[Leadership] - Build an international sales culture with Debora Marchese

Don't be afraid to just cut the distributor off. Sometimes you're so scared to say, oh, I lost the distributor, but the distributor wasn't performing at all, so there's no point in keeping them there. And at that point, if you cut them loose and you say, okay, this is not working, you know, respectfully, we need to close this relationship more often than not. You will find that they also felt like your product was a burden for them and they also didn't want. It was just an extra bit on their portfolio. And you can find a better one possibly that can focus on your products.

I would also say, and more broadly even is don't be afraid to disqualify people. You know, we all try and hold on to opportunities for too long, and we hope for the best. When hope isn't a strategy. Right? So.

Yeah, exactly.

Hey, we got another great episode for you here on the sales DNA podcast. We're joined by Deborah Marchese, who is the international sales manager for angle. And so this episode is a lot of fun because we talk about a lot of things related to international sales. How you build that sales culture of growing internationally within an organization, how that leadership has to start from the top. How do you support distributors and international sales reps to be successful as you grow? All in all, I thought it was a pretty, you know, insightful episode. What a good discussion. What do you think, Nick?

Yeah, definitely. Really interesting. Learned a lot. I really like the discussion around the distributors and how the support has to come from the top and the patience about. It's a long play to build these networks, build these relationships, but pay off in the long run. And I know I've made mistakes there myself when trying to implement this kind of thing. So it was really good to hear exactly how you should go about that and how you should trust in people.

Yeah, all in all, I think it'll be a good one. So if you are thinking about international sales selling in different regions, thinking about growing your company that way, wealth and knowledge in this one. So with that being said, what do I always say, Mick?

Let's dive right in.

Hey, Deborah. Welcome to the podcast. We're excited to have you here.

Thanks a lot. Thank you for having me.

So we gave you a heads up as we do every one of our guests give us a crazy or funny story that's happening in your career.

Yeah, well, mine happened early on in my career. I'm not sure if it's really funny, but it's definitely a bit crazy. So I just joined. I had just joined A company called RBC Bioscience and it was my first role in biotech sales and basically my Boss, I was 12 weeks in the job and he told me, okay, well in two to three weeks we are going all the way to the US to give a presentation to very important potential client that we have and you are going to have the whole conversation. And I was like, oh, that's great. I don't know anything about the technology, but, well, I dive into it. I tried to learn as much as possible. I literally spent day and night just preparing for this presentation and I really thought that I was doing a great job. So when I got into the US I did my presentation and I felt very proud of myself. Of course my boss was next to me and it was helping answer any questions. I think for years I always thought it was a great presentation. Only years later he told me it was really terrible and everybody could really see that I didn't know what I was talking about. But we managed to sign this distributor up actually and they became a client of ours for a little time until they were acting a bit funny and we decided to close all conversations with them. But because of that presentation, years later, the new CEO saw me in a conference and he remembered me. I don't know, I did it. Yeah. I must have been so scared and so worried that I probably made a very long lasting impression. But he remembered me and he saw, he went, oh, you are Deborah. I remember you. I even have your business card on my desk. All these years, the old CEO left. Should we start a conversation again? Start working together again? I was like, oh, this is interesting. So, yeah.

Yeah, it all works out. Yeah. And that's funny. Yeah. The early days, making an impression.

Yeah. I don't know how I did. I made that impression. I'm not sure it was a very good impression after all, but was a memory at least.

Yeah, exactly. Those early days, you. It's. What's it called when you have a. It's a Dunning Kruger effect. Right. When you do something for the first time and you think you're amazing at it. And it's only after, like you realize later on, like you weren't as good as you think. And then you're like, oh my God, that was so bad. I'm really bad at this. Only until you have more experience do you figure out how to get good again. Yeah.

Yes, yes. Well, in my brain I was still great at it. That's it.

Yeah. Well, I know one of the first things we want to get into Is probably a little bit along these lines. Right. Which is how you got into sales, Because I think your story is a little bit different than others and some of your background working internationally. So it'll be a lot of fun to kind of hear about those things. Want to give everybody a little background on how you got into sales.

