The Challenge
A Calgary-based surgical robotics company that had recently received Health Canada approval for their innovative minimally invasive surgery platform faced an ambitious mandate: building an entire national sales organization from the ground up within a six-month window to capitalize on their first-mover advantage in the Canadian market. The company needed to simultaneously hire five Regional Sales Managers covering Western Canada, Ontario, Quebec, and Atlantic Canada, each requiring a highly specialized skill set. Candidates needed deep experience selling capital medical equipment to hospital procurement committees; familiarity with the complex, multi-stakeholder sales cycles typical of surgical robotics; and the technical acumen to conduct product demonstrations in operating room environments. The challenge was compounded by the nascent state of the surgical robotics market in Canada, meaning there was no established talent pool of robotics-specific sales professionals to draw from. Additionally, each regional hire required different linguistic and cultural competencies, particularly for the Quebec market.
The Solution
Lock Search Group designed and executed a parallel, multi-office search campaign that leveraged our national footprint and medical device recruiting expertise. The strategy began with a comprehensive planning session where we worked with the client’s VP of Sales to develop standardized role specifications while allowing for regional customization based on local market dynamics. Our Calgary and Edmonton teams led the Western Canada searches, targeting sales professionals from surgical instrumentation, capital imaging equipment, and existing robotic-assisted surgery competitors. The Toronto team focused on Ontario candidates while also coordinating the overall search to ensure consistency in assessment standards across all regions. Our Montreal team conducted the Quebec search with particular attention to bilingual capabilities and established relationships with the province’s unique hospital procurement structures. Rather than conducting sequential searches, we ran all five in parallel, with weekly cross-office coordination calls to share candidate intelligence, avoid duplicate outreach, and ensure we were presenting candidates of consistent caliber across all regions. Each candidate underwent a standardized technical assessment including a mock product demonstration, stakeholder mapping exercise, and sales strategy presentation.
The Outcome
The coordinated national search generated over 200 initial candidate conversations across all five regions within the first eight weeks. Through our rigorous parallel screening process, we developed regional shortlists of three to four candidates each, ultimately presenting 18 finalists to the client. All five Regional Sales Manager positions were successfully filled within the six-month target window, with the first placement made in week ten and the final placement in week twenty-two. The hired team brought diverse but complementary backgrounds: two came from surgical instrumentation sales, one from diagnostic imaging capital equipment, one from a competing robotics platform in the US market, and one from medical device distribution with extensive hospital C-suite relationships. The rapid team build-out enabled the company to achieve their first-year sales targets of 12 system installations, with the Quebec region notably exceeding projections by securing placements at three major teaching hospitals in Montreal. This engagement demonstrated Lock Search Group’s ability to execute complex, multi-position searches at scale while maintaining quality standards across diverse regional markets.