[Sales] 5 Skills Needed to Sell in Today's Environment

Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Sales DNA podcast. On this episode we are going to share a recording of the Elrig drug discovery presentation we gave last week on the five skills needed to sell in today's environment. A lot of things have changed. It's really hard to generate first meetings, it's really hard to drive deals to close. And we're going to share our experience of working with 30 different companies, hundreds of different sales reps, all in the life sciences from the last year to sharing, you know, what's working, what's not working, and really focusing on the five skills that you need to actually sell successfully in today's environment. So again, this is the presentation that we gave last week at Elbridge Drug Discovery and so we're sharing it all with you here today. And so enjoy. All right, so this presentation is all about the five skills that you need to sell in today's environment. But real quick, I'm going to give you an overview of who succession is. We're a life science sales organization where we help life science sales teams across a number of different elements from lead generation, so helping you generate new opportunities. Top of funnel pipeline. We help sales teams up, up level their skills around sales training, coaching. We have live workshops that we run, we can even do in person training events if you'd like. And we have an entire platform dedicated to the retention and on demand content, courses, workshops, resources, things that you need to upskill your whole sales team. We also will selectively help headhunt specific people. So if you meet a specific salesperson with a specific set of skills, we can leverage our network to help you find them. And then as well, we also really dive deep into existing organizations to help them set up the tools, the tech, the infrastructure, the training, the onboarding and the things that they need in order to be successful as a sales organization. And so those are the main things that we do here at Succession. And so because of that, we have a ton of insights into what's going on in the life science industry across a wide range of different providers. And so what we're going to talk about today is the different trends that we've seen in the data that we've seen from partnering with 30 plus different companies, hundreds of different reps. And so what we're going to do is share a lot of the insights that we've had over that period of time and help you at a high level understand what are the skills that you should really be focusing on to help you be successful in selling right now. So the top line stat is quite disturbing, but it's that 81% of reps have said that they struggled in Q2 and Q3. Right? That means that only 19% of reps are doing well or good enough. And so this is a number that we really need to change. And so we need to dive deeper though to figure out why are these reps struggling. And it turns out that 48% of reps are finding it much harder to get initial meetings. And 41% have a first meeting. They feel like it went well, but then they get ghosted. They never get heard from again. We just recently actually found out that apparently Gen Z refers to getting ghosted as getting aired. So that was a new learning for me. Depending generationally what you are, you're either getting ghosted or you're getting aired. And those are the two biggest challenges that sales reps are facing right now. And then the rest of them are, you know, losing to competitors. And some people marked other as a different challenge. Those are so minuscule on this list. What we've decided to focus on are really around how do you get initial meetings and then how do you prevent yourself from getting ghosted or aired after that first conversation? And there's a ton of external stuff that's going on in the world that's making it harder and harder for sales reps to be successful. You know, the first one is vendor consolidation. So companies, biotech companies, pharma companies, they're consolidating a number of vendors that they're actually working with. They want to make it easier for their scientists, their researchers to work with a select number of vetted vendors. So that is a big challenge if you're trying to disrupt the status quo and get into an organization and you're just a new vendor getting added to the list. There's less funding for exploratory research. Right. So if you're not aligning to, if your solution isn't aligned to a critical path project or critical critical path experiment, someone may be closer to clinic. You're less likely to actually get funding or they are less likely to give you funding or have funding allocated for those types of projects. Purchases are requiring more scrutiny. We're seeing people as high as like CSOs of 500,000 person companies signing off on 10k deals. You know, CFOs getting involved in purchases of that size. Right. So there's a lot of scrutiny from a executive level on where the money is actually being spent. Which also leads to another challenge which is larger buying Committees, there's more and more people that are involved in making any decision. We've seen committees of 40 people responsible for making a 10k decision. Because of the implications that 10k decision has for a pilot project. We also, that's an outlier. But in general, we'll look at some data around buying committees where the average buying committee is seven people, but most reps are only talking to one person. And so there's clearly a disconnect there. A lot of people have a if it ain't broke, don't fix it mentality. This is pretty common when it comes to like protocols, things that they're working on. If there's not like a clear problem that is causing a business impact, it's not something that's going to be worth