Yeah, I feel like most people fall into sales when they are in biotech especially. I did the opposite. So I studied pharmacy, and after a couple of years studying pharmacy, I realized I was never going to work inside of a pharmacy in my life. So after pharmacy, I went and. Because I come from a very small town in Italy, so my only language was Italian, barely. And so I went to study, actually did a degree in languages to study English and Spanish, to learn foreign languages, because in my brain, I wanted to just travel the world and, you know, go around and do something. And. And then after I finished that, I started. I studied global marketing and international business because I actually wanted to do sales or marketing internationally. And while I was studying, I was getting my master's. I got an internship in Taiwan that was not there, was not in biotech at all. It was a company making commercial kitchens. And I started working there for. I worked there for, like, two years, and then I thought, yeah, but actually I'd rather be back in science. So I actually went to sales, and then I came back to science somehow. And then since then, I've always been in biotech, then sales.

What was it like making that transition to Taiwan? I'm sure that was a bit of a culture shock probably, right?

Yes and no. So it was a bit odd because, well, I arrived in Taiwan with no knowledge of the language at all. I didn't know any Mandarin at all. So it was a good start. But it was an internship, and I was supposed to stay there only for six months, and I ended up staying Taiwan for seven years. But initially I was like, yeah, I don't need Mandarin Chinese. Right. So the biggest shock for me was that Taiwanese people were very, very, very friendly because they were not used to foreigners that much, Especially where I was. I was in the center of Taiwan, a city called Taichung. So they were seeing me and thinking, oh, my gosh, where does she come from? What is this? They thought I was, like a celebrity. So I would be, like, in the night market, and people literally were handing me their kids, like, their babies and say, take a picture. And I was holding these babies, taking pictures. That was the weirdest thing for me. And at work, it was a bit different than possibly I mean, I've never worked actually in an Italian company because I've always worked overseas. But it's definitely different than Europe. There were certain things like in the office, people will have lunch break all at the same time. And you all go outside and pick something to eat and then use like 15 meals to eat and the rest of the 45 minutes to sleep at your desk. And. Which I found so cool. I still find cool. It was great. But yeah, a lot of things were quite different at the beginning. But then I got used to it and when I moved back, now I live in the uk. When I moved back to Europe, I had the biggest cultural shock because for me, I was too used to the Taiwanese culture.

What's strange that is so picking up on something you said. Just thinking through sales people. I'm not sure whether it's sales people are naturally okay with being uncomfortable or whether that's something you breathe. Breathes into you as you become sales. Because you said you went to Taiwan, you didn't know the language, but you're like, I'll be fine.

Right?

Yeah.

You have to have that kind of attitude with every meeting we walk into because we only have a certain amount of knowledge. When you go into a discovery call and it's like, you have to have that. Whatever happens, it'll be fine.

Yeah.

The more we talk to salespeople, the more they tend to have that approach in other things. And. And do you feel you had this before sales, or is that something Sals gave you?

I think I had that for a very long time, actually. I think it comes from my mom that my mom was like, yeah, just throw yourself into it. Something is. Is gonna happen. But whether you worry or not, this is going to happen anyways. So I think I approach life like that. And that's probably why I throw myself into. Because I was like, yeah, I mean, what can happen wrong? I can always try something different.

My mom had a similar approach to me actually telling me, but her way being that she's from East London, her way had a lot more swear words in it. But. So I'll leave that there.

No, my mom too. I'm Italian. A lot of that works.

That's good. One thing I am curious about. So you got your. You studied international marketing. How so? So I guess the background of this question is that I hear people all the time. They're like, hey, should I get an mba? I've done my, you know, I've got my science background, whether master's, bachelor's, PhD, whatever. And the Question is, should I do I need an MBA to be successful, to like learn what I need to in order to, you know, progress my career? And so you studied international marketing. Do you think that that was, you know, how helpful do you think that that was towards your roles today where now you're working globally across all different types of markets, working with all types of different distributors. Where do you see the educational piece coming into it versus the now I'm doing the actual work in the field and getting that experience in real time.

I think it was really good because I was studying while doing the job so I could actually see and can apply what I was doing into my job at once. It helped me a lot because I didn't know anything about marketing and I think it was, it was easier to actually study it and then do the work rather than just being thrown into the job and having to learn everything. So I think, I think it does make sense to actually have that part of study. But in the end, you know, in the end if you would just do the job and you start doing marketing without any background whatsoever, possibly is going to take you much longer to learn certain things because you need to learn by experience. Right?

