually, you could say it's similar but almost opposite. In the United States the people who are making decisions about vaccines are much, much more localized and much smaller, and it then goes back to the cost of sale. "Can I actually get out to every clinic or every place where they're going to make...where they're going to be delivering vaccines and make a presentation, develop the relationship, build rapport and trust. Well, if I'm dealing with distributors, our channel partners that have those relationships, they're getting out there, then that is gonna make my sales process a lot easier.
Jen: The beauty of a channel. That's great.
Zach: Exactly, right.
Jen: So, actually, let's dig into that a little bit more, and I'm gonna start by going backwards. So your most recent company, AMETEK, you worked within the Rauland-Borg Division. And when you were there, you grew annual sales from less than $1 million to more than $12 million in 7 years, and you did it without adding any headcount, products, or resources, which that's pretty substantial, right? That's a big accomplishment. So you gotta tell us how were you able to grow your sales that much without adding that headcount and those resources.
Zach: Well, so when I came on board to Rauland, which was the division of AMETEK that I was part of, they'd been trying for 40 or 50 years to sell internationally without any real luck, mostly because, you know, they were doing what a lot of companies do. They were taking a regional manager from the US market who thought it might be fun to sell internationally and putting them in the role, right, but without any real experience.
And we were locked into probably the wrong model of partners, the wrong profile. And what I like to do in a new role is I always start by asking a few questions: who are we selling to, why are they buying it. And that might sound really elementary, but a lot of people don't do that, and that really is going to define your channel. And as an example with some companies...and this was the case with Rauland. We had a very difficult - not difficult - a complicated product to install and to maintain, and keeping happy customers is very important.
So the philosophy from the beginning, had been "Let's find partners who we can trust to handle this very complicated technical installation and provide good technical support. And can they sell what's sort of an afterthought?" So the first thing I did was I looked at this, I said, "Okay, we need people who can do this type of level of technical support." That's great, but you can always buy an engineer. If a distributor doesn't know how to sell, you can't teach them how to sell. But if you tell them you need this type of technical person, "If you wanna be our distributor, you have to have such and such technical person and they have to do this training," then you'd wanna hire him, and in some countries they can hire him for $15,000 or $20,000. In some countries, it might be 50, 60 or $80,000 a year, but those numbers are nowhere near the cost of getting really good sales people.
So the first thing I did was totally revamp what the profile of distributor I wanted was. Now, one thing that I did that was interesting - and it wasn't my choice, but I'm not unhappy I did it - was we decided as a company that in order to maintain our reputation and our credibility, I wasn't going to fire any of the distributors even if I thought they weren't the right distributors.
So I inherited something like eight distributors, probably none of whom I would have chosen, and I let one of them go simply because they had nowhere near the bandwidth to cover the territory that was assigned to them, and that was the one distributor I had reason to let go. But everybody else, I really focused on turning them around and we were able to get them, on average, to increase their sales by about 400% and some of them even more than that through, you know, the next step.
So after we brought on board new distributors and identified a new paradigm or new model of distribution, I really started off with everybody saying, "Okay, now you're part of our sales organization." This isn't the situation where you are a customer where we're selling you something, you buy it and you do what you want with it. I look at channel as part of my sales organization, which means I wanna know what they're doing, I want information about the funnel, I wanna know who their sales people are, I want either myself or my regional managers to actually know and evaluate the sales people, know how much they're actually working for us.
And I started off with, like, KPIs from the beginning of saying, "We have X man hours of selling time around the world. I wanna increase that by about a hundred-fold within three years." And the idea there was that if our distributors were just not really getting out and focusing on us, the existing ones had to increase their sales hours with the product, and the new ones had to commit. And either myself or my regional managers were keeping track of this very diligently, which sometimes isn't that common.
Some people look at the channel and they say, "Well, I'm gonna find a channel in a country and I'm gonna ask them to buy 100 pieces a year and they're gonna buy 100 pieces a year," and they'll sell them and that's all I really need to know. But what I wanted to do and the way I liked to work was really know how they're selling, how the different people are, and it goes really in-depth. I mean, we would do evaluations all of their salespeople on a regular basis for training needs. We would do a lot of sales training and we would push people to take different courses. I would send out summaries of business books that I've read and I'd say, "Okay, I believe this is a little piece that could help you out."
On a regular basis, I would talk to distributor owners and I would say, "Look, John just isn't really the right guy. You don't have to fire him, but you have to take him off my product and replace him with somebody else." And I would do that, and about two years into the job I had a little rebellion by the existing distributors.
Jen: Oh, really?
