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Sage advice on selling from Mark Maloney on BoneChat.

4 Apr 2025 · 2 min

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1:32

Mark Maloney, drawing on his Army experience, argues that sales success depends on being in the foxhole with customers through weekly calls and monthly visits. He says doctors sell doctors, peer influence drives prescriptions, and a smart salesperson outsells a less intelligent one by a factor of ten. Product knowledge matters less than hiring people with high IQ and adaptability.

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I firmly believe that to me, my distributorship is my lab. And you said something at the very beginning, which I have said for a long time. Many of, much of what I do in this business, I learned in the Army and in Vietnam. The farther you are from the foxhole and the more stars on your shoulder, it easy, the easier it is to pull the trigger. If you want to know how hard it is to pull the trigger, Get in the foxhole with that guy, you know, and get scared, and then you'll learn. My next, next one was, I echoed what Patrick said, nothing sells itself. Uh, number 3, doctors sell doctors. Out of sight is out of mind. Dealers got other products. They got families. They got problems. They get all kinds of shit every day. And if they don't hear from you every week on the phone by ear, And if they don't see you once a month, it's like you don't live. If you don't show it— in other words, if somebody doesn't show it— they'll never sell it. The number one competition in the business and on the ground in the foxhole is that doctor has not seen your product, because it's hard to get in front of doctors. If I know the IQ of every salesperson on your force, I tell you who sells the most. Smart people sell 10 times what dumb people do. Uh, product knowledge and higher-end experience are highly overrated. Most companies hire the same morons over and over again.