Let's take a quick break from the podcast to talk about what we have going on over here at Succession. We work with 40 plus life science sales companies to help them find more opportunities and close more deals. We provide a range of services to support your sales growth. So whether it's increasing top of funnel opportunities with done for you, lead generation in person or virtual sales training reinforced by personalized training plans, recruiting top sales talent, or just building custom AI workflows to help make your team more efficient focused on selling. So if you're ready to transform your sales strategy, visit Succession Bio and schedule a call with Nick and I and we'll see how we can support you. I think that makes a lot of sense. It's like the schooling can give some of that foundational knowledge that you may not know but then you have to be able to translate it into like real, like the actual real world. Is that. Yeah, I think the challenge that I have a lot with these educational systems when it comes to teaching like these real world skills is that like, I don't know, you go to any MBA and it's like the case studies are like Apple or Walmart or Costco or something. It's like that's not, that's great for them but like that's not my 20 person startup that I'm working at that I need to Go exactly how to get our first 50 customers right, completely different problems and how you would think about branding, how you think about going to market. Also these companies that they do these case studies on are like really old school versus like nowadays. They have all of these new channels and things that you can leverage to grow your audience, your brand, etc. So I think it's really interesting to like, it's like if you do one, you have to have the real world aspect of it. If you do the educational side, you have to be able to like instantly apply some of those learnings somehow to order in order to get feedback loop.

I, I feel that it is exactly like that. I think that's why it was so useful for me. I think if I just started without doing that internship that turned into a, a job, an actual, you know, a pay position, I, I, I think I would have not learned that much. But because I was on the job, I was just experimenting something different every day depending on what I was learning. I'm not sure they were so happy about it, but I was, you know, for me it was really useful because I could see immediately what was working and what wasn't working. In that sense it's useful.

Isn't that some like saying that wisdom is knowledge with application or something like that?

Something like that, yeah, same thing.

You have to be able to apply it to learn it properly.

Yeah, I agree.

So now I'm curious, kind of switching topics a little bit. So you've got background working in the uk, you lived in Italy, you lived in Taiwan for a while. You do a lot, you know, work within the US as well. So you've got all this sort of international experience. So I want to talk a bit about how you can build this international sales culture into organizations. I think especially early on is just trying to do this for the first time because we see a lot of companies that will, hey, we want to go start working with distributors, so we'll hire a person to go manage distributors and then that's it.

Right.

Hey, good luck. Seen that before, a couple different places. So it's like what do you have to do as a company in the early days to set that if you're really going to try to start selling internationally and working with global distributors? Like how do you have to build that culture within the company to make that successful?

Yeah, I like that you talk about build that culture because I feel like many companies just think, oh yeah, I'm going to appoint an international sales manager and the job is done when actually it's definitely not done. It's never done because the sales manager or business development manager can only do as much. So you need to have. The whole company needs to work towards that direction. So I think it needs to come from the top. You need to have a completely different mindset. We're selling, let's say if you're a British company, you're selling to the uk, you have the mindset of selling in the uk, but when you go internationally you need to understand that you need to. First of all, you will have to lose some of your power. You cannot be controlling everything. You're giving away your product to a distributor, let's say, and the distributor needs to have some power and you need to start, you know, trusting these other person and building relationship with this other person, this other company and trusting them fully because they are representing you over there and you need to understand that. And I think this is the hard part. A lot of questions from the international sales manager are going to be fed internally and I think from the top it needs to come, you know, an understandment to the whole of the company needs to be given that they need to support the requests. Not because the people overseas are trying to copy your product but because without that information, most likely they cannot sell your product. I've been in companies in which they didn't want to give away the service manual because if I give the service manual they're going to copy my product. But you cannot sell into clinical, into any hospital if you apply, especially for a tender without giving the service manual. Right. So I think it needs to come from the top to have and then, you know, fall down to all the levels to educate more people on what it takes and the level of trust that you need to create and the level of documentation and support that all these companies need. Because you will need the service support, you will need the technical support, you will need marketing and the whole company needs to work in the direction of just the answer's manager.