fixing. And so they're just going to stick with what they're doing. They don't have the budget to go try out a whole bunch of new things to see if they can make something a little bit better. Next to a solution overload, there are so many different options and solutions that scientists, that companies have at their disposal to solve their potential problems, right? There's more and more companies being started, more and more products and services and solutions being brought to market, which means there's more decisions that scientists and researchers and companies have to make. And so it can be challenging to choose the right solution for you. Another big one that we see is that everyone has great data. Meaning like every company out there is putting together data sets that make them look good. Just because you think you have great data does not mean that your competitors are not actually sharing great data as well. And so everybody has great data. This is essentially a like the status quo. This is like. But the thing like the minimal viable entry into the market is to have great data. So what if you don't have great data? What do you exclude? But everybody has great data. This is just commonplace. And so you have to go above and beyond above your data, tell stories in order to really differentiate yourself. And then lastly, it's easy to load up the span cannon. There's so many different tools out there to find data. There's so many tools out there for email automation, for LinkedIn automation. And so it's so easy to just send a bunch of messages to a lot of different people. And so everybody is inundated. Our buyers are inundated with information and messaging, just loading up their inbox. And so it's really hard to stand out, right? So because of the ease of the ability to send messages at Scale, you have to do something different and unique in order to stand out from all of that noise. And so when we're facing all of these different challenges, what most people revert back to is, is they want to do more, more, more, more. Right. They want to send more emails, they want to reach out to more prospects. They want to just figure out, how do we get more opportunities, more and more instead of thinking about how can they do better with what they already have, how can they get better at converting the current addressable market that they are going after? If you think about the effects of going after more and more people say if you start expanding your lists into less qualified buyers, you are now going to, in reality, decrease your response rates. So if you're already gaining low response rates with your ideal prospects, and then you decide, I'm going to expand my list to go send out more messages to more people, your response rates are only going to go down because you're sending messaging to people that are less qualified. So more isn't really the answer in a lot of cases. Really what you want to focus on is getting better. Get better at prospecting, get better at doing discovery, get better at driving deals to close, get better at working with your champions and developing champions internally at their organization. Get better at those things. And then once you get better, then you can figure out how to do more. But if you scale crap, it's not going to work. You have to get better first and then you can focus on more. Right, so now we're going to jump into the five different skills, Right? So that's the framing for the presentation here, where the challenges lie. Now, what are the five skills that you actually need to be focused on to sell in today's environment? All right, the first one is relentless prospecting. You're not going to be able to generate enough opportunities if you're not prospecting on a regular basis. So I'm going to share a couple numbers with you all here is that there was a large study done by one of these sales automation tools out there, you know, sales engagement providers, where they have access, like billions of different data points. Maybe not billions, but millions of different data points. And what they found was that it takes on average, not takes on average, but when you're reaching out to somebody to try and get a meeting or try and generate an opportunity. 80% of those opportunities that get generated come after six touches. That means that you have to take a minimum of six touches across different channels, like email, LinkedIn, maybe in person, events, phone calls, whatever it is, but it takes a minimum of six touches to generate 80% of your opportunities. That means if you're only sending one or two emails or you're sending a connection request and maybe a message on LinkedIn, you're missing out on 80% of the opportunities you can generate. And it gets worse in that 50% of opportunities come after 11 touches. That's crazy. That's a lot of touch points that you need to generate that's a lot of touch points that you need to generate in order to actually generate opportunities. Right? So you need to do a lot of work and it takes a lot of different messaging touch points in order to you actually get meetings and opportunities with your potential prospects. So this is what we mean by relentless is you have to keep at it and you have to keep doing it on a regular basis. And another stat here is that 250, you get a basically 250% increase in reply rate when you use personalized messages versus templates. So where it's really easy to just again, load up the span cannon with the same template and send it out to the same massive list, you're just not going to get the responses that you really want. And so if you really want to focus on getting better, you have to do personalized messaging and you're going to get basically a 2 1/2 x increase in response rate by doing that. And so when we think about prospecting, I think AstraZeneca