[Q&A] Is biotech slower to adopt technologies vs other industries?

Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of our Q and A portion of the podcast. In these episodes we take questions from the audience that have submitted them directly to us and we answer them live on the show. So if you want to get your question answered, go to Succession Bio podcast and there will be a link there to fill out the form. You can fill it out as many times as you want and then we will hand pick a few of the questions and answer them live. So for today's episode, our question is do you think that the adoption of new technologies, tools and tech stacks is slower in life sciences and biotech sales comparatively to other markets? If so, why might this be?

Oh, so I think this, I think the answer to this about the sales side of things is actually going to be similar to the scientific side of things. So I'm going to answer it with the our customers and why we experience the adoption kind of curve we do in biotech. And I think the same answers are inferred into the sales process, if that makes sense. So actually when we think about biotech sales or we think about scientists adopting technology or tech sector, whatever it may be, we tend to think, oh, why are they not adopting it? Like it's a unified one thing and they all have the same mindset. Whereas actually in I've read these processes you'll normally have a process, a series of different kind of mindsets. So you're, you're really early adopter, that's forward thinking, then you're kind of next phase of adoption and then you're late adopters and they're not always the same groups of people. And in biotech particularly you can find that there's a department in large pharma that are early adopters because of who's leading it. But actually in general you find large pharma adopt slowly and, and it's the small agile biotech. And the reason for this is they normally have really well established embedded processes that work and the pain of inertia to adopt something new is high because they have to throw away a big thing that kind of works to implement something that doesn't. Whereas newer companies that are just coming on board to technologies tend to be like, well we've got nothing, what do we want? We will as well take the newest best thing out there because there's no pain to throw the old thing away. So you need to think about the process and what they need to go through to see who your early adopters are. And I think that's similar in sales technology process like large Sales companies versus new agile companies.

Yeah. And I think if you take it from a, you know, I'll take it from the sales side of things, which is from a sales perspective in life science sales. I think one of the main reasons I think that technology is adopted a lot slower is because most people don't enter the workforce as a sales rep. So what do I mean by that? Most people coming out of the lab or entering sales or starting their career for that matter, are starting out as a scientist. So their first interaction with coming into work and having a job is being in the lab. It's not about using tools and technology from a sales perspective. Whereas if you look at a soft, like an industry like SaaS, like where you're maybe you're selling to marketing companies, sales companies. Right. You're selling to these other organizations and maybe you have a horizontal SaaS product, software as a service. This the way you enter your career in those cases is typically as a sales development rep. So your first job out of school is what are the tools and technologies that I can use? How can I be empowered to go and sell? And so from an early stage, that is your mindset of how you function and that is just portrayed all throughout the industry. And then to add on to that, everybody goes and just like sells to each other's like VC companies when they're starting out, when it comes to like the software industry is like, oh, I'm just going go sell to my friends. They're in the same space like at their company to use it. And so you have all these companies that are like selling to each other. And what actually is interesting is it's really hard for some of these SaaS companies to expand into other markets like say Life Sciences and get out of SaaS and selling to other SaaS companies because they don't know how to position and message things in a way that gets somebody to understand why they actually need like a sales engagement tool, why they actually need, you know, contact data. Because they're so used to talking to other software companies that are used to this sort of like necessary need and already focusing on that technology side.

Yeah. The challenges in the biotech space is often you have maybe have a salesperson who's invested in looking at this stuff, but people often say, well, this is a great product, it will sell itself. So then if you have that mindset, you don't need any of these tools. Right. You just need people to see it. You don't need the tools and the resources and the data, which is to Me, really weird, because you're talking about.

Like, are you talking about like a, like a biotech company? They're basically saying, hey, our product will sell itself. We just show them the data, they're going to buy it. Right. We don't need all this other sales tech to help the sales rep sell. Just go in front of people and talk about science. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Which is not true. Which is not true.

No.

That's not how the world works.

But what's really weird about that is you would think that people want to research the new technology and everything because everybody in this is a scientist. And for the whole of their career they've been like, I need to do X experiment. What do I do? Right, let's go research what's been done before and what's out there.

Yeah.

And then I'm going to get embedded in it and I'm going to start working with it. Whereas when they take that jump from scientists to sales, they forget that there is a science to selling and there's a lot of tools and resources we need. And I think if they remembered that, more people would adopt quicker.

I think. Yeah. As well. But I also think that the, the leadership teams. A lot of these companies have started their career again as a scientist back in the day, and then now they're transitioning into leadership roles. And when they were selling and we just went door to door, we just knocked on people's doors, we showed up at their labs and had conversations. But we know that's like, not how sales is like, done anymore. Right. Especially the last few years. And so you don't, you see this, like, late adoption curve to your point, around companies being willing to invest in, in, you know, the latest and greatest sales technology that's going to make their sales reps substantially more efficient and effective. So, yeah, it's not, it's definitely not.

Until they've experienced some pain. They're like, crap, we're not hitting quota. What do we need to do now? We're willing to invest in some stuff.

Because we realize maybe, maybe I would even argue that it's like, yeah, sure, you're in pain, but it's like, how do you know what the pain is? It's like, well, they don't know what they don't know. Like, they don't know that the reason they're not, you know, hitting their quota is because they don't have enough pipeline. And it's not. It's because their team doesn't have the tools and resources and training to actually go and prospect effectively as an example. No, no, that's.

I mean the senior people, until they start seeing people not, not willing to invest in these tools because they don't see the value in them. Yeah, but, yeah, well we, one of the reasons someone we know, we see a lot in different things like the book club, Brian, he always talks about when he wants to work for someone, he wants to work for someone who's carried the bag. And by that he means being a rep has done that because then he knows the import, they know the importance of this. And I think that's, that's why.

Yeah, I mean I think it's also one of the key roles that has popped up a lot in software companies is this like role of like rev Ops revenue operations. And the idea with this role is that they are responsible for basically connecting the tissue between all of your systems and operations between all of your different commercial functions. And the reason they have that role is because now you have all of these different tools that can solve all of these different challenges. But you need somebody who can manage that and who's looking out for what are the best options for our team. And so having a person and, or group of people that can be on the lookout for which tools and technologies to actually like enhance the salesperson's efficiency and effectiveness, then they can bring that into the company, figure out how to roll it out to everybody, train up everybody, get them all enabled. Because that's the other like hard part with this. It's like if you're just going to buy a software and then not teach people how to use it or not, make sure that's being used effectively, that's just going to be wasted budget. So yeah, I think we definitely agree that the biotech industry is a little bit more of a late adopter hopeful. We touched on some of the reasons why we believe that is and hopefully everybody that's listening to this will understand why it's so important to go out and evaluate different technologies. And if you are curious what the best ones out there are or what different options might be, feel free to reach out to myself or Nick and we could share some best practices that we've seen from some of the more innovative life science companies out there. Awesome. Well, if you want to get your question answered, remember go to Succession Bio podcast and fill out the form right there on the website that says ask us anything. And with that we'll see you on the next one.

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