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May 4, 2021 17 mins

How do you tap into your inner salesperson? For Chris Lundy, a late-bloomer and raconteur who takes pleasure in knowing that the medication he sells can change lives, it's all a matter of attitude. And after a stint in the PR department for the Philadelphia Eagles, his segue into pharma sales has provided him with plenty of championship moments.

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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Welcome to Season five of On the Job, a podcast
about finding your life's work. On the job is brought
to you by Express Employment Professionals, a leading staffing provider
that employs nearly six hundred thousand people annually across more
than eight hundred thirty franchise locations in the US, Canada,
South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Our vision is to

(00:26):
help as many people as possible find good jobs by
helping as many clients as possible find good people. Whether
you're looking for your first job or you're seeking a
new challenge in your career, Express Employment Professionals will be
with you every step of the way. We understand what
it takes to land a new position at a top
employer in today's job market. Plus, we never charge a
fee to find you a job. And just like finding

(00:49):
a job, finding the best people to fill open positions
in your company requires more than sorting through applications. It
takes real people, real interviews, discovering the skills you need.
At Express, we find people for jobs and companies of
all sizes and industries, from the production floor to the
front office to the C suite. Express knows jobs get

(01:12):
to know Express. This is on the Job, a podcast
about finding your life's work. On the job, is brought
to you by Express Employment Professionals. This season, we're bringing
you stories of folks following their passion to carve their
own career path. To start off this season, I wanted

(01:33):
to focus on a kind of overlooked occupation, a job
that if you're good at it, people might not know
that you're doing it. All right, I'm according working in sales.
So for this episode, I talked to a guy named
Chris in Baltimore. Chris Lundy forty two years old. Wow.

(01:54):
He is a clinical oncology specialist, which basically is a
fancy term for I sell your drugs. Chris has worn
a lot of hats besides being a pharmaceutical rep in
his career, but he says that no matter what it was,
he was born to sell, and so were you. We've
all been We've all been selling. We just didn't know it.

(02:15):
If you've ever dated, you've sold, you know, maybe not successfully,
but actually maybe not successfully. But think about that, right,
You gotta you gotta a lot of times you gotta
go to someone who's a perfect stranger and you have
to bring that person along a continuum that makes this
perfect stranger. Kiss you. It's all about relationships. It's all

(02:38):
about relationships, man, Thank you. That's the that's the point
the dating game aside. He's right, we do all sell
each other on ideas constantly. We convinced people to think
about us differently by how we dress, by what our
social media looks like. And Chris's approach to sales is
that people really can tell when someone's not being real.

(02:59):
I think that everybody has a like authenticity radar. I
really do. And I think that if people sensed it, like,
wait a second, this guy is not some some's fishy
about them, I think they start to close up. You know.
He says that's what sets him apart. There are a
lot of salespeople who will treat their clients like a
walking dollar sign and say anything to sell their product.

(03:22):
At least I see me. I just I can't do
any of that stuff. You gotta be authentic, because again,
you're trying to convince someone to think differently. You're trying
to convince someone to behave differently. It's not Hey, here's
a pen that I want you to buy. Give me money.
I'll give you this pen. I'm trying to change your behavior.
I'm trying to get it to the point where every

(03:43):
time a patient comes in with disease X, you think
about me and you think about my product. That's a behavior. Man.
The Chris you're hearing now, that's the Chris whose job
it is to be likable, to constantly be talking to people,

(04:03):
and generally be pretty extroverted. But growing up just outside
of DC as a kid, he was a lot different.
So I kind of was like a little loner, geek
kind of kid. I love comic books, you know. I
remember my mother used to talk about that. How I
could be in my room and if it weren't for
having to eat food, I could be in my room

(04:23):
for like eight nine hours. Just I didn't pay I
didn't pay a lot of attention to the real world.
My mind was always always daydreaming, always all the time.
That was his life for a while, in his own world.
His favorite comic book here was Adam Warlock. He kept
to himself right up until about the tenth grade. I
remember writing an essay. I don't even remember what it

(04:47):
was about. The teacher was mister Howard. It looked like
he wasn't even sure that I actually wrote it, Like
he may have suspected plagiarism or something like that, and
so and like he took you like he made you
stay after class. Yes, yeah, because he thought you didn't
write it. Well, it's not that he was being accusatory.
It was more like disbelief, you know, like where I'm from, man,

(05:08):
Like I'm kind of from like the hood man, you know,
so you don't get a whole bunch of like writing talent.
So I think that it just really stood out for him.
And he pauses and looks at me. He goes, you're
a really good writer. Do you know that? The proof
was there? He had won essay and speech contest before,

(05:30):
but he didn't figure it was because he was good.
I thought other people sucked, you know. So it took
a while to realize, like, wait a second, Wait a second,
Maybe maybe it's not that everybody else runs slow. Maybe
I am actually fast. I don't know, just kind of
took off. I just started talking more, sharing the thoughts

(05:51):
I had instead of suppressing them, and people, people you know,
liked it. It worked. This late blooming moment really set
him on the trajectory to where he is now. I
don't know. It just changed overnight, it seemed, and all
of a sudden, I was like mister social extrovert, you know,
a type personality, Homecoming King, captain of the football team.