Yeah, because I mean if you just put somebody on it like hey, go do it and figure it out, they're most likely going to fail.

They will.

And then the response is going to say, oh well, it just doesn't work. We couldn't make, you know, international distribution work or they'll just say, oh, it'd be the wrong person. So they'll try and hire a new person, do the same thing. And it's like, well that wasn't the problem. Right. The problem was is that the company wasn't prepared to support that individual in Leading. Right. I call leading the charge. Right. Not being the sole person doing the work.

Yeah, exactly. So I think the CEO, literally depending on the size of the company, but the higher levels need to be first educated on what it takes and what it looks like to do sales internationally. Even just sometimes joining this webinar that teach you a little bit about what it takes that that would be already good enough for, to have an understanding. Because sometimes companies arrive to that process and say, no, sorry, but we cannot do this, we cannot do that. And as a sales manager, you're like, okay, how do I, how am I supposed to sell anything to these people? You know, it kind of breaks the trust with the distributor, which is the worst part in my opinion, that the.

Leadership as I'm realistic with expectations of like channel cells and distributed cells and they think, well, okay, so it takes my rep, when I get a new rep, it takes them six months or seven months whether to be up to speed and then they're going to perform in that territory. Whereas in, in my experience, and you have a lot more than me, it's a much longer approach because you're in a new market. Japan, but for example, buys from people it knows, you know, so you have to build these relationships as well. But often the people aren't given the time.

Yeah. And you need at least in my experience, at least one year for the distributor to just to be, you know, to set themselves, understand the market and start talking to different, you know, start creating different opportunities in the market within one year. You cannot judge anything. You cannot say, oh yeah, I signed this distributor then in January, by December I will have sales. No, you're not going to have sales. If you sign them up now in January, maybe next January you can start discussing sales because they need time.

I think the challenge too is because they're selling many different products.

Yeah.

So part of the challenge that any company working through distributors have to solve is how do I get my product mind share to all of their reps and to all of their team that are reselling or redistributing our product. Right. Like that's only. And that's only one element of it. Right. It's like, how do I get them to sell it? How do I get them good at selling it? Right. Those are like now two different distinct problems that you have to solve that happen after you get a distributor to sign up.

Exactly. And having worked as a distributor myself, trust me, so difficult to learn all these products.

Yeah.

If you have especially many, many, many products, you're not Going to learn them that well. So it's always important to have the support from the other point. But actually to your point, how do I get them to sell? I think one of the biggest problems is always giving discounts to the distributors, like giving a proper price to the distributor. Because there is this idea in many companies that, oh yeah, I just give them 30% of the price and therefore they have enough margin to sell. Right. But then you need to come in that they need to ship. Maybe this doesn't work all over the world. Right. Like imagine if you're selling from Taiwan all the way to the US they need to ship these goods all the way up to the US they need to import them. So they have the import duties, import boxes and everything. And then, you know, they need, maybe they have agents. So they need to calculate also the commission of the different agents. With a 30% discount, they're going to be basically losing money. So you need to make it appealing also to the distributor part of the agent as well.

That feeds in quite nicely to a question. So I've had to, I've been a sales leader and I've had to work with distributors, enlist distributors. And something I've always struggled with is that I know, I know reps and whether they're a distributor rep or normal rep, they're going to sell the thing that is easiest to sell to get them to commission plan. They're going to do that. And I've always struggled with how do I incentivize my product best so that they want to sell me over everybody else. Because, you know, that's the goal.

Yeah. And that's one of the ways, I think, you know, first of all, training them well so that they know the product very well and it's easier for them. Second, helping them position it in the market because you can have the shiniest product. But if he's not well positioned, it's not clear maybe to the sales rep how is this positioned in the market, then it's already a fail. You're failing already. And then of course, allowing space with distributor to have that commission to them and making a good commission of course is going to incentivize them more.

Right, right. Like you can even work with distributors to run certain spiffs for reps. Right. I mean, like the, the thing I think people don't underestimate is just like the amount of time that a distributor rep is in the field selling your product is very low compared to your own team. And so they, they have to be viewed differently. So you have to incentivize people to sell your product and then you have to get them really good at selling it. And I think those are like the two, probably the two biggest challenges and then are not easy to solve either of them. Right. It's like, how do you, how do you get both of those things to happen with every distributor that you're working with?

