[Leadership] Starting a company through founder-led sales with Dejan Husman

First seed financing round. Your investors are very, you know, product focused. They're like, okay, you need to create a product which is going to massively scale and make us a lot of money. And you don't want to say that dirty word, service. That's a really dirty word, right? Because that's totally not scalable. And you don't, you're not doing that right. But I was given the advice by a seasoned CEO who told me, like, look at the beginning, it doesn't really matter. What you need is cash in and, and cash gives you freedom. Right? If you have, if you're a sustainable business, you're free. You can, you know, you can develop at your own pace, you can do things your own way. And so do services, do services at the beginning because it's not necessarily scalable, but it will get you, it'll be much easier to close deals and it will get you to a stage where you're more regularly exchanging with people and you're learning about what it is that people really.

I'm really excited for the episode here today. We've got a good one. We've got Dayan Houshman, who's the CEO of De Novo Matrix. They're a really early stage company and we've got some really interesting takeaways that he's going to share. But Nick, what are you looking forward to most?

Yeah, I'm really looking forward to the discussion with Diana. Um, we, we've known him for a little while, Harrison and I, and I've always been really impressed with how he's first the learning about sales process and not coming from a sales background as a founder and CEO and he's, he's understanding of those processes has always blown me away. So I'm really looking forward to hearing what he's got to say.

Yep, it's going to be great. We're going to talk about a few different things. The transition from being a scientific founder to then actually having to go and sell the product that you've now made, when you should think about hiring your first sales rep and making that transition from founder led sales to actually building a team. And then we're also going to talk about just general early stage startup challenges, specifically around investments and whatnot across the globe. So really exciting stuff. Let's dive in. Ayaan, welcome to the show. Pumped to have you here.

Thanks for having me.

So nice to have you. Awesome. We prepped you here ahead of time. So you're aware we asked the same question to everybody to kick off the Episode. What's a funny or crazy story that's happening in your career?

Yeah, sure. I have to say, based on this question, I checked out some of the other stories out there. I thought, okay, what should I expect? And yeah, a lot of really impressive stories came out. So I thought, oh, the bar is really, really high. But yeah, for us, funny story was last year we were negotiating what turned out to be sort of our biggest sale of the year. It was sort of very classical. We sold something to this company before and we'd been working on it for a couple of months. We had a very, very skeptical decision maker. But we were lucky that we also had a lady on board who was like the champion and she internally really understood the science and it really, really helped that we had another scientist who worked with me and sure. That they vibed really on the scientific level and I could sort of get all the scientific things, but also the sales points in on the side. And we finally negotiated getting the deal closed and we said, oh great, this is like the biggest deal we've ever closed so far as a company. So we're really super excited about it. And then we got an email from this champion who said, wow, there's a little sticky part. We actually want to pay with credit card. And so for us. Oh, damn, who does that? Who pays for such a huge amount? I mean, it was effectively like a three, three to six month project which we were going to run with this with this company and they want to pay that with credit cards. So obviously we didn't charge them enough or. Yeah, or there are just differences in how you pay things in the US versus in Germany.

I mean, that's actually a big point. One of the things that we wanted to talk about today. Right. So you guys are based in Germany and you know, you obviously are selling a lot in Germany, but then also in different cultures like the UK or in the us what have you kind of noticed as some of the differences in, you know, not only selling in those locations, but you know, maybe even just like operating and functioning as a, as a company.

Yeah, I mean there's certainly differences in mindset when it comes to discussions. I would say. Yeah, there's the things which most people notice is that, you know, in the US people are, I guess, more open. Everyone is like in general, more. More relaxed about taking on meetings and discussing things through. I guess people are a little bit more guarded with their time. When you look at sort of Europe, like Swiss, German, but yeah, there's this mixtures of both. Yeah. Ideas around paying for projects are also slightly different. Where I would say the biggest differences are coming down to sort of which segment of the market. So we sell to sort of cell therapy companies, big pharma, which we sort of see behave in a similar way. And then we also did a bit of like, cultivated meat market last year and the year before, and there we saw really, really big differences in the kind of behavior and the expectations that you have from the customers. So, like, what bar? How high is the bar set? And all the questions that you get. And like, oh, very, very demanding versus very relaxed. So that's where I sort of saw the biggest differences.