Zach: And I said, you know... Oh, yeah. They said... And what's funny is at this point after 10 years, they loved me and they were making a lot of money. But for the two-year mark, they all actually got together, the old distributors, the ones I inherited, they actually got together and they decided that they were gonna go to my boss and say that they didn't wanna work with me anymore. And, you know, my boss supported me on that, and then I went to them and I said, "Look, I'm gonna fire one of you. I don't know which one yet, but you don't either. And if you guys don't wanna work according to the way I say, there's a good chance you're gonna lose our line. So you'll have to decide if it's worth it, you know, because you wanna exert your independence if you wanna lose the line."
And it was a big, you know, standoff, got a little tense, but then they all decided that they would change the way they worked, that they would cooperate. And, you know, some of them ended up making a great deal of money afterwards because they were selling more. And all I really wanted from them was to do things to help them sell more, but at the time they thought, you know, I was really intruding into their independence, right. They didn't like that I was asking them for too much information, I was pushing them too much.
So that's really, that's the short of it, was finding the right new distributors. You know, and being my distributor, the ones I recruited, I would probably interview anywhere from 6 to 10 distributors for every territory before choosing one. We would really give them instructions in terms of how much training they had to do, how many sales hours, what type of reporting they had to do and that kind of thing.
And, you know, they always thought this was a little much, but on the other hand by asking for them for a lot, they understood how serious we were. And then we would do things with them like get them together for periodic trainings. We would do...we divided up the world into four territories, so we would get the groups of people together on a regular basis. On odd years, we would get the local groups together. So we would have a South American Sales Conference one year and then we would have a global sales conference on the second year, and that gave a lot of opportunities for the distributors to talk to each other and exchange information.
And because I was pretty aware between myself and my RM's, of the different people's strengths and weaknesses, we could do things like say, "Okay, Turkey has the same problem that Australia's having now and they overcame it. I'm gonna have them sit together at dinner and I'm gonna, you know, throw out a little introduction and mention that problem and see if I can get them to have a conversation about it," and those type of things. And we really got different channels to support each other and share information and become very, very friendly, and also really have a feeling of belonging to a family.
And that, I think, was very powerful, because there were expenses involved. You know, we were flying people to global sales conference every two years and we were flying to a regional sales conference every two years and we would ask them to send their people to sales training and stuff like that, but you know, by asking them for that investment we made them really buy into our system and they sold a lot. That really drove sales.
Jen: Well, I mean, like you said, you looked at your channel partners and these distributors as an extension of your sales team, which is great, and that's exactly what everyone should do. And what I really like about, you know, your story is that you went in, you did research, you gathered data from these new partners to see what was working and then used that to coach the existing partners, because I think the situation that you were in where you had these partners that you inherited, right, that use it and go and sort of prospect and select, it's very, very similar to somebody walking in and now managing a sales team and inheriting reps. You know, this story, we could take out the word 'channel', take out the word 'distributor', we're just talking about managing expectations with the sales team.
But I think there's a lot of people that have been in your shoes or are in them now, and for some reason when we talk about people selling for us, with us, partners, most folks tend to be a little bit hesitant to be that aggressive, because it's almost like firing a volunteer, right? So people get a little anxious about it, but you have limited time and resources.
Zach: Right, and what's really interesting, I always say, is almost every case...and you could even say every case. I mean, almost every case, your distributor, if he's any good, if he or she are any good, they're richer than you are, they make a lot more money than you are, they might have more experience in exactly what they do, right. So, you know, when I try and explain this to people I say, "Yeah, I'm having a conversation with this guy and I say, you know, I really want you to do this, because you're gonna be more successful," and he says, "Zach, how did this year go? My boat's 100 feet long, how long is your boat? Don't tell me..." right? And that's the type of thing it's a very sensitive point.
You know, I had a distributor who I love now and I was able to get their sales up by almost 400%, and he was 75 when I took over at Rauland, and he was the only sales asset for his company covering a large country, and he was great. I said to him, I said, "Look, if you die, your company is worthless to me, and your family is gonna be in trouble. So I need you to start hiring sales people and training them, because you wanna be able to sell your company to leave something for your family." And he was furious with me, right? But I was able to drive him to hire professional sales people and other people and build his company, and we ended up building up by 300-400% of sales, which was good for me, and then when he wanted to retire he had something to sell. But you get that, and he was looking at me like I'm his kid. Why should I be telling him what to do?