had the five Rs of drug discovery, right? It's like the right target, the right molecule, the right patient, a few of those different things. And so what we did is we decided, hey, we'll make the four Rs prospecting, which is you have to send the right message to the right person at the right time through the right channel. Right? If you send the wrong message to the right person, it's not going to resonate. But if you're reaching out to the right person at the right time, the with the right message, maybe they have a thousand unread emails in their inbox. And so your email's never going to land in their inbox. They're never going to see it. So you also have to leverage the right channel. So all of these things have to come together to make prospecting work, which is why prospecting is so hard. And so when you're thinking about what are the things that somebody would be looking at when they look at your email, what are the things that they're going to consider when they decide, are they going to Actually open your message, the first thing that they are going to decide is who's sending it, right? So if somebody's getting a message from their boss, somebody important, they're probably going to open that message despite the subject line or anything within it. Then the next thing that they're going to look at is the subject line, right? So maybe they don't know who the sender is, but they're going to now look at the subject line to see, hey, is this something I may want to open? And then the third piece, which a lot of people don't consider, is what's in the preview text window. And so if you pull up your phone right now, or you pull up your email and you look at right after the subject line, there's a little bit of preview text. Sometimes it's about seven, you know, five to seven to eight words, depending on the length of the words, depending on the size of your screen. But you have about five to eight words that you can play with in the preview text window that can catch somebody's attention to get them to open your email. So those are three things that you want to think about there. Then they're going to say, hey, how long is this going to take me to read this message once I open it? And so if it looks a long block of text or it looks like it's going to take a long time, people are probably just going to delete it, especially if it's from somebody they don't know. Next, they're going to ask themselves, is this relevant to me? Is this something that I care about, something that can help solve a problem for me? And then anytime somebody's reading an email, they're going to continue to ask themselves, why should I read the next line? Why should I keep reading this? And so you have to minimize the space of your message and make sure that you are capturing their intention with every single line. You don't want to use wasted space in your messaging. And then lastly, they're going to ask themselves, should I even respond to this? So the questions they're going to ask are, could this help me? Is this a viable solution for a problem that I have? So maybe it's relevant, but is this actually something that's going to help me? Is it worth responding to this particular person and what are they asking for? Meaning that if somebody's asking to spend 60 minutes of their time on a call, 30 minutes on a call, somebody may not want to actually do that, and so they may not respond. It may be something that's interesting to them, they may want to learn a little bit more. But if the ask is for a 30 minute meeting, people may not actually want to do that. And so you actually may be missing out on responses from that perspective. Right. This is the nine questions that people are going to ask themselves at any point in time when they are looking at an email to decide do I open, read and respond to this message? So when it comes to messaging, there are five things that we see people mess up all the time. We, we look at, I don't know, hundreds of different messengers. It's wild how consistently these five things come up and why you need to avoid them at all costs. First one is messaging, which is just about the facts. So you're sharing a bunch of data, you're sharing a bunch of information. It talks about your features, your capabilities. It's a very fact based message that doesn't elicit much emotion at all. Two is focused on your offering. You use a lot of we's and an I in your messaging instead of you and they or you really focusing it around your particular customer and the problems that they have. Because your message is only about you. Hey, we can do this, we can do that, we can make this happen for you or I would love to meet with you. It's very you focused versus flipping it and having it be specific to the customer. There's no differentiation. This is a big one where you could basically swap the company name from the email and replace it with any competitor and it would look like the exact same email. This is really common and unfortunate. The next section is it's too broad. So you're trying to solve essentially every problem that or application that a customer might potentially have in one email. Right. So you end up with an email with seven different use cases, you know, five different applications that you could potentially solve. A list of content that they could go and look at, a bunch of links where you create these broad email that doesn't actually hit home and it ends up making the email very long and nobody's going to want to spend time to read it. You're also putting the effort on the recipient to figure out how it is you can actually help them. Then you have no personalization. Again, most people are sending out just templates. They write a template and they just blast it out to everybody. Again like this is not how you're going to stand out through all of the