Introduction: Take your life science sales career to the next level

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I'm really excited to start out the sales DNA Decoding Life Science Sales podcast before we get into the meat of it and start interviewing guests. And we'll tell you a little bit about that in a minute. Harrison and I thought you should know a little bit about us. So, Harrison Wade and Nick Claire, we're going to introduce ourselves on this podcast. I'm looking forward to all of the others, but you'll find out I love to talk about myself. So I'm really excited about this one, actually. Yeah, we're going to jump into it and what we're going to do is just do an intro of Harrison and me and then we're going to ask a question. And the reason we're asking this question is in every episode going forward where we do an interview, we're going to ask every guest the same question and, and see if we get some interesting answers. So let's jump into this straight away. Harrison, do you want to take off with your introduction?

Yeah, sure. So I'm Harrison Wade, co founder of Succession. I got into sales actually as a software sales rep back in the day, did software sales for, for quite a while, and then entered life sciences a bit later when I joined Synthego to help build out their inside sales team, later moving into enablement, more of a rev ops function. So, you know, my background is really in sales. How to train salespeople, sales process optimization, the tools, the. And so what we've really learned in our time talking to different customers and different sales reps is there's so much opportunity to improve, like the sales knowledge, the training and the expertise across everybody in the life science space. There's not really something out there that's very specific to life sciences. You see a lot of this information and training out in the world that is all about sales in general. So they take the general sales training framework and they try and, you know, plug it into your system, into your company, but it doesn't always quite apply. So that's really the, you know, driving force behind succession is we want to enable all Life Science sales reps, whether they're just starting in their career, all the way through to, you say, the, the senior executives and the leaders in the industry. How can we give them the tools, the training, the resources, the community that they need to be successful in their career. And so that's why I'm really fired up about succession. So this podcast is going to be a great way to learn from sales reps. So we're going to interview a lot of different sales reps in life sciences both early in their career. So if you're just getting into it, you can learn from what they're going through at this exact moment. You can also learn from more experience reps that we'll have in the podcast talking about sharing their experience and their knowledge. We'll also be interviewing scientists so you can get into the mind of your customer and actually learn why they do or do not like working with salespeople and trying to figure out the psychology to sell better to those customers. And then we'll also be talking to leaders in the space. So you can see, hey, what does it take to become a sales manager, to become a sales leader? Or how can I learn from these people that have 20 plus years of experience in the field? And I think the last part of it is going to get real tactical. So I'll also have episodes where we'll talk about specific sales tactics that you can use in your career or in your day to day. Like tomorrow, you know, rather than having to say, hey, here's this like hypothetical thing that works in software that I saw on LinkedIn. Like how do I like take this and use it in my day to day? Well, our, our goal is to say, hey, this is like what people do today in life science sales to be successful. Take that, you can use, start using it, you know, today, tomorrow. That's our idea behind these tactics as well.

Great. And, and we're going to try and keep that really fun as well with lots of stories. My aspiration is that one day my epitaph says raconteur. So I like to tell stories and hope to be able to do that in this podcast and get our guests to do so. A little bit about me then Nick Claire. So if you want to look me up, I think I'm under Nicholas Claire on LinkedIn. But basically I started off in, in science in the lab. From where really from straight out of like A A levels, like college, straight into the lab, worked there for sort of 17 years managing teams, all cell culture, cell models, and really loved it. And then I won't go into a story about everything. It would be all day. But basically then there's a, the story about I accidentally fell into sales, but in doing so I found out I love it. And I really enjoy the process of talking to scientists, learning science on a daily basis. And that's something I'm really excited about with, with this podcast is they're going to get to interview scientists and find out how they experience their day in the lab and how we can support them. So I'm a co founder also of Succession Bio with Harrison. I'm also SVP of a biotech in Cambridge. So still really at the coal face as well as trying to support people going forward. And the reason I got so excited about starting Succession Bio is during the process of interviewing for my last position I met many different companies and what I realized is there is so much biotech out there, so many companies that actually have great tech, great products that potentially are going to fail because they have poor commercial process, poor commercial planning and teams. And that seemed a real shame to me to think that all of these companies out there that don't have the right support to get what they want to through to biotech pharma and eventually affect the patients. And I think that's although I'm really excited about all the stuff Harrison said and learning that the sort of the altruistic part of me to see it go to the patients is really exciting too and I think this podcast could help us all do that. So I'm really excited about that too.

Yeah, it's going to be awesome. We've already got a few episodes lined up so if you're listening to this, we've already got some probably already in your podcast player on YouTube. So this is also going to be a video podcast. So find us a succession bio YouTube page. So go see us there. You'll like a subscribe watch all the videos. I think it's going to be a lot of great content. We're going to be trying to putting out stuff once or twice a week, so probably at least around one interview a week and maybe a tactic episode thrown in there in between that'll be a little bit shorter bite size so you can go and implement something right away. And as well if you're interested in learning more about our training and community platform specifically for life science sales, it's Succession Bio slash join and then as well we also have a newsletter that comes out on a weekly basis. You can find it on Succession Bio. Sign up there. Lots of content. Our goal is to get you the information that you need to be successful in whatever mechanism and channel it is that you you use most. Whether that's you know, audio listening to podcasts, video listening to it on LinkedIn or excuse me or well yeah, video going on LinkedIn or YouTube, however we put it. And then also in the written format too if you prefer to read newsletters as well. So that's our goal for all of this is to help up level everybody in the life sciences. But without further ado, let's dig into the first question, which is, Nick, tell us what is a funny or crazy story that's happened to you in your career?

