Samantha M. Templeton

I attribute my success to building trust and putting in the hard work. At the core, you cannot build a relationship or move forward in either a personal relationship or a business partnership without having core trust and understanding of one another. I've seen it time and time again where once that is broken, marriages have crumbled and business partnerships have collapsed. In my industry, I think success comes from the fact that we as women work our butts off and put in the time. We don't take shortcuts. We do the right thing, we follow up consistently time and time again, and above all else we put our ego aside and we listen. We present solutions that are not self-serving to us but that are genuinely going to help whoever we're talking to. That is how you build success and rise up quickly in this industry.

Above all else, always be true to yourself. Do the right thing, work hard, put trust in your clients, and as long as you are doing the right thing, good things will happen. When I say be true to yourself, if something does not feel right, you need to listen to that. You only have one life. You need to make sure that everything that you're building is ethical, but it's also putting you in a good situation. I see this all the time with my medical device friends who work with these sleazy doctors that treat them horribly or harass them, and they are so afraid because they have these high quotas and it's a high-stress environment that they take it and they don't speak up. They're miserable, and a lot of times burnout causes them to just implode their careers. It doesn't have to be that way. You've got to make sure that you're speaking up, you're standing up for yourself, and you're making your leadership team involved, because everybody deserves to work in a safe environment. I tell all of the young girls that I've mentored throughout the years that no client is ever worth your physical or mental health. If you ever feel they are threatening or harassing or taking advantage, you fire them immediately. You get HR involved and make sure you are out of there.

I would say, honestly, just establishing credibility. Unfortunately, because this is such a male-dominated industry, we almost have to work harder than our male counterparts to be taken seriously. I tell this to all of the young women that are hired on, either with my current company or even when I was with TTI Milwaukee. Another challenge is the hesitation and doubt, especially in male-dominated industries, about what happens if you are disrespected or in a certain environment where you don't feel comfortable or where you're harassed. There are situations where you have alcohol involved at company happy hours and dinners and trade shows, and when you have late nights, it's opening up the doors to bad behavior sometimes. You just have to learn to protect yourself and make sure you're surrounding yourself with the right people and not putting yourself in a bad situation. But what's amazing is both companies that I've worked for, the top 5% reps have all been women, historically. I think it's because we work our butts off and we put in the time. We don't take shortcuts, we do the right thing, we follow up consistently, and we put our ego aside and listen.

The number one value for both my work and personal life is trust. You cannot build a relationship or move forward in either a personal relationship or a business partnership without having core trust and understanding of one another. I have seen it time and time again where once that is broken, marriages have crumbled because trusts have been broken, and business partnerships have collapsed because things have not been properly communicated or things have been manipulated or taken out of context because someone is trying to serve something that's not in the best interest of the partnership. At the end of the day, if you deviate from that, it just never works out.