Episode 9: Zach Selch, VP of Global Sales, PharmaJet
Zach Selch is the VP of Global Sales for a high tech medical company. He has sold in more than 135 countries and lived in six. At 10, Zach was living in a trailer, at 15 he was left to fend for himself, at 19 he lead men into combat, and at 33 he was the head of sales for South Asia for a Fortune 1000 multinational. For about 30 years, Zach has built up the international sales of several companies —from start-ups to publicly traded companies— four times growing sales by more than 1000%, three times bringing in the single largest P.O. in a field's history. With this, he has added hundreds of millions of dollars to the value of mid-market companies by increasing their international footprint.
Zach is passionate about driving incremental improvement across every inch of the sales process and every nut and bolt in the sales organization and has the friends and enemies to prove it. His views are often controversial, but always rational, well thought out and have produced results that can be counted in the millions of dollars in revenue. Zach is the person that companies have called in, time and again, when they have tried to grow a market or their international division and simply haven’t been able to get off the ground. Zach brings results and is happy to explain how others can do so, too.
Zach is an ex-paratrooper, a father of 3 and boxes, smokes brisket, and runs a soup kitchen when he isn’t on the road. Zach was in Germany when the wall went down, Jordan when peace with Israel was signed, had breakfast with the Dalai Lama and has been in the right place for a surprising number of right times.
Episode Transcript
Introduction
Julio Martínez-Clark:
Welcome to the LATAM Medtech Leaders Podcast. This is a weekly conversation with medtech leaders who have succeeded in Latin America today. Today our guest is Zach Selch. Hey Zach, it's great to have you here today. Welcome to the show.
Zach Selch:
Thanks, Julio. It's great to be here. This is really nice.
Julio Martínez-Clark:
Excellent. Well listeners, today we have an outstanding professional in the medical device world: Zach Selch. Zach is VP of Global Sales for a high tech medical company. He has sold in more than 135 countries and lived in six. At 10, Zach was living in a trailer, at 15 he was left to fend for himself, at 19 he lead men into combat, and at 33 he was the head of sales for South Asia for a Fortune 1000 multinational company and for about 30 years, Zach has built up the international sales of several companies —from start-ups to publicly traded companies— four times growing sales by more than 1000%, three times bringing in the single largest P.O. in a field's history. So with this, he has added hundreds of millions of dollars to the value of mid-market companies by increasing their international footprint. So I'm really, really honored to have Zach today in the show and I look forward to our episode today, Zach.
Zach Selch:
Thanks for having me. I look forward to discussing a little bit about Latin America.
Julio Martínez-Clark:
Excellent. Zach. So first please give us a description of your journey to Latin America. How do you get involved with the region?
Zach Selch:
Well, I knew I wanted to be sort of where I am today from a long time ago. I want it to be the head of global sales for a company and what people typically do is they start off as regional manager someplace or a salesman someplace and then they go up through that territory, but they don't get a lot of experience with other parts of the world. That was what I noticed when I was in my early twenties was really common. So what I tried to do on my twenties and thirties was jump around territory is a lot. So, I was a regional manager first in Africa, and then in Eastern Europe, but then what I tried to do was shift horizontally to be a regional manager in different parts of the world, eventually I was regional manager for Latin America, and you know that Latin America for virtually any manufacturing company, certainly in American company, Latin America is going to be one of the better markets. So, having a position, understanding how to sell in Latin America is really important for somebody who's going to be in charge of global sales, in my opinion. So, I got a job with a medical equipment company and actually I took over a position for about a year as acting head of Latin America. There's so many good people out there who speak Spanish and Portuguese and nobody really wanted to give me a job and my Spanish is pretty bad, but as an acting person, I was able to get a job like that and it worked out pretty well. I got to know the market's pretty well and on top of that, my wife is Colombian, so I don't speak Spanish, but I can get by in a taxi, an hotel, you know, I can understand most of what happens in the meeting. So anyway, yeah. So I did that pretty well and that goes back about 15 years and since then I've had responsibility for Latin America pretty much the whole time as part of my overall territory. So, I've hired and managed regional managers for Latin America several times and Latin America's always been a very productive, exciting market for me and aside from everything else, it's a fun place to visit, good developing, producing territory. The food's great, the music's great and most of it's safe. So it's really a good part of my life time as I spend in Latin America.
Julio Martínez-Clark:
Okay. Thank you for that. I mean, as a Latin American, I'm very glad that you have that perception of the region. So, talking about perceptions, I mean, what's your overall perception or opinion about Latin America? Some market to commercialize medical technologies or to conduct clinical research?