noise and everybody else is sending out these messages. How do we flip that? Leveraging everything we just talked about and the questions that someone is going to ask them themselves before they decide to respond to your and avoiding all of those pitfalls around bad messaging. And what you're going to do is you're actually going to focus on problems that you help solve versus the product. So think about what are the problems that a prospect might have that means they should use our product or service. So problem oriented versus product, then you're going to focus on one problem. For email, you may have many different problems that you can help solve, but you want to drip those out over the course of a sequence. Remember, multiple different touch points, but you want to focus on one problem per email. That way it's very specific, it's going to help it keep it short and it's going to be very clear what it is that you can help solve for that individual. Make sure it's focused about them versus you. Count the number of I's and we's and count the numbers of you's and make sure that you have way more you's than you have I's and we's. Your message has to be matched to the level of the responsibility of the person you're reaching out to. A CSO cares about things a lot differently than a bench scientist. Same thing goes for a director, right? They all have different levels of responsibilities and things that they care about and ways that they are measured. And so you have to make your message align to the type of person you're reaching out to, otherwise it's not going to resonate. You want to keep your message ideally under 100 words, but 125 words is good as well. Reason for this is, is if you pull up your phone and you look on your mobile device where, you know, probably 80% of messages are opened on mobile, you don't have to scroll. So when you look at 125 word message, 100 word message, you don't have to scroll. You're able to quickly look at it and say, oh, this is actually a short read. I might as well read this thing because you're really optimizing for the readability of your message. I can't take full credit for this quote, but I do love it. I heard it somewhere else, which is your messaging should be about creating curiosity and never satisfying it. If you give somebody everything that they could possibly need in an email, there's no reason for them to respond for respond to it. So the goal of prospecting is to get a response one way or another. If you give them everything they need, they have no reason to actually respond. So Figure out how to create curiosity with your message, but don't give them the answer to their problem in that message. And that kind of leads into this next section, which is don't try and sell your product or service over email. The email is not a great platform for selling what it is that you offer. So make sure that you leverage prospecting as a way to create curiosity to get interest. And then when you have a call with somebody and you're talking to them, that is where you spend the time going and selling. Make sure you're highlighting your unique differentiators. We'll show you exactly how you can think about your differentiators later, but make sure you're highlighting your differentiators in your messaging. You have too many people again send the same message that a competitor could send as well. So highlight your differentiators more. So why are you why they should talk to you over anybody else. And then lastly, make sure that you are talking about outcomes that you can drive for your prospect or for the person you're reaching out to versus the features and capabilities of your product or service. Right? It's one thing to say we can, we have this specific capability, but what does that capability actually do for the client? What is the benefit? What is the outcome that they'll be able to achieve from using your product or service? That's all the things that you want to make sure that you're including in your messaging. So these are the nine rules. You print this out, you can screenshot this, save this and anytime you're writing a new email look through this checklist and just make sure that you are checking out all of the boxes here and a quick email framework that you can use on this. We also wrote an in depth article in our newsletter about this. So if you actually want to join the newsletter it's blog succession bio and you can join get all of our newsletters once a week. But we have one in there specifically around the 4P email framework and it's a straightforward framework where it's personalization problem propose a solution and prompt for a reply. Essentially your first sentence you want to personalize as part of the message. Again going back to why should somebody open an email if the first section is I hope this message finds you well or hi, this is Harrison with succession bio. Those are useless pieces of information that are taking up the preview text window. What you want to do is get straight to the point personalized for why you're reaching out to them specifically so that way they see it in the preview text window it's also going to get them to read the first line because it's relevant and personalized to them. So that way they go on and read the second line of your message. So that's why it's really important that you personalize. It also makes it look like it's not a bot or an automated message that's being sent out. So really important to personalize there. Then you're going to call out a specific problem you think that person might be facing. And it's best if you can tie that problem to the reason that you're reaching out and to that personalization. Then you're going to propose a solution. How can you uniquely solve that problem for them? And then lastly, you want to prompt for a reply, right? Prompt