Jen: Right, it's great. And you know, between building these teams and...you know, you were talking before about putting partners together at the same table, getting them to learn from each other. It reminds me of...there was a blog post you wrote that was on LinkedIn, it was called "Hobbies and Selling." So for everybody, after you're done with the podcast, go to LinkedIn, connect with Zach, you can see this article. But you talk about the benefits of seeking help from sources other than your own. And in this particular piece you talk about weight lifting, how you were able to really break a plateau, a sales rep who was able to outsell his peers two to one, all by innovating, right, and listening to other people, to someone else's innovation, then using their expertise to kinda change a tactic to fill a need. I'd love to know, you know, how do you see this translate in the channel, because today, channels are not as much two-way streets anymore, they're becoming these very complex ego systems. Love to hear your thoughts on this.
Zach: So just to repeat the story, sort of, I learned when I was probably 25 or so. I had a channel and there was this guy, a salesman, who was taking notes in a very unusual way. And none of this...and his boss had sent everybody to this class to learn how to take notes, and he was the only one who adopted it. And then later on in the year I found out that he was by far the best performer in his team, right. Like, he outperformed everybody else in his team by at least two to one.
And I really learned from that the idea of you should always be learning, you should always be honing your skills, taking yourself up, even something as small as note-taking, right. I mean, how many...we all take notes, we all say, "Well, you should ask people questions, you should gather information," right? But if you're not documenting that well, you're not doing your best job, but how many of us go out and really work at note-taking? So I took that as a really important lesson, and that was almost 25 years ago, more or less.
So what I try to do every year is, first of all, I try and read probably between 6 and 10 very specific business books every year, and they're usually on a subject, open-ended questions for instance, or you know, a certain type of way to prepare a slide deck, different things like that. And I'll read the book and, you know, I'll go to a couple of seminars or workshops every year. And what I try and do is then take that stuff and prepare it into training for my channel sales organization, and sort of I see that as part of my job. So what I'll do is I'll say, "Okay, you know, I'm gonna take this 300-page book. I'm gonna take two ideas from it, and then I'm going to set up a webinar, and I'm gonna first train my regional managers, and then I'm gonna train all of the salespeople." And now this also brings another value to the owner or manager, because if I teach them a good trick that isn't related to my product, they're gonna be able to use that selling other products too, right.
So I'm giving them an advantage. I'm increasing my importance and my mind share with the partners, but I'm also giving them a tool that might help them sell a little bit more. And, you know, what I've heard from that is also sometimes it even drives people... You'll have sales people who say, "You know what? I sort of felt that I had everything I really needed, and then you taught me this and I thought, 'Maybe I should be reading my own 10 books a year.'" And it sort of helps convince people to get back onto the self-educating type of path, because that can be...you know, sales people really should be constantly learning, in my opinion, to develop their skills.
Jen: Excellent. I agree. I don't think there's...I mean, think most people do agree with that completely. I wanna pull us...let's pull in, going back to the present. So we've been talking a lot about a lot of your past experience. You're at PharmaJet now, we got to understand a little bit more about what that company's doing. You're partnering with some interesting organizations like the Serum Institute, and its really innovative healthcare. Can you get into a little bit more detail about how your partner program is set up? Because I imagine there's this one layer of education marketing that's going on, there's the distributors, there's like the in-office sales that are happening. I just would love to know, you know, how are you organizing this to really maximize collaborative partnership?
Zach: Well, so it's very interesting. We are essentially selling tools to help deliver vaccines, and vaccines are purchased in a very unusual way. And again going back to what I said before, I really like to try and think from the beginning that your sales organization should be a mirror of how people are buying your particular type of product. So internationally, the people who are buying vaccines and things that have to do with vaccines are a very limited number of people.
You have a country that might have 200 million people and the decisions for all their vaccines are being made by 1 or 2 people who are part of their central government. And so what's really important to me is to be able to find those people, give them the information they need, help them understand that they can trust us and then help move forward the sale, right? That's key to me. But I also need... You know, what's gonna happen as I go...you know, let's say I go to Bolivia and I meet with the right person and he loves the product, and then I come back or I go to another city, and then he remembers he has another question, right? He wants to know more information. Well, I don't wanna have to go there 20 times over the course of the sales process.
Now, if I have the right channel who has a good relationship with that guy already and I can make sure that my channel handles all that ongoing questions and the issues and the back and forth along the sales process, that really takes a lot off of me that simply would make the whole sales process not cost-effective. So that's really what I'm looking for.
So, internationally, I'm looking for a very specific, focused type of partner. And of all the products I've ever sold, this is probably the most focused type of partner that I'm looking for in that sense. Now, domestically, there's tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of potential customers for my product in the United States and I need to be able to reach them. I can't afford to do it directly. So again, I need the right channels for that and it will probably involve multiple channels because if you think about who vaccinates in the United States, well, your pharmacy chains vaccinate, your doctors' offices vaccinate, your employers vaccinate, right? And those are probably going to be separate channels, so I need to find the right channels to reach those types of people.