Zach Selch:
Well, again, you got to think about who you're dealing with. For most American small and mid market companies, Latin America to some extent as low hanging fruit. For the most part, you're dealing with two languages and you have a couple of hundred million people with just one language too. So, essentially you have a pretty good market if you're basically saying, okay, I can only really afford one regional manager to start my global expansion, and I don't really want to spend a lot on travel expenses. I want to do this, I want to dip my toe into international expansion. Latin America is in your backyard, right? So, it's some extent the low hanging fruit, a lot of the markets in Latin America, will take American products as is, as long as you know, if you're dealing with the same medical software and there's a language issue, that's another story, but again, if you have to do translation, you can get into Latin America we're translating into one language, right? So, there are some advantages that come with Latin America, just essentially being in our backyard. There's growth in Latin America in some markets, and there's also, you take a look at Latin America so the way I look at it, you have products do your?* Manufacturing company, you might have a high end product, which is really aimed at the very best hospitals, or you might have something that is a relatively inexpensive product that's aimed at mass markets right now in Latin America. You're going to have both of those. You go to some parts of Colombia, Brazil or Panama, and you have the very, very best hospitals in the world. Right? And then, pardon me if I'm excluding some other countries here, but really I can think of six world class hospitals in Colombia. I can think of multiple world class hospitals in Panama, multiple world class hospitals in Brazil that are gonna want the very, very best products. On the other hand, there are places in Latin America that they're going to want the lowest priced products that the world buys. So, really there's a range within Latin America for just about any type of product that you have. There are countries where, again, they're looking at lung transplants and hip transplants, and then there are countries where they're looking at a filtering water to make sure that people have clean water and good sewage and basic trauma medicine. So, Latin America is a very, very wide market with different areas that pretty much any American manufacturer of medical devices should be able to find a relatively receptive market for their product somewhere within Latin America.
Julio Martínez-Clark:
Okay, good. All right, Zach, getting a little deeper, let's speak about the countries or the specific territories where you've had experience in the region?
Zach Selch:
So, I haven't sold in The Guianas, and I haven't sold in Bolivia, but aside from that, I've pretty much sold in every country in Latin America. So, I've done really well for myself in Argentina, Chile, those are great markets. Certainly Brazil, I've done a lot of business over the past 30 years in Brazil, Colombia, I've even sold in Venezuela, although not in the past couple of years, but you know, Ecuador, Peru, Peru is a fantastic market and then all throughout Central America and Central America is the same type of thing as the rest of Latin America. You have Panama and Costa Rica, which are very high tech markets and then you have some of the other markets which are lower tech, lower value markets. So, it really depends on what you're selling it. Over the years I've sold different medical products, so I've sold into different markets across Latin America, of course I've sold the extensively into Mexico and the Caribbean.
Julio Martínez-Clark:
Very good. Quite an extensive experience. I'm sure you had a lot of fun, eating and seeing places.
Zach Selch:
Yeah, and you know, it's not like it's hard to get a good cigar in Latin America.
Julio Martínez-Clark:
I'm making friends as well. I mean, people are very friendly down there.
Zach Selch:
People are very friendly, yes. I have some really, really good friends. I've had places in Europe, you know, not to name names, but some of the colder places in Europe you do with people for six years and you don't know if they have a wife or children; deal with people in Brazil and the first weekend they take you home and, you know, you're barbecuing on their porch. Sometimes there's a total difference in how people treat you in different countries.
Marketing Strategy
Julio Martínez-Clark:
That's very true. Alright Zach, let's speak about the go to market strategy or market access strategy that you've seen throughout your 30 years of experience. Can you tell us what is the predominant approach that you see companies taking with Latin America? A proactive and well thought out strategy where they create a market access plan for each country where they plan to enter or an opportunistic or reactive approach where they just waiting for distributor to contact them at a trade show or through an email or something?