I've. Well, being a scientist, I had a few. But since being a sales guy that travels around the world, essentially, you tend to get quite a lot of them. But one that I. I still look back and kind of chuckle to myself that it even happened, right? So I was traveling. It was one of my first actual business trips as a. An fas, A technical specialist traveling with a rep. And we were in Germany. And this rep, although lived in Austria, didn't speak German either. Tiny little town. We just got off a train and we're trying to get our way to the meeting. And this is with a large farmer, really big farmer, important meeting. We finally see a taxi rank up. We've had some lunch, we're chilled, We've got loads of time. We go to the taxi rank, the cab, whatever you want to call it. And there's. There's a guy sitting there, and we're like, we. We want to go here. Can you take us? And he's like, yeah, yeah. So we get in and he doesn't move. This is weird. And then eventually moves, and then he stops again about 50 meters down the road. And like, this little old lady gets in and they just start speaking German. And me and this, my friend in the seat, Priyanka, are sitting there. We're like, what? What is going on? Like. But he doesn't speak in our. Bingo. He drives off. And we thought, okay, he may. I don't know, maybe he's nan. Who knows what's going on. We're driving off, we're going to get to the meeting. We still got loads of time. Next thing, he pulls into a graveyard, right? The little old lady holding her flowers gets out at the graveyard and goes off to lay the flowers at, I presume a husband or some relatives. He waits for her, drops her back in town, and then takes us to our meeting. We arrived 20 minutes late. And the best bit of this story for me, when I'm remembering it, is still the face of the person we were meeting when I tried to explain why we're late. And you could just see him thinking, this is so bizarre. It has to be true.

You can't make that up.

You can't make it up. So it's taught me to make sure. I now use Uber and nothing else.

Plan ahead well, especially if you don't know the language of the country that you're going to.

Yeah, this was a. This was pre Uber, I think. Yeah, that's pre Uber in Germany, anyway.

Yeah. Nice. Good one.

How about you? What's your crazy story?

So not quite, as I would say, entertaining and crazy, but mine was something I think a lot of, maybe a lot of early sales folks can remember where I was early in my career. I was sdr. I do a bunch of outbound prospecting. So I'm putting together at the time. This was a mail merge. So if you remember what a mail merge was, is like you had to have like a spreadsheet, all the names of the people that you wanted to send it out to. And then you had to like, write your email in like a word doc in the right way. And so if you messed up any of, like the tokens that would say, take out the first name from that spreadsheet, you know, you would. You'd be in a lot of trouble. Well, I messed that up. And so I sent out to thousands of people an email that said, hi, first name. It was like hi, bracket, bracket, first name, bracket. So, like, I missed one of the brackets. And so that went out to thousands of people, like customers and prospects. And so that wasn't good. But then to make matters worse, I got like complete hate mail from. From somebody. They basically reached out like, you're a piece of shit. Go die in hell. Like, why would you ever send this? Like, I hate these automated messages. You're a horrible human. It was really, really aggressive response to like, a simple whatever, mess up in an email. Like, it would have been more. It would have been less effort to just delete the email. But he decided it's going to be time for me to rip this kid a new one. And I just remember, though, my boss was really great about it, and he's like, hey, mistakes happen. I get it. He should never have acted this way. So he went and found this person's boss on LinkedIn and his boss's boss then reached out to all of them with this message attached, basically saying, like, this is not how your employee should be responding. I don't think this is like the type of person you want to employ. Wanted to make sure you're aware of this, your type of behavior. And what that really taught me was one, not to make this mistake ever again. So now I know whenever I'm putting together these campaigns, a test previews a lot of different things. You want to make sure you optimize. There's. But then also that moment really sticks with me because of the way my manager reacted in the moment. And so that is something that I try and do as well when I'm working with people, is making sure that I'm always thinking about them, protecting them, people on my team in the best way possible because I remember that moment a lot to this day.

Never go after the sales guy, particularly your manager. He's like Liam Neeson in Taken. He has a specific set of skills where he can find your boss's name and he will take you down.

Exactly right. Like, we know how to do that stuff. That's great. But yeah, that's. Those are. Those are our stories. We got a little bit about our background here. We're really excited for this, this podcast to take off. If you have ideas of people you want us to interview, topics you want us to cover, hell, if you wouldn't want to be on the podcast, reach out to Nick or I us on LinkedIn. Just reach out directly or even just on the comments of this video. Let us know you want to get involved. We'd love to have you on the show. Without further ado, let's kick it off.

Let's go.