What the Best Medical Sales Reps Know That Nobody Taught Them
Featuring Landry Roberts, Director of Sales, Galt Pharmaceuticals
There’s a version of the medical sales job that still exists on paper. You learn the product, you get in front of the customer, you pitch your product, and you move on to the next account. Rinse and repeat.
That version is becoming harder and harder to execute. Not because the product isn’t good, and not because reps aren’t working hard enough. But because the field itself has fundamentally changed, and the training hasn’t kept up.
The reps pulling ahead right now aren’t just more motivated. They’ve figured out what the job actually requires in today’s environment, often through experience, trial and error, and mentors who were willing to be honest with them.
We sat down with Landry Roberts, Director of Sales at Galt Pharmaceuticals, to get into what that actually looks like. His perspective is worth paying attention to, not just because of what he’s built at Galt, but because of how he got there. Landry didn’t come from pharma. He came from logistics, one of the largest logistics companies in the world. And that background, the one that would have gotten his resume screened out at most traditional pharma companies, turned out to be exactly what the job required.
The Industry Has Been Wrong About Who Belongs Here
For a long time, pharma experience has been treated as table stakes for field sales. It makes intuitive sense: complex products, regulatory constraints, clinical conversations. Shouldn’t you already know the landscape before you walk in?
Landry’s answer, and Galt’s track record, challenges that assumption pretty directly.
“The industry ‘norm’ of hiring reps with a ton of pharma experience as a matter of necessity is wrong. Not that the experience is a bad thing. But I look at it like a blank canvas when you bring someone in from another industry. You don’t have to untrain them or expect them to unlearn certain habits. With great training and corporate support, the blank canvas can become what you need much easier than a picture that is already established.”
The blank canvas idea matters because it points to something the industry has consistently undervalued: genuine relationship-building ability. The kind that either shows up in the interview or it doesn’t, and no amount of product training creates it after the fact.
“I will take genuine personality and relationship building ability over experience every day.”
For Lobby members who came up through non-traditional paths, or who are thinking about what actually matters in this work, that’s worth sitting with.
Getting the Yes Is Just the Beginning
Here’s the thing about the way most reps are trained: the training tends to stop at the prescription.
Get in front of the provider. Build rapport. Make the clinical case. Get the commitment. Move on.
Most sales frameworks treat that sequence as the finish line. In today’s field, it’s closer to the starting gun.
Landry frames it this way: in a hundred visits, you’re going to hear 99 nos before you get to that one yes. So yes, you train for the yes. But the more important question is what happens after it.
“Some yeses come quickly; others take time. What doesn’t change is how critical account management is after it happens.”
This is where a lot of reps lose ground they don’t even know they’re losing. The provider said yes. The script got written. And then somewhere between the provider’s office and the patient’s hands, things get complicated. Prior authorizations, specialty pharmacy routing, insurance hurdles, callbacks to the office, a patient who can’t get what their doctor prescribed. Confidence in the product erodes, not because the product failed, but because the process did.
The reps who understand this build a different kind of trust with providers. They help them understand not just why a product is the right clinical fit, but why the patient is actually going to get it.
“When it becomes less about sales and more about adding value, that’s when real success happens.”
The Fulfillment Conversation Is Now a Sales Conversation
The back end of the prescription process used to be someone else’s problem. PBM dynamics, specialty pharmacy partnerships, copay assistance, prior auth support, these were administrative details that lived behind the scenes.
They don’t live there anymore.
Increasingly these conversations are happening in the exam room, showing up as provider hesitation rather than questions. A great product doesn’t get prescribed if a provider isn’t confident the patient can actually access it, and that confidence gap has quietly become part of what a rep has to address.
At Galt, that’s a core piece of how their reps are trained. Getting the script written is only part of the job. The other part is making sure there’s no friction between that script and the patient.
“Our goal as reps is for there to be no negative static getting back to the provider’s office in the fulfillment process. Ensuring the fulfillment process is efficient is one of, if not the most important piece of the puzzle.”
In practice, that means knowing which pharmacies are partners, understanding the copay assistance and cash pay programs available for uninsured or underinsured patients, and being able to walk a provider through the process with enough specificity that they feel genuinely confident. Confident enough to put pen to paper.
The reps who can do that are operating in a different conversation entirely.
The Relationship vs. Business Operator Debate
Ask ten sales leaders where they land on relationship builder versus business operator and you’ll get ten different answers. Ask Landry and you’ll get the most honest version of the conversation.
“I will always lean towards the relationship builder personally. But there is certainly a balance. Every territory is its own small business in a lot of ways. So understanding how to manage time and resources efficiently is critical. If you’re a great relationship person but are disorganized and don’t manage your time and resources well, what good is that skillset?”
His number: 51% relationship builder, 49% business operator.
Almost even, and deliberately so. The relationship gets you in the room and keeps you there. The business acumen determines what you do with the access once you have it. Both matter, and the gap between the two is smaller than most people want to admit.
What does that look like in practice? Weekly visits, not monthly. CRM notes with birthdays, hobbies, kids’ names. Working the full office every single time, not just checking in with the provider and heading out. Making each office feel like they’re the only office on the schedule.
“The best reps are able to personalize their communication office to office and make each one of them feel like they are their only customer.”
That’s not a soft skill. That’s the job.
What the Next Chapter Actually Looks Like
For the rep who has done the work, built the relationships, learned the business, and is starting to bump up against a ceiling, the question of what comes next is worth taking seriously.
Landry’s answer is more personal than most sales leaders would offer.
“For me, it comes down to what you want your life to look like 5 to 10 years from now. Every decision we make affects our future in some way.”
He talks about his four kids. About valuing work-life balance over grinding 80 hours a week. About watering the grass where you are before deciding it’s greener somewhere else. And about the leap he took leaving logistics for pharma, a move that felt risky at the time and turned out to be the best professional decision he ever made.
“If nothing ever changes, then nothing ever changes.”
For Lobby members thinking about that next chapter, Galt is worth a serious look on two fronts.
For reps who want to develop inside a sales organization built around the principles in this piece, real relationship building, fulfillment fluency, business acumen, Galt has open rep roles across the country. An opportunity to grow inside a company that has actually built its culture around these things rather than just talking about them.
For reps who are ready to put skin in the game and build something of their own, Galt’s franchise model offers protected territories, full backend support, and the ability to build real equity in your work. The difference between building someone else’s territory for years and building your own.
Learn more about open roles at myvocari.com.
Galt Phranchise System is a business model designed to empower sales professionals to become independent entrepreneurs by providing the infrastructure, products, and partnerships needed to build their own pharmaceutical company through owning their local territory. To explore if franchise is the right calling for you, visit www.galtfranchise.com for more details.
The medical sales landscape is changing faster than the formal training is keeping up. The reps who will thrive are the ones closing that gap themselves. Coachable, adaptable, genuinely curious about the full picture of the business they’re operating inside.
That’s not a personality type. It’s a practice. And it’s one worth starting today.