Zach Selch:
Well, I sort of made my living over the years fixing screw-ups that other people have had before. To be perfectly honest, and I can't tell you how often it is that people take a reactive approach to market access strategy; and I'll tell you, I can even know of a company where the founder went down to Brazil and in conversations with her interpreter, the interpreter said, well, if you don't have a distributor, maybe I could be your distributor. So, the person literally gave a distribution agreement to an interpreter who formed a company and became a distributor and had distribution rights for about four years without producing a penny. People do stuff like that, or you didn't your booth, you go to a trade show or maybe even you don't even go someplace, somebody arrives to you. They see you on the Internet, they write to you and they say, hey, if you don't have a distributor in Brazil, can I be your distributor in Brazil? And people think: oh, well, you know, I don't have a distributor, any distributor is better than no distributor, I should let them be my distributor and getting out of those is really difficult because if you give somebody distribution rights in most of these countries, obviously the government of Brazil is going to protect the Brazilian company more than they're going to protect in American manufacturer, right? So they have rights. That makes it very difficult for you to get out of this. Now, the way I like to do things, I typically say I'd never want to work with somebody who contacts me randomly. What I like to do is basically take a look at the market and say, okay, I'm selling a product, they get sold to a certain end user. Now that could be in the private sector, could be in the public sector, and those are very different markets in Latin America. Let's say the private sector in Colombia is going to be totally different than the public sector in Argentina. There are very different price points, very different needs, etc, but let's say I'm looking for a distributor who is going to have existing relationships as well as the knowledge in how to sell to the end users I want to sell to, he's comfortable with my price point, he's comfortable with the type of sales process idea with and, I'm going to build myself a profile and then I'm going to go looking for those distributors and they're going to be selling a different product. I don't want to find somebody who's selling a competing product, but if you think about it, you say, okay, I sell ventilators the ICU and I want them to go into a midrange private hospitals. So, what I'm looking for is somebody who sells monitors to ICU in the same price point, the same, you know, mid-range type hospitals and that country can I find distributor for those types of products. Once he defined a thought way, it's not that difficult to find them. Then you say, okay, there are three potential distributors in Peru, but I want to work with, I'm going to go down and talk to them or I'll reach out to them at one of the big trade shows like FEMA*? or hospital are at, I'll meet with them and I'll talk to them, I'll interview them, I'll see if they're interested; I'll pitch to them, etc. So, that's the way I like to do it myself. Personally in Latin America, I've only dealt through channels. There are other markets where I've sold direct, but in Latin America I've only dealt with channels just because of the nature of the companies I've been with when I've had responsibility for Latin America. So, typically I'm going to find the right distributors, I'm going to be working in parallel to find somebody who can do the registration for me and the regulatory affairs for me and what I like to do is pay somebody per hour for that and by that I mean somebody will say to you: Hey, I'll do the registration for you, but I'm going to hold onto the registration site of documents saying that you've given me the rights to your registration in Brazil for 10 years and I'll do it for you, and then you saved yourself $5,000 or $10,000 but somebody else now is holding you hostage for the next 10 years because you can't sell without them, and you see that a lot. So personally, I rather own the registration for these markets. Now obviously when you're with a small company, you might not be able to afford to do that in every country, but that's my preference and then typically there are trade shows, there're probably half the countries in Latin America have a local medical device trade show. I know that Chile, Peru, Colombia, Argentina does, and then there are also ones that are specific for the respiratory care, for a hospitals, safety, whatever, depending on your field. There are little conferences like that. Then there are the big conferences. Sometimes I'll show in the little conferences sometimes I'll show on the big conferences. Typically I prefer the big conferences and I prefer to have my distributors show at the little local ones that, but it really depends on where I am at the process of market access at that point and really a lot of it is footwork. You have to go and you have to train your distributors, you have to go with them the first few times you have to work with them to localize your marketing material and make sure that they get the messaging right in Spanish and Portuguese. I've done a lot of videos. It's sort of funny. I've got a lot of videos which I then had dubbed into Spanish and Portuguese of me presenting. I know I don't speak Portuguese, but boy it looks like I do, you know, putting together those tools to help your sales people sell, make sure you do your training. In my last company I had a really nice, really professional quality group of distributors, and we did an annual sales meeting of a Latin American distributors to get them together for additional training and to get them to exchange ideas and share contacts and stuff like that. So those are the type of things I do with market access and those have been very successful, couple of times I've grown Latin American territory for my company by well over a thousand percent in a few years, and my last company, they had been selling in Latin America for about 30 years and within three years I was able to increase sales by about 400% with existing distributors because what we were doing was we were hitting them with methodology, we were giving them better training material. We were pushing them to use our messaging and giving them better sales enablement tools and that type of thing and it really showed results in the sales.
Distributor Selection
Julio Martínez-Clark:
That takes me to my next questions. You're bringing up a very good point, which is a hands off management approach where you just sell products or ship products to a local distributor, let them do the rest or a hybrid approach where you had a local clinical sales agent or somebody at the head office focus on the success of the distributor; working side by side with him to generate demand. What do you think about this?