I can't speak to all sales reps, but I wanted to get into surgical sales because I wanted to sell technology that would help people and make a difference. Obviously you probably saw some of the same value propositions that I saw when I was looking at joining da Vinci. Otherwise, you probably wouldn't have gotten trained. I saw the problems of open surgery and I knew the limitations of straight stick surgery, especially in GYN surgery. When da Vinci got FDA approval for Hysterectomy. The of adoption rate looked for different modalities looked like this.
TAH was around 67%
Lap Hyst was between 18%
Vaginal Hyst was around 15%
Think about this. During this time, Lap Hyst has been out for more than 20 years and the adoption rate was only around 18%. Why???? Very hard to learn. For those that are not familiar with lap surgery, the closest example is trying to Tie your shoes with chopsticks, except all your movement are counter intuitive, meaning it is backward. In order to move you instrument up you have to move your hand down, to move your instrument right, you move your hand left. Open surgery was at 65%+ because of the limitations to treat complex disease.
My point of all of this is that everyday I felt like I was helping surgeons to treat their patients better by giving them a better tool to do the surgery. I was trying to eliminate TAH as well as for the surgeons that were not the cream of the crop GYN's I wanted to give them a tool that made their their difficult cases easier.
Not to mention the success in other procedures such as mitral valve repair, lobectomies, lower anterior resections, prostatectomies and nephrectomies.
I'm curious to see how lap robotic Chole's turn out. I don't think that adoption will be a great as DVP, DVH But ISRG doesn't have to hit a home run in this procedure. There are over 900K+ procedures done in the US. Look at what da Vinci's stock price did during the run up on DVP's and there are only around 185K US procedures annually.
By the way, everybody is incentivized to do more. It's not just you ISRG rep
Sales reps such as Covidien and JNJ as well as surgeons and hospitals.
None the less as stated in my previous post, emerging procedures and specialties are not perfect right now but with new competition, it will help drive innovation as well as bring the cost of robotic surgery down, potentially making it economically feasible in procedures that you wouldn't think it would be. (Lap Chole's)