I imagine there's like a threshold for innovation. Right. Or like their willingness to try out new products and new services across these different markets as well.

Yeah, yeah, certainly, certainly. So, again, I'd be cautious about saying that it's necessarily like a national difference where they say, okay, Americans are more innovative or open to innovation versus Europeans. But you definitely see it in sort of the startup sphere as to how open investors are, for example, in those two different areas. That's a really stark difference where you can say it's on national boundaries, it's dividing itself. Yeah. What else was there? I mean, there's also this, like, regulatory aspects which are slightly different, and there's also slight differences in sort of openness to risk in the different areas.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense in selling.

So about investing, I'd say in selling, I noticed, and this is my own anecdote, being a British person who sold sort of globally, that German, Germany and so Germanic area countries want a lot of data before they'll make any decisions. Japan seems very. Japan's very similar. Do you see the same thing in investing? Is there that level of extra detail you're expected than what you maybe would.

In the US for investing? I would say that's a difficult thing because you can't really ascertain how much data other companies have given to their investors when they raise their round. But certainly from the level of preparedness or the level of the way that they present themselves, you simply seeing much, much earlier stage or companies which have not yet really proven their market or not yet really proven their technology, receiving financing or like, you know, seeing it from the teams. Right. When you see a very youthful team full of people who just finished their PhDs, you know, raising like monster 30, 40, 50 million rounds, you think, wow, that's, you know, that's a lot of courage to take on that, that kind of huge risk versus in Germany, where You know, I've been on, you know, dinner tables with CEOs of, you know, pharma companies. You know, they're in their 50s, their 60s, and they're like, well, maybe we can perhaps raise like, you know, 10 million perhaps, you know, we have like 10 years of data but you know, we'll be conserv. Conservative, you know, so that is certainly different. And from the sales perspective, yeah, you're right. There are customers in, you know, Germany and Japan who are very, very data demanding. But I've also seen it, I've also seen it curiously, like in certain industries in the US as well, they'll be like, well, show me the proof. You know, I need to see the proof. I need to have, you know, your documentation. I want to see, you know, how you do quality management. They want to know it all before they decide to go with you as a vendor.

Well, I guess that's one thing that we also wanted to touch on is sort of like that funding process. Right. I think you've gone through this, you've know other people have gone through similar processes to raise money. How do you kind of approach that from your perspective?

So this is something which we were discussing earlier. So I think it's very, very context dependent. So if you are based in San Francisco, you would go about raising money very different than if you're based in London versus if you're based in a small city somewhere in Germany, then the process is very, very different for you. Right. It also has to do with pedigree. So whether you come from a famous university, you have a strong, you know, like a well known professor, key opinion leader behind you, you would approach that again differently. Like they might have their own inroads into investors or people who they know, who might know investors. So like, yeah, we call them multipliers in these like networks. For us it was the case that, you know, we didn't necessarily have these like options available to us. So rather what we did was we scoured around, you know, what's, what's available in Germany and, and we went to sort of the most prolific investor here in Germany for, for young startups, which is the High Tech Founders Fund, which you know, would be the same thing that I would recommend to any founder here in Germany to at least check those guys out to see if that's a good fit for them. But yeah, in the UK you would have, you know, 10 times as many investors that would be a potentially good fit for you. And in the US I think then that's, you know, Multiplying, even x fold. So then there's, I would say, more options available to you if you're sort of either in a big city or in a famous university.

So is there then like an upside to potentially thinking about how you start your company in one of those locations?

Absolutely. I think there's an upside in availability of, of investors, so people who are prepared to talk to you even at an early stage, there's an availability of talent. So if you think of sort of the Y Combinator model of like, you know, finding founders or other people who think like you or could be complementary with their skill sets, sort of increasing your chances of successfully, you know, creating that founder team that really, really works. I think this is all multiplied. If you're in these very, very large cities, in smaller towns, it's just unlikely that, you know, you having this collection of minds or complementary skill sets that come together, it's just more challenging. I mean, in Berlin, for example, there's like a certain street in Berlin where it's just sort of food stalls and stuff. And if you go and sit there anywhere, in pretty much five to ten minutes, you're going to hear someone pitching to a VC around you. Right? So it's just the place where all founders and VCs go to have lunch. And you know, you can't get that in smaller towns. There isn't such a hip, cool place to be.