(06:14):
It was, yeah, it was. It was not gradual. After
high school, he went up to college and got an
English degree, where he was also acting in plays and
had his own radio show on campus. I started to
really hone my skills in terms of communicating and sharing ideas.
The first big job he got out of school before Pharma,

(06:37):
was working with the Philadelphia Eagles in the PR department
media relations. So everything from setting up interviews. Let's say
ESPN wanted to talk to our quarterback or something, you know,
I would facilitate that. He was basically the liaison between
players and the public. So his skill set would kick
in during moments where say he and some players might

(07:00):
stop at a Wendy's while on the road and inevitably
get crowded by fans asking for autographs. My job. One
of the things I had to do. I had to
be the no guy, because you can't have a superstar player,
you know, shutting people down, telling them no, they look bad.
So I had to be the bad guy. Having lived
in Philly myself for a couple of years, I can
say that they're not fans that like being told no exactly,

(07:24):
And I guess, like, what is the biggest thing you
learned from that job? When like nobody wants to hear this,
that or that, Like you gotta win at the end
of the day, what's your record. I've got an NFC
Championship ring. When I pull it out, people think it's
a super Bowl ring because it's big and it's full
of diamonds and stuff. It's not a super Bowl ring,
like we weren't that proud of that ring. It's an

(07:46):
NFC Championship ring, which means there was a ring that
was bigger than that, and that's the ring we want it.
We'll get back to the story in a second. First,
a word from Express Employment Professionals. A strong work ethic
takes prime and a job well done. This is you.
But to get an honest day's work, you need a callback.

(08:06):
You need a job. Express Employment Professionals can help. We'll
connect you to the right company. We're committed to your
success and never charge a fee to find you a job.
Express Nose Jobs, get to no Express find your location
at expresspros dot com or on the Express Job's app.

(08:28):
Now back to on the job. After the NFL, he
wanted to make the leap to pharmaceutical sales. So we
went for a job at MERK, a huge company, and
they basically said, you were in media relations. You don't
have any experience in sales. And I tried. I had

(08:49):
to explain to them, listen, every day I have to
convince young millionaires, egotistical millionaires, to do things that they
don't want to do, you know. And if you don't
think that sales, then and I don't know what to
tell you, you know. And so that that line actually
got me in the door. So he could obviously talk
to talk. But the job isn't selling a product to

(09:11):
the general public. It's selling life saving drugs to medical professionals.
And they don't know you, so the trust isn't there.
You know, you're trying to convince a doctor to practice
a certain way, and this guy knows that he's got
more education than you, he's got more expertise than you,
but he's supposed to listen to what you're telling him

(09:31):
to do. Like that's insane. The marketing department would train
reps to go in with fancy graphs and selling points.
But Chris did the exact opposite, meeting with doctors for
multiple appointments without mentioning his product at all. And so
I started by asking questions like, what's important to you?
What do you not care about? Tell me about your patients,

(09:52):
what are your needs? What keeps you up in night?
Those kinds of things I'm saying, tell me about you.
And then once the relationship be set, and once that
rapport is there, now we can talk about what I
have to offer and what I can do and you know,
provide for you and your patients. In an old fashioned
industry full of reps just trying to sell, sell, sell,

(10:14):
Chris's authenticity started to really shine through. Yeah. Once I
saw like my numbers start to reflect what I was
actually doing, I was like, how about that? I wanted
to get mister Howard on the line and tell him. Look, man,
he cut to see selling around New York City, where
the competition was fierce, and there was one experience early

(10:36):
on in his career that really stuck with him. So
there was this doctor, he was huge, He had an
office in like a nice area in New York. I
don't remember where this was, but it was nice, fancy, nice,
pretty office. You couldn't see this doc. You go in,
there's there's other reps from other companies all over the place.
You'd wait for two hours and still barely even get,