Yeah. And that's why I think once you have an international channel manager, let's say it's good for them, you know, to be visiting clients with the, with the sales reps and get to know the sales rep. Because again, I think at the end of the day it always comes down to personal connection. So if they manage, you manage to go around with them and meet all these clients with them, then they feel more confident in representing your product because they think, okay, now I know better because I met, you know, the person that sells the product every day and they told me how to sell it and if I have any problems I can always go back to them. So that is also I think very important to kind of empower them.

Yeah, like I've seen we'll run like one distributor training for the group. It's like a 60 minute presentation and it's like, okay, now they're all trained on how to go sell our product. It's like how much time do you spend with your sales team internally to get them to learn how to sell your product? How long does that take when you're there doing it? All day, every day, in and out, talking to marketing, listening to product, listening to the technical team on calls with customers. It takes them a long time. Imagine how that is for somebody who's selling 50 of those products. Right. And they just don't have the capacity to learn that much. So you have to really dig deep on this if you want it to be successful. If you're, if you want to half asset and just like put somebody out there and see what happens, like fine, but just know you're not going to be hero that successful.

Yeah, maybe you're going to sell a couple, you know, instruments or whatever you're selling. You know, maybe I have a little sales, but it's not going to be maximized and it's not going to be that relationship that actually is, is going to make it worth it. And all the other point, I think on these, because you need to hold hands to the distributor, at least for the first part. You know, for the first year you need to literally hold their hands. Very importantly, you need to set proper expectations you cannot expect. Oh, yeah, I'm hiring an international sales manager. Therefore, now we are sending to the whole world. Wait a second. Your target cannot be the whole world. Your target needs to make some sense. Okay, say let's start with expanding to Europe or let's start with whatever the Nina region, the APAC region. Choose a region, focus on that and do it properly rather than, yeah, let's, let's do, you know, let's throw our international sales rep all over the world and see what happens. And nothing is going to happen because they're going to be spread too thin. They cannot actually work with the distributors properly. And. And then you say, oh, we failed.

I think something we've been talking about is actually also taken for granted in smaller companies that you're saying, like you, you get an international sales manager. Most smaller companies don't invest even in that phase of it. So I worked in a few small companies and often it's like, oh, your territories East USA or your territories Europe, or you're the sales manager of X number of people. Also, can you be the channel manager? Because that's just a small job that takes no time. You just got to manage the distributors. That's easy.

Yeah.

And I think that even that level isn't invested in. And I have a sort of anecdotal story of I was doing that myself and then somebody came on board that happened to speak Japanese. So I'm like, right, Hasti, this is how to you go manage the Japanese distributor. And she was at the point in time much more junior less experienced than me. And I thought, I don't have time. You do it. She doubled what the distributor was making by working with them. I think the language helped, but you would assume that someone with more experience would do that better. But just where she invested the time in them and work with them, it doubled what they were doing.

Yeah, I'm excited.

Helped, but probably not.

No, but it does make the difference. You know, I was working a company and we had this distributor in Greece and nobody had ever met them before. They, it was just on paper, but nobody ever met them. And when I joined, I was like, yeah, you know, let me do a Euro trip and I meet all our distributors. And I met also this distributor and the guy literally told me, oh, this is the first time somebody has visited me from this company. So this is impressive. So you're actually interested in us and so of course we are. And you know, we start proposing what. I was showing them what we had and what we had just launched and on the spot, he ordered four instruments. He said, yeah, let me buy four instruments immediately. Because I feel, you know, we had these requests, but I felt like nobody was actually supporting us.

Wow.

So it does make a difference always.

Yeah. I think the other pieces too that we talk about are like the support from the rest of the team. Right. Like there has to be marketing effort. We talked to somebody the other a couple weeks ago on the podcast about just simply translating content and information into local language. Right. Can be a big part of how you differentiate in the marketplace. Things like having even like pricing adjustments. Right. Like certain countries, the currency isn't as strong. And so if you go with like, I don't know if your instruments 150,000 USD and you try and sell it at 150,000 USD into a country with, you know, not a strong currency, it's going to be a lot tougher. Right. And so even those sorts of little things, you have to think about which, which makes me, I guess, sort of ask the question if I'm a founder or executive at a smaller company and we're thinking, I want to go this route, I want to expand internationally, I want to bring somebody in, I want to like actually invest in this as a, as a strategy. How. How does somebody like that get this knowledge or get this experience?