for a reply could be something like, hey, are you interested in seeing the data? Are you interested in learning more? Typically, a soft call to action will get more replies than asking for a meeting. And so if I think about logically how this would work is if I always ask for a meeting, I might get, let's just say, you know, a couple percent of people to respond to that. If I ask for an interested CTA or a softer cta, there are a certain number of people who would not be ready to respond and want to take a meeting, but they would respond and ask to see some of the data and have a softer call to action where there's less of a commitment. And so by, by using the softer call to action, you're also going to get to people that actually want to meet with you. They will still want to meet with you. Right. So you're not going to be missing out on the people that won't meet with you. And you're only going to be increasing your reply rate by getting more people who might want to respond that aren't ready to actually meet with you. So that's why we want to call out a softer call to action. Cool. Now what you're going to do is you're also then going to create sequences. So a sequence is a step, I would say step by set of actions that you take in order to reach out to a particular person. And typically it's across different channels and it's across a period of time. An example might of a sequence might be I'm going to send a LinkedIn connection request. I'm going to send a personalized email. A couple days later I might reply to that email, I might give them a phone call and leave a voicemail. A few days after that, I might send Another follow up email talking about a different problem. Then I might send a different LinkedIn message with some data or some information that might be interesting to them. Do you have a sequence of touch points over a period of time and that's what you want to do? And this is where you have the chance to talk about your different pain points and problems that you solve right across all of these different touch points, not just all of one to one email. So at minimum we want to use at six touches over, I would say a 30 day period. If you want to extend that out, you totally can. Again, we're trying to optimize for the timing component of this, which is we want to hit the right person at the right time with the right message in the right channel. Right? So we want to optimize the timing which is how long should we spread out this particular sequence to assure that you, maybe a month from now somebody might have this particular problem. And we want to make sure that we are still top of mind when that time comes. In multichannel, you want to use at least two that you should definitely even use more if you can, like different channels for trying to get in front of and talk to different people. So tell a story throughout your sequence, make sure it's multi touch and multi channel. And there are lots of tools out there to make this happen. So if you want to know like which tools, like just send me an email harrisonuccession bio or find me on LinkedIn, you know, ask me there, send me a DM and I'm happy to talk to you. All the different tools and the different available options that you have to run highly effective sequences. Now just to reiterate why multichannel is so important, this was a data set run by gong. So GONG is basically call reporting software. They also do a bunch of other stuff related to sales engagement now. And one thing that they found is that when you call and leave a voicemail for somebody, you get a 2.15x higher email response rate. Yes, email response rate when you leave a voicemail for somebody. So let's think about some of the logic behind that, which is when you're leaving a voicemail for somebody, one, they may listen to it, hear your name, hear a company's name, you may reference back to the email that you sent them. So they'll be more likely to either go back to the email that you've sent or they may recognize your name, recognize your company name the next time you send an email. And so they may be more likely to respond to you at that point in time. Second, you can now read a transcript on a phone. So a voicemail is essentially an email that you can send with your voice that somebody can read on their mobile device. And I guarantee you that your customers get way less voicemails than they get emails. If you want a way to stand out and deliver a message that you want to deliver to a specific person, voicemail is a great way to do that. Should you expect calls back? Absolutely not. Don't expect to get calls back. Don't expect that many people to answer. But if you leverage voicemail as a way to increase your chances of connecting with a person in the long run through email or through LinkedIn, it can still be a fantastic channel in order to reach your target prospects. Oh, and just one other thing I want to note about this. We actually ran this test a couple years ago at sympigo and saw very similar results where we ran the exact same sequence, so the same emails and messages. One sequence had a voicemail step, had a couple voicemail steps, I should say, and then the other one didn't. And we saw, I think it was like a 2 1/2 x increase in response rate, email response rate on the campaign with the voicemails. This is also backed up from my own personal experience as well. Cool. So that's the main thing that you need to do, relentless prospecting. That's going to be the first way that you're going to be able to get meetings. The next thing you're going to want to focus on is delivering expert insights. So an expert insight is a perspective grounded in deep experience that reframes how prospects perceive a problem or opportunity. That's a mouthful, but essentially you're talking to a ton of different people that are dealing