I want to know where to sit now. I just want to spend time listening to the pitches.

Yeah, I mean, they're not always good.

Thanks for listening to the podcast. It would mean the world to us if you could help spread the word by sharing it with someone you know. Succession is a life science sales membership that includes on demand courses to uplevel your sales skills, resources to plan and execute your sales process, community for peer to peer networking and learning, and live workshops delivered twice a month. You can get access to all of this as an individual for just $79 a month or up. Level your entire team with customized learning paths built for each individual rep. Come join us at Succession Bio. As I say, switching gears a little bit, can we talk a bit about. Okay. Hey, now we've got a little bit of funding. How do you think about leveraging that money to build the team, build the product? Really early stages, I think we've talked and heard from other people on the show that are more involved in the scale up side. So once you're able to have a product, you're ready to take it to market. But how do you figure it out before that. Because you have to have a product and you have to have a team in place ahead of time in order to even get to that scale up phase.

Yeah. So ideally you think about it in a very. Yeah, should I say it in a preplanned way? Right. So you need to think about, okay, where am I now in terms of how much money have I raised? How much more money do I think I need in the next stages to get to where I want, which is at a certain sort of revenue scale. And typically there's a multiplier. So your end game is that you're getting to your X amount of millions per year in yearly revenue and there's a multiplier that your investors hope that they could sell your company for and that needs to pay off the amount of money which they've given you. Right. And most investors would need at a minimum like 3x return on their money at the very basic, basic, basic level. And that's not even considered a win. But most likely they want a fund return. So like a 10x on their money or 20x on their money. Right. And so just thinking about how much money people are raising, then the question is like, is your business big enough to support that dream? Right. So if I'm, If I'm raising 10 million from someone, then the expectation is I can sell my business for 100. Will my business ever be 100? If you're in the therapeutic space, that's, that's a pretty easy question to answer. So you don't even need to think about the sales aspects. You can forget them. Because for therapeutics most of that happens so far, much down the line. It's more about, you know, clinical risk and you know, regulatory risk. Yeah, in a sense, scientific, technical risk that needs to be solved. But once you hit market, you know, therapeutics are always worth literally billions per year. So there's going to be no problem in paying your investors back. I think the issue comes is if you are a founder in the sort of biotech space and you're looking to be B2B focused, so that means you're selling a product and you need to worry about the sales aspect. And there the question quickly gets difficult, is like, well, you know, am I addressing the right market? Is this the right thing? How do I move from my really, really tight niche where I get product market fit and my initial traction to the end market? So my end game, where I'm actually making money, that's going to realize my exit down the line. And I think that's A really challenging path myself. So, you know, de novo matrix, we haven't necessarily followed that path very, very accurately. Right? We, we focused very, very much on addressing our technical risk early on, and that's where most of the energy went. And then at some point we started realizing, okay, well, we need to also address the market risk. You know, are we able to sell this product? Who's going to buy this product? Are they going to keep buying this product? How do we find, you know, repeat customers and growing a growing market? So I think these are, these are sort of the really, really big challenges that need to go. I would say as soon as you've raised your seat, that should be sort of the key focus or even ideally before that. And I think that's a little bit maybe the disadvantage between sort of all other startups that are in the US and the way that they teach you how you should do a startup, first find your market, then figure out how to produce the product, like software as a service. And biotech is more, you know, it turns out, being more like, you know, somebody invented something cool that does something scientifically cool and then you're trying to shoehorn it into a market. And that's a totally different question. Right? That's, that's the backwards. We shouldn't be doing that way. If you're, if you're going to be a startup, you should rather know the market and then figure out how you can address it. And with biotech, you can't really do that because scientific innovation, you know, you can't just be like, well, you know, I kind of need a machine that does X, Y, Z. Why don't I just build that? I mean, it takes years, right?

So yeah, whereas like software, you can code together some more features, you could pivot really quickly. Biotech, you need that sort of technical innovation that's probably coming out of either academia or some other industry, or not industry, but other sort of.

Or a company, right? A company might have a technology which they have no interest in commercializing themselves and say, well, create your own spin out and do that. And they have no real idea whether that's useful or not, whether people are willing to pay for it. I mean, it could even be a solvable problem, a problem that people have, but people are not willing to pay for it or they're just not interested in solving that problem. I think, Harrison, one of your posts is exactly on that topic, right? That people say, yeah, I have that problem, but so what?