I will say, first of all, try to educate themselves with some webinars. You know, there is a lot of material online that trained a little bit people on international sales. And I think this would be fundamental at first, just to have an idea of how it works and how it's going to be different. And then try to educate the company itself, all the people in the company, and make. It's important that they make this cultural switch in the company to make everybody understand that this is now our goal, this is our strategy for the next five years. And that's what we are trying to do. Anything that we can do to support you to make you understand what is needed, we will do and really rely on even knowing other companies that already sell internationally and talking to them, understanding the struggle. It's always useful because at that point you get to understand, okay, this is not maybe as easy as I thought it would be.

One of the times you'll have shared investors with these other companies, you can get those introductions through your investor network to other people, founder networks, exec networks.

Those sorts of things.

Or frankly, just like reach out to people such as yourself and be like, hey, I'm thinking about doing this at my company. Can I just ask you some questions? And talk to you. I don't know if I just like put you up and your inbox is going to get blown up. But like, I think that that could be something that people do. I go out there, ask questions, talk to the experts and then, and then figure out how to, how to create your strategy. You don't just, you know.

Yeah, you will hope they did actually. You know, I would be happy to actually answer questions if anybody was asking me. But I think most people just think, oh, it's easy, let's just do it. But it would be actually very good if they were. If more people were starting to ask any questions and not just assume that you hire a person, they're going to do the job because this is not going to happen.

And I'm going to give a piece of advice that I think I've learned. And Deborah, you could tell me if I'm wrong or not, right? So if you're not going to hire a sales manager to look after this, then at least listen to the distributors. I made the mistake of almost getting annoyed with the Japanese distributors when I first started this because they're asking for so much data, so much details about stuff, and I'm like, come on, we can sell this like us, uk, because we're used to those market. You don't need all that data. And then I traveled with the rep in Japan and realized what the clients are asking of them and how they buy so much more through that data. That's just an example. Every culture is slightly different. Right. But if I'd have just trusted in the reps and the people in the distributors as the expert in that area and given them what they needed, I probably would have learned that lesson a lot quicker and less painfully. To my advice, if you're not going to have an international sales manager, listen to the distributor and what they need.

Yeah, and that's part of the trust and relationship that you need to build from the beginning. Because I think many times the idea is, oh, they're asking all these questions and they are so far away from me. Why are they asking me all these questions? They maybe don't understand the technology and you know, you have all these assumptions. Actually not the case. They just need that information, otherwise they cannot sell.

Well, we're running up on on time here, but want to end with one last question because we chatted the other day. Hopefully you remember the answer. And we chatted the other day. But I would say give a one, you know, sales tip to, to all the listeners that has helped you Be successful.

I don't know the answer. You don't know what it was.

It was connecting with the person. Right. So.

I will have, you know, in general, I will have two tips, and one of them, the first one will always be to. To nurture their relationships all the time. Because it's always. People end up always buying from people, and there's nothing else I can tell you. If you don't have that relationship built, they're not going to buy from you. Whether it is distributor or end users, that is always fundamental. And the other thing that I will say is don't be afraid to just cut the distributor off. Which is a bit likely to say. But sometimes you're so scared to say, oh, I lost a distributor, but the distributor wasn't performing at all, so there's no point in keeping them there. And at that point, if you cut them loose and you say, okay, this is not working, respectfully, we need to close this relationship more often than not. You will find that they also felt like your product was a burden for them and they also didn't want. It was just an extra bit on their portfolio. And you can find a better one, possibly. I can focus on your products.

That makes a lot of sense. So I would also say, and more broadly even is don't be afraid to disqualify people. You know, we all try and hold on to opportunities for too long and we hope for the best. When hope isn't a strategy. Right, so.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

I think we're gonna have to do an episode two of this because I have a lot more questions that I had about distributor and I was manager, so. Yeah, it was really good. Love it.

Yeah, we'll get into it. Sure. Well, Deborah, thanks for coming on. We really appreciate it. It's been a pleasure.

Thanks a lot for having me.

Ra.