Fast Track to the Top: Prepped and Ready

About Genzyme: A global biotechnology company with more than 12,000 employees and 2008 revenues of $4.6 billion. Its products and services make a positive impact on the lives of people with rare inherited disorders, kidney disease, cancer, transplant and immune disease, and more.Hughes’s educational background: BA in sociology and anthropology from Colgate University; currently in a PhD program in leadership studies at Alliant International University. Sales team: Manages four sales managers who oversee a total of 25 sales reps, all located around the United States. Product: A medical device (Seprafilm® Adhesion Barrier) that can be used to reduce scar tissue in patients undergoing abdominal or pelvic laparotomy. “We developed this product and actually built the market for this.” Customer profile: “Our product is ordered by hospitals and used by surgeons. So we’re calling on highly educated, highly trained, highly skilled folks. A typical sales call would be meeting a surgeon in his or her office or in the actual operating room.” Selling challenge: “Surgeons are the best of the best, so when you meet there’s a credibility tug-of-war. ‘Who are you, a sales rep, trying to convince me?’ So our reps get a crash course in anatomy, procedures, and clinical data. We call on six different surgical call points, so you could go from a C-section to a colon cancer case to a hysterectomy. The span in a day is wide, and you need to be able to dance in and out of a variety of surgical procedures. Preparation is everything.”On leadership: “I push people out of their comfort zones, because in this job we’re in so many uncomfortable positions. You’ve got a woman on the table who’s got metastatic ovarian cancer, and you’ve got to hold it together and teach the staff how to use our product. Or it is late in the day and a gunshot victim comes in, and there’s blood and guts and everyone’s screaming. You’re a salesperson and you’ve got to figure out, ‘Where do I fit into this ecosystem? Where can I add value?'” Defining success: “[Doing] this job is the first time in my life when I felt like what I did mattered. How many things can you sell where you get to see people who are no longer in physical pain or where doctors are telling you, ‘Wow, your stuff really works’? So this is my small imprint on the universe. Conceptually, I take ownership of that and get up every day and say, ‘I’m going to affect someone’s life today.'”