Yeah, exactly. Something we teach in our discovery course is essentially just because somebody has a problem, you can't just go start pitching your solution right away. You have to take a step back and you have to understand, is this a problem or one that is urgent? Are people actually going to like try and solve this right now? And is it a big enough problem that they're willing to pay, you know, potentially a premium for whatever that product or service they're offering is in order to, to, to solve that problem?

Though think about the extension of the problem. Right? So if you save them $2, but there's a load of investment in switching technologies, you may be better, but you're not better enough to make me put the effort.

Yeah.

And even being somewhere in all of those spaces, I have a, a question for you, Dan. That is we often talk to a lot of people that are scientific founders that have ended up in sales. And I know your mindset isn't this because we've spoken before, but often their thought is, oh, okay, I've got a product, it's amazing, I'll sell itself. Sales is easy.

Right.

Whereas you've gone from founder to CEO and you're working in the commercial aspect as CEO as well. Maybe you could talk a bit about that journey and whether there was a realization or you always knew that.

Yeah, no, that's, that's, I think a really great point. And I think it's. Yeah. What you're mentioning is not uncommon. In fact, it might even be rewarded. So I've also met more senior biotech CEOs who, you know, when I ask them something about sales or their commercial numbers, is it. Well, I have no idea. I'm the CEO, so you know, talk to the commercial guy where I think, well, that's shocking. That, that's shocking. You know, how could that be? And some CEOs do get away with it because they come from a scientific background and they focused solely on sort of product development. So they're sort of product focused people. And the product has been really successful through distributors. They don't have to think about the sales aspect as much. They just say, okay, well we appointed 1, 2, 3 distributors and it's going pretty well, so we'll just leave it at that. So that's okay. And that might work for some. So, you know, kudos to them and that's awesome. For us, it wasn't the case. So we had a sort of explanatory heavy product or a service based product which doesn't really allow itself to be distributed as well. And so I had to figure it out on my Own. So I did a lot of online readings around Corona time when you know, there was essentially downtime in the biotech industry. Weren't doing at least at the beginning, at the beginning. So it was like 2019 where we didn't have a lot of orders coming in a lot of discussions. So I was like, okay, I should train myself. So I did a lot of online reading, found a lot of resources out there, mostly focused on sas. So cool to read. Not necessarily very applicable to biotech since a lot of the lessons don't transfer. Shoehorning of markets being one big example, but there are others. And then yeah, I took some courses, so I took some sort of sales training courses to figure out, okay, how does the process work? And I sort of learned about the different concepts which I found really, really fascinating. I think it's a continual process. Right. I'm by no means an expert. I still need to read more and learn more. And then yeah, eventually I started working with you guys on the topic which I found even more sort of eye opening since the advice and the background came from people who were really in the industry and had worked in the space. Up until that point I had only access to salespeople who mainly came from sort of medical device sales which has its own, you know, there's its own thing and it is closer to biotech, but it's not quite biotech. So yeah, that's a little bit how I learned about the process. And yeah, internally. Now I teach my team internally about how sales works, how, you know, what processes they should employ, the mindset, the people that they talk to, how they should answer questions, what is discovery? It's like the thing that they, that they hear me drilling into them all the time. The most important thing.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. So that's actually an interesting point which is you went out on your own, you figured out how to sell. Right? Self taught. I'm going to figure out how to do this. Not everybody does that. So one kudos to you there. Right. Also seeking out help to make that happen. But then also you're sort of transitioning a little bit from founder led sales where you're the sole salesperson to hey, now we've got a team. So I've got to bring in a team, I've got to teach a team, we've got to coach a team. I now have to get them fired up about selling this product that you have years of, you know, experience and like you've been in the weeds, you know the industry so well. But now You've got these new people coming in. How do you actually get them up to speed? You know, appropriately.