What's very interesting about this is people make decisions about vaccination in a very focused way, time-frame wise. It's almost like selling Christmas trees. You know, if you offer a Christmas tree for $3 in May, nobody's gonna buy it, right? No matter how fantastic the tree is and how great the deal is. People have a very specific timeline where they say, "Well, I have to figure out what I'm doing about flu shots, you know, and I'm gonna make that decision...for the 2018 flu season, I'm gonna make that decision in April of 2017." So what I really need is my channel to be talking to the customer during, you know, a 60-day period about my product, which is on one hand good, because if you say to your channel, "Look, what we really want from you is, every time you go into the customer to remind them about our product, that's asking a lot of the channel. But if you basically say to your channel partner, "Look, once a year during this six-week period, we want you to present our product," that's a very different ask from your channel.
The other thing is the starting price of this, you know, a doctor or a pharmacist can really start using this for very little money. So the cost of buy-in for the customer, for the end-user customer, is very low and the return on investment is very clear. So from a channel perspective, I think what I believe has happened with us is, in the past we've made the wrong asks from the channel partners in the United States, which has sort of slowed down our sales. But I think what we really need to be asking from them is a very, very doable, reasonable, focused sales process, you know, very, very reasonable, and the return is, in my mind, very obvious.
So, well, that's sort of where I am. I've been getting a lot of very positive feedback from both international and domestic channels that see this as a great addition to their portfolio.
Jen: Yeah. Well, it sounds like you've made a ton of headway in a short period of time, and I'll be anxious and eager to catch up with you a little bit later down the road and see how things are going. Maybe we can have you back for a recap of what's transpired.
Zach: Oh, that would be great.
Jen: Wonderful. Well, before we wrap this up, Zach, at the end of my podcast, I like to ask folks some more personal questions about themselves just so we can get to know you a little bit better. So if you're up for it, I've got four simple questions for you.
Zach: Sure!
Jen: All right. So first question is what is your favorite city?
Zach: Oh, wow. You know what? I live in Evanston, Illinois, and having traveled around a lot...like, I've done business in more than 100 countries, I've lived in 4 or 5 countries. This is a very, very comfortable place to live. So if you're asking me what's the best place to live, I'm very happy at Evanston, Illinois.
Jen: Okay. That works. Second question, do you consider yourself an animal lover?
Zach: I have a corgi, and yes. So I did not think that I would love a little furry dog, but I am very, very fond of my corgi, yes.
Jen: What is your corgi's name?
Zach: Wingate.
Jen: Oh, nice, very nice.
Zach: Yeah, Wingate was a British World War II general, so I gave my kids a list of potential generals they could choose from and they chose Wingate.
Jen: That's hysterical. The way that I name pets in my house is authors' names. I was an English major, and so...
Zach: There you go.
Jen: Always funny hearing how people come up with their pets' names. Okay, next question, Mac or PC?
Zach: PC. I have never been a Mac fan.
Jen: All right, and last question. Let's say I was able to offer you an all-expense paid trip. Where would it be to?
Zach: Oh, wow. Probably Cambodia. I have never been, and it's someplace my wife really wants to go, is probably Cambodia.
Jen: I like that the decision is based on where your wife would like to go. I think that's a great answer, Zach.
Zach: You gotta keep your wife happy. There you go.
Jen: Awesome. Well, thanks so much for sharing your experiences, your insights, it was a pleasure. If any listeners want to reach out to you personally just to kinda follow up, connect with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Zach: So I would just suggest reaching out to me on my LinkedIn profile, there's contact information there. You can send me an email or a personal message through LinkedIn. Just to make sure it's clear, because I don't know how this appears on your site, my last name is Selch. That's Sierra, Echo, Lima, Charlie, Hotel, and my first name is Zach. So if you look me up on LinkedIn, you'll find me and you can reach out to me.
Jen: Perfect, yeah. Be sure when you reach out to Zach, let him know you heard him on the podcast so he has frame of reference. That will help, and you'll wanna do that so you can also check out that article, and he's got others up there too that are great as well.
Zach: Yeah, thank you.
Jen: So thanks, Zach, go ahead.
Zach: Oh, I was just gonna say I put up a series of articles about hiring a regional manager that I'm very proud of. So that's something...you know, I'd suggest people...if they wanna read it, they're more than welcome to.
Jen: Wonderful. I recommend that as well. So thank you again for joining us, and thanks everyone else for listening in, and we'll catch you next time with an all-new episode of the "Allbound Podcast." Have a great day.
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