(10:57):
you know, ten seconds with this guy. Chris and other
reps noticed that this doctor was never there on Tuesdays.
They all assumed it was his day all but after
some digging, Chris found out those weren't his off days.
Tuesdays were his Picking Avenue days. Picking Avenue is the
avenue in Brooklyn that you do not want to go to,
right like, you gotta have Picking Avenue. You're getting robbed,

(11:19):
you getting mugs, something's going wrong. It's a dangerous part
of town. It turns out that doctor was from a
pretty rough neighborhood and those were his days to give
back to the community at a small clinic. So Chris
decided that's where he'd go. I understand that I'll probably
get my wheels and rims stolen from my car, but
I'm going to Picking Avenue. And I went in and

(11:39):
I told the receptionist that, you know, I was a
pharmaceutical rep. And she looked at me like I was
an alien, Like what, like, we're actually getting a pharmaceutical
rep here? Like are you sure you want to be here?
After about an hour, he got to see the doctor.
He was so happy. First first he was shocked because
no one went there, and he was happy that he

(12:01):
was actually getting attention at this location at Picking Avenue
for his patients on Picking freaking Avenue. And then the
doctor started to criticize farmer reps he'd interacted with, because
they'll always go to the fancy office but never there
because he's not a lot of money in it. Right,
he got a lot of patients on like state care
or governmental care. It's not a nice, fun, easy place

(12:25):
to go. And that's how Chris started building a relationship
with this doctor to the point where at the plush
office I was able to walk in and reps are
like mad, like what are you doing going back? How's
he getting back there? But that's what he was. I
went to Picking Avenue. I served him where he needed
to be served. I carry that everywhere I go. What

(12:50):
do you need? I mean, think about it? Right in
sales you got to use car lot. That car salesman
isn't thinking about what you need he's thinking about how
can I get what I want out of you? Right?
And so if you're a salesperson, but your lead foot
is what do you need? Man, you just differentiated yourself
right there, right off the break. You're not like the others.

(13:14):
So that really gets on the point of like, when
I think a lot of people think of sales as
a occupation, they probably think of like they used car guy.
But to go back to your comic book days, do
think you use your powers for good? I do? I do,
I see and also work with people who don't. And

(13:37):
when we're talking about the pharmaceutical industry, we're talking about
a lot of money. So yeah, there's a lot of
negative stigma you know that comes with it, and it's
unfortunate because the people who do do it the right way.
They really are like changing people's lives. Chris started off
in primary care generic drugs, and that he works with

(14:00):
cancer drugs. It's different. He'll go into an appointment talking
about a drug that could help a particular patient, and
the next appointment, that patient's no longer with us, you know,
like we can't even pick up on the conversation because
the patient is gone. It's a much more urgent world
over here. There are real stakes involved. This isn't just

(14:21):
paul an allergy meds. Yeah, yeah, this is this is
life for death over here. Was ever a moment in
your career where you thought, this is why I do
what I do. A couple of years back, we were
at a sales conference and they brought in an elderly
woman who had stage four lung cancer. That's usually you know,

(14:46):
like all right, see you later, get your affairs in
order kind of thing. The woman told a story about
how her grandson was trying to lift her spirits and
made her promise to go skydiving with him later that year.
And now her she was convinced that she wasn't you know,
gonna be around long. So sure, Scott, I haven't no problem.
And it didn't matter what he said. He could say
we're gonna go to Mars, she'd be like, yep. And

(15:09):
she was telling us this story, and then behind her
they pull up the picture of her jumping out of
the plane. She lived because of our drug and she
kept her promise that she never thought she would have
to with her grandson. They both jumped out of a

(15:30):
plane together to hear that story, and to see that image,
it's like damn, like, yo, we really are helping save
people's actual lives. Just throwing a scenario your way. You
sold the drug to her doctor that saved her life

(15:53):
and allowed her to have this moment, and she never
knows your name. How do you feel about that? That's
all right, that's all right. Yeah, that's okay, because um
we won, we went to the playoffs. We got the
big ring, you know, So, yeah, hasn't it hasn't. It

(16:13):
doesn't matter. The job got done. For On the Job,
I'm Otus Gray. Thanks for listening to On the Job,

(16:45):
brought to you by Express Employment Professionals. The season of
On the Job is produced by Audiation. The episodes were
written and produced by me Otus Gray. Our executive producer
is Sandy Smallens. The show was mixed by Matt Noble
for Audiations Studios at the Loft in Bronxville, New York.
Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Find us on iHeartRadio and

(17:06):
Apple Podcasts. If you liked what you heard, please consider
rating and reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever
you listen. We'll see you next time. For more inspiring
stories about discovering your life's work, Audiation,
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