I think that's, that's tough. And, and it was in one of your earlier. Yeah. Posts or earlier videos where. Yeah. It also has to do with the people. Right? So some people are, you know, having this grit aspect in them that they are resilient and they are able to learn it themselves. So they spend some time doing sales and they do it really bad and at some point they figure out how they should do it. Right. I mean, I can teach them a bunch of stuff, but inevitably they need to go out and talk to people and figure out how do they deal with questions, how do they deal with objections. So I think it has a lot to do with the person and also has to do with the background. So if people are excited about the science and they think, wow, I've seen it, a lot of people, we invite them into the lab. We have this, we have this day every year where we invite people from different positions in the company to see each other's jobs. And that's a perfect example where you bring in a salesperson, you force them to sit down at the laminar flow bench and you say, look, you're going to do the pipetting now. And then they see the result and they're like, wow, this thing actually works. And they get excited about it or they hear, you know, the people who did the product development talk about the results and explain why they're excited about it, the science behind it. And so people start to quote, unquote, believe, right? They know the product works, they know the proof is in the pudding. And then they're motivated also to sell it themselves because they stand behind the product. So yeah, internal communication, I think is sort of one of the big things there.

I think one of the things about that transition that I've heard, and you're obviously doing it really well because you're keeping everyone engaged. But the problem is, you know, the technology and you may have been naturally good at sales, right? You, you won't know whether it's something about to be educational as a natural affinity. And often you'll see this with great reps as well, that people say, ah, we had a great rep or a great founder, they sold loans, this is going to be easy. But there's no sop, right. We're all used to standard operating procedures in the lab. There's no SOP of cells in your company to hand over to the next person. So they have to go and make all of the mistakes bit by bit. And I think that's something that's really difficult, this sort of sop of training to hand over.

Indeed, indeed. So, you know, technically, if you're following the rule book of creating your own sales organization, you should always hire two reps, right? So you have a sort of control group internally and indeed you should provide them with an sop of, you know, this is how you should do sales. But in the end, every rep will have their own flavor, right? They'll have their own focus of how they build their sales operation, plan and say, look, I'm going to spend, you know, 20% of my time on prospecting, 30% on calls or whatever, 10% on emailing. And then some of them slightly, you know, do better in certain areas than others and they're more successful at that. Others are, you know, simply better at the discussion part. And they can convince people. You know, we had, we had one rep who, who, you know, he, he spoke with people in different languages, right? So he, you know, he, I contacted, he was Brazilian, right? So he contacted people in Portugal and he could speak to them in their local language. And then you're finding a different connection with people because you come from the same place or you can associate with the same culture. And he did really, really well with that. And others are not so good at the talking part. And yeah, you can't really blame them. But I think it's especially tough to evaluate reps as a startup because the business itself is not entirely figured out. So I think comparing reps is only really fair if you're in a sort of scale up stage and you know, what the sort of angle is of your hockey stick. And then you can compare people and say, okay, how well are you actually doing? And then you're hiring, you know, four or five, six reps at a time. And then after, you know, six months, 12 months, washing out and seeing, okay, look, did they hit their 30, 60, 90 day goals or not, then it's clear, right? But as a startup, I think that's a really, that's really challenging, right, to say that someone's not necessarily cut out for the job when it could have been just the fault of the founder, you know, not teaching them well enough or the market being not mature enough or whatever the, you know, case may be.

Yeah, that, that being said, then it's, it sounds like it's almost difficult to set quotas, right? So early stage, how do you know, like, hey, what can we expect? We expect them to do a quarter Million a quarter, a million a year.

Like what's super challenging?

What is the sort of goal that you set? And so, and I guess then the question is, do you set a specific target or is it more focused on like say, activity? Right. So is it a revenue target? Maybe it's activity targets. How do you set these sort of goals at the early stages where you're still really testing the market to find out if there is product market?

I think that's, that's a great question. That's something which, which we've been, you know, bothered by and concerned with for the last three years. So how do you set a target? What's realistic? And, and yeah, there's the sort of expectation from the investors, you know, what target you need to hit in order to be. You're showing that excellent growth. There's the standard which people talk about, which is 3x, 3x, 2x. So you want to grow 3 times in revenue for the first year, second year, also 3x, then 2x, and you're following the sort of typical growth pattern. And then there's the realistic. As a person in the trenches doing the calls, booking meetings, is that realistic? Can you hit that target? And what we have found is that the first year, it's basically a crapshoot. You might as well take a dart and throw it on the board. The number you pick, it's not connected with reality because you simply don't know. You have no clue, you haven't talked to enough people. And then following the first year, you can then start to sort of have an idea of in which direction it's going. What I found at the beginning is helpful for orienting is looking at activities. So for us, the biggest side of book calls, so if we could book calls, then we have more or less historically like a 30% chance of closing that deal. That was really, really helpful. The amount of emails that you exchange or other activities didn't really correlate with anything positive, but those activities did. And then following the first couple of years, then we could sort of get an idea, okay, how much could each person realistically close after they've been sort of fully ramped? And then we could start projecting. So this year it's then getting a little bit more realistic. I think we can really project, okay, where can we close which deals? But at the beginning it's, it's very, very challenging.