with particular problems that your product service can help solve. And so you have a deep experience in the problem set that your prospect is facing that they probably don't have. They're stuck in their world, focused on doing their things, and this problem comes up once every once in a while at best. So leverage your experience to reframe how they perceive a problem or opportunity that they're facing. As I'll talk about how you do that. So the first step is you want to introduce unconsidered needs into the conversation. So unconsidered needs are unknown, underappreciated or unmet needs that create urgency for your unique capabilities. So let's map this out a little bit. For those listening on audio, we're looking at a 2x2 matrix here. If you Want to see the video? Jump over to our YouTube channel and you'll be able to watch all of everything we talked about here in video format as well. On the Y axis we have a client's needs which are either identified or unconsidered. And then on the X axis we have your capabilities which are either specified or differentiated. And so what ends up happening in a lot of cases is a client will go, excuse me, a prospect will go to many different companies and say, hey, I need this, I need that. You know, help me with this service, this is what I'm trying to accomplish. And it typically will align to the capabilities that they want from each supplier. And so if you have that conversation, you're basically having a commoditized conversation because they're having that same conversation with a whole bunch of other prospects, or, excuse me, a whole bunch of other suppliers. And so if you stick to the same script of doing exactly what the client needs and what they say they need, you're going to end up in a commoditized conversation. Now what a lot of recs will do is they'll try and layer in how they're differentiated, right? So they're going to try and layer in their differentiated capabilities the differentiated things that they can do for them as this value add into the commoditized conversation. The challenge there's is that a client doesn't really need those things that you're talking about, right? That is just sort of like add ons. It's not required, it's additional stuff that they don't actually need. They went through this whole needs analysis to say what they need. And so you adding in all of these differentiated capabilities is essentially you're just adding more stuff to the decision making process. So it's not necessarily helpful. What you really want to do is you want to think about what are the unconsidered needs, like the decision criteria that the client is not thinking about. What have they not considered in their decision making process that is something that they actually should be considering. And you know this from all of your conversations with all of your different clients. What are the typical biases and misconceptions that they have when they come to you? Those are unconsidered deeds. And so you want to basically figure out what are a few of those things that your prospects always have when they come and talk to you. And then what you do is, is you tie those back to, right, those unconsidered needs, how you can solve them in a differentiated way. So your differentiated capabilities tie back to those unconsidered needs that you're going to teach them about. And that's how you can create an urgent and unique conversation for your specific service, product, whatever it is, right? So tie your differentiated capabilities to their unconsidered needs. And now you're going to be in a world of your own where in order for that client to solve that particular problem, to resolve those unconsidered needs, they can only use your solution. How do you actually do this? Step one is ask yourself, what's unique about your offering? What can you do that nobody else can do? What are the unique outcomes that you provide for your customers? Start there. Start with your differentiation. Then say, what are the misconceptions or biases that your prospects have before they talk to you? So customer may come to you with a problem. Customer may come to you with some particular needs. Hey, I need you to run this for me. I need you to do this, whatever it is. What are the conversation. What are the, excuse me, the misconceptions or the biases that your prospects have when they come and talk to you? List all of those out. Then decide what unique perspective can you share that will make the prospect rethink their current approach? So you've again have many of these conversations. What are the unique things that you've talked about with other people that the current prospect isn't normally thinking about? What perspective can you share that will make the prospect rethink their current approach? How do you highlight those unconsidered needs and then ask yourself, what data do you have to back up that insight? And how can you present that data in a way that reinforces your differentiation? If you think about this from the top, we've got what unique value do you have? What are your differentiated capabilities? What unique outcomes can you drive? What are the misconceptions that a prospect may have before they come to you? What unique perspective can you share that will get them to rethink that problem, to rethink the approach that they're thinking about to solve that problem, and then back it up with data. And then lastly, most importantly, nobody likes to be told what to do. So if you just went out there and said, hey, you need to be doing this because of X, Y and Z, these are the things that you're not thinking about, blah, blah, blah, like that, nobody's going to light that, and they're probably not going to take to that in a favorable manner. So instead, ask questions. So list out questions that you can ask that's going to help your prospect Realize the importance of the unconsidering. So what questions can you ask somebody that's going to get them to come to this conclusion on their own that they need these things that they haven't really been thinking about? So that's how you're going to find the unique insights that you're going to deliver in a conversation in messaging. Those are how you create these insights that tie back to your unique capabilities. Cool. The third skill that you need to master is you need to be able to align your solution to high priority initiatives. This comes back to the concept that you can that if your project that you're aligning to is not on critical path, it's likely not going to get funding. Right. So if you're talking to a prospect and they're not, you know, their project maybe gets deprioritized, happens all the time. That is where they just don't get the funding that they need to execute that particular project. So what you need to do in your discovery conversation, your first conversation with the buyer is figure out what are those high priority initiatives so you can align your solution to them. And that's essentially the first step of every sales process. And now this is a great stat, not a great stat from a selling perspective, but it's a great stat to highlight like how poor most people do discovery. And that is that 26% of buyers say that sellers are good at uncovering their needs. 20, 26% of buyers say that sellers are good at uncovering their needs. That's only one in four conversations. Right? So one in four conversations, like you're actually able to uncover what a client might need and the challenges that they're facing. That's not good. And so we need to think about how we can improve this and get better at asking great discovery questions that align to high priority initiatives so that way we can understand the true needs that a client actually has. And so when you think about like business problems in general, they fit again on like a two part access where on the Y axis you have the importance of solving an initiative or the importance of that initiative. And on the X axis you have the urgency of that particular initiative. So the bottom left quadrant you have nice to have projects, right. So maybe four years ago people were doing exploratory research, they had extra funding, they'd be like, yeah, go try this, I'll go run this experiment, I can go see what happened. You really don't get that anymore. This bucket in the bottom left quadrant almost doesn't exist at this point in time. Not many people are doing this sort of low urgency, low important work. Now. In the bottom right quadrant you have situations where the company needs to get something in place very quickly, but they don't really, it's not really important that they choose the right vendor. So this might be something that may be a more commoditized product where they're just going to go shop around to try and get a deal with whoever is going to give it to them. Right. So low importance on who they choose, but high urgency. Right. Those deals will get done quick, but it's going to be more of a race to the bottom. Then you have the opportunities in the upper left hand quadrant, which are low urgency and high importance, which you need to get done eventually. These are problems that need to get solved at some point in time in the future, but it's not a high priority today. And so we've all had deals that get pushed quarter after quarter. And that is exactly what's sitting in the upper left hand quadrant. It's the deals that don't have any urgency. They need to get done at some point. They like talking to you, they're easy to talk to, they know they need to solve it, but it's not a priority because more and more things keep jumping to the top of their priority list. And then you have the money slot, which is the high urging and high important initiatives. And these are the things where budget can get created, where budget can get reallocated from different programs to solve these business initiatives and to solve these problems. Make sure when you're asking your discovery questions that you're trying to uncover everything you can about the priority, the importance, the urgency of the program, the project that is being worked on. And we'll give you a couple tips here in just a sec on how you ask those questions and one really good killer question that you can use. And so to help you think about how these organizations are structured from a metrics perspective, from a goals perspective, objectives, perspectives, initiatives, et cetera, we have what we call here the impact triangle, which at the bottom tier you have project level metrics, project level initiatives. These are things that are related to the data that they're able to collect, experimental timelines, reproducibility of experimen. This is where a lot of the work gets done at the bench. And these are, I would call them, your project level metrics and initiatives that bench scientists really care about. However, that's not where a lot of the funding goes. So if you move up another level, then you have departmental level initiatives. Right. These are, how can we hit a certain deadline for a program? Are we allocating our headcount efficiently? Are we ensuring regulatory compliance with everything that we're doing within this particular program or department? You're taking a step up from a project level measurement to a departmental level or program level initiative. And those have more money, those have more impact within the organization. Solving those problems are going to give you access to larger budget. And then you have company level initiatives where depending on the size of the company, you'll be talking about stock price, time to market, fundraising timelines, pipeline development, are they adding new programs