Yeah. I think you're also probably trying to figure out pricing even in the early days. Right. So totally, there's so many, there's so many like nuances that exist in the early days that you're just trying to figure out. So would you, I mean, what, what would be sort of your recommendation? Any other early stage founders that, hey, we're talking to you salespeople, right? How would you set those goals? Would you set them on activity? Would you set it on, on revenue?

How would you kind of, I mean, I, I would maybe before like thinking of just sales team. So what, what I, you know, advice that I received and at the beginning, you know, I balked at it and thought, I don't know if I want to do that, is that, you know, when you raise your first seed financing round, your investors are very, you know, product focused. They're like, okay, you need to create a product which is going to massively scale and make us a lot of money. And you don't want to say that dirty word, service. That's a really dirty word, right? Because that's, that's totally not scalable and you don't want, you're not doing that right. But I was given the advice by a seasoned CEO who told me, like, look at the beginning, it doesn't really matter. What you need is cash in and cash gives you freedom, right? If you're a sustainable business, you're free, you can develop at your own pace, you can do things your own way. And so do services. Do services at the beginning because it's not necessarily scalable, but it will get you, it'll be much easier to close deals and it will get you to a stage where you're more regularly exchanging with people and you're learning about what it is that people really need versus a product sale is sort of one and done versus a service. You sort of, you're developing relationships. And you know, I'm sorry that we didn't take that advice early enough. So we eventually we did go to that model of running more and more services and building relationships with our customers over longer periods, which has been hugely helpful. And that's what I would recommend to everyone. And at the beginning, I think it's very important to have sort of founder led sales. Since the founder knows the product, they know how to sell it, they know the science, they can be sort of the field application specialist and the salesperson at the same time. Although it's helpful to bring in an extra person every so often. But I think that's really, really important. And I think salespeople at the beginning of a startup don't have anything to like, they shouldn't be there at the beginning. If you bring in a sales rep. Sales rep is there to execute things which have been written down and like clarified. Right? You can't bring in a sales rep and expect them like, hey, you figure out that sales thing, even if they're a seasoned person. So I mean, we've made that mistake. People talk about it, there's, there's entire YouTubes about this where, you know, you create your startup, you have a little bit of success and then you say, well, now we have enough money, now we're going to get some fancy schmancy sales dude from, you know, biotech X company, you know, who has a storied career and made millions, millions in revenue. And they're going to come over to our business and they're going to figure out this whole sales thing for us. We thought, no, we're smarter than everybody else. We're not going to do that. We did that. We weren't happy and we weren't happy. And it's clear because, you know, salespeople, I think really, really successful salespeople require a certain infrastructure for their activities to really shine, right? So for that guy or girl in that big company, they have a marketing department behind them, they have existing sops on how it should work. There's a brand, you know, all of these things work together. And sure, the guy's ensuring that the deals are closed, but as a startup, no way. It needs to be the founder. And I would say that there's a certain, there's a certain tipping point and that's either at a certain revenue or at a certain standardization of what the buyer's journey looks like. When it starts to make sense to bring people in to support you with the sales, it doesn't necessarily have to be people who are closing deals themselves, but it could also be people who support you with, let's say, outreach activities or some marketing aspects. And then, you know, then it slowly starts spilling into like co selling. But at the beginning, I would recommend people don't get any sales until, you know, the founder has, has figured it out. Because, you know, you need to figure it out. And as a founder you can also say, look, we're not going to do product, we're going to do service or we're not going to do the service, we're going to do, you know, online based sales or, you know, that's something that you need to decide as the business is evolving and you can't expect somebody else to do that for you.

If the founder is going to be the one that figures it out though, do you advise they seek training and mentorship in the way self process works?

100%. 100%. I mean, as I said, I think it's different if you're in the therapeutic space because it's not really relevant. But I think that so many scientific founders could really benefit from that because sales. Sales is so different. It pulls you away so much from when you speak in sort of science language. It's about truth. What is the fact? What do we know? And sales is so different. Right. It's about what is actually arriving in the ears of the person you're talking to. What do they care about? It's not about you anymore. And I think for a lot of people, it's a big mind switch that needs to be made and it would be for everyone's benefit if they did it.

Yeah, I think as. As in a sort of maybe a rough analogy for people out there listening. That phase, you've got science like chemistry, biology and physics and their absolutes. Right. They're theories and data. But then you've got the other kind of side of science, which is more psychology and more qualitative. And I think sales falls into that bucket. It's still a science. It still needs a process, it still needs an understanding, but it's much more qualitative. And you need to. You need to know how to navigate that. And if you can piece those two things together, they're the people that are successful in salsa.

Yeah, indeed. Indeed. I would even say in a certain stage, people would be successful in sales at least. We've also experienced that. Right. Reps in our company who had experience in sales and people skills, even though they had very little, or I would say, minimal sort of scientific knowledge, they were still able to close more deals simply because they could. They could connect with people. So I'd say that's even more important.

Well, this has been an awesome conversation, but we're coming up on time, so want to ask you one more question, which is, you know, we talked a lot about how your CEOs or founders can really go out and try and figure out sales, and they need to go and learn it. Where would you recommend that they start?

With you guys? Certainly.

That's not what I said. I'm never more like, what sort of skill would you recommend? What skill would you recommend they try and start with first? Right. Like, you know, there's a lot of different things that you can focus on within sales. Where would you recommend?

I think there's so many elements it's difficult to recommend. Just One, because I think that you need to understand how the entire process is mapped out. Maybe it's also like my preference because it's the way that I like to think about things. But understanding the entire, like having a first, a bird's eye view of what the entire sort of sales process is like is I think, really, really helpful. And then you can dive in and become an expert at the various stages. So understanding like, okay, how do I define, like, what is my buyer's journey? How does that all work? You know, which points they have to interact with our content or to know my brand or what solution I have? How does discovery work? What kind of questions do I ask? Who are my ideal customer profiles? All of these aspects. I think if you know a little bit about it, it's going to be very, very helpful versus jumping in, becoming an expert at discovery, that would be my feeling because at least that's a pathway which I took. And for me that was really, really helpful to map out the entire process. And it felt like, okay, this is now the known universe and then I can go in and figure out my unknowns versus if I just did one thing, then I would feel like, oh, there's a lot of these other aspects which I don't understand. Like, you know, what does this, what does this mean? Why does this not work for me?

Yeah, I mean, I think that's probably great advice for anyone, right, that's coming into sales, is currently in sales or, you know, you know, a founder trying to, trying to figure this stuff out is get a bird's eye view, figure out, you know, the whole landscape, figure out what you're good at, what you're not good at, and then go and systematically sort of improve those skills along the way.

Yeah. And I think also depending on the salesperson about what position they have and what their sort of product type is, there's this concept of are you hunting for mice or for elephants? You'll have different kind of behavior as well. What you should focus on, whether you're field application specialists, whether you are a sales rep, account manager, there are different skill sets that will be more important to you and others which will be simply less important to you. So that then also makes a difference. But knowing the entire process helps you sort of piece things together. And I also think that understanding perspectives, so different perspectives from people, so that's useful internally in an organization. So for example, what does your boss want from you or what do your team members maybe want from you or need to be successful? And then also the perspective of your customers, whether that's a scientist who's your champion internally, or somebody who's a gatekeeper, understanding what their motivations are and being able to put yourself into their perspective, into their shoes is also, I think, really, really helpful in sales so that you don't get, like, emotional. So that's a big thing that I did at the beginning is like, you know, people don't want to buy from me, and I got really, like, pissed off. You know, like, why is this not working? And then, you know, I start to abstract myself from the equation and start to understand, okay, well, you know, from this person's perspective, I'm this guy who is, you know, pushing something on them which they don't want or don't need, even though their boss wants them to do it. And, you know, how do I. How do I put it in their perspective?

Awesome. Well, this has been a pleasure. So many great nuggets in here for everyone. Whether you're in sales with your founder, early stage, later stages, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for being here, and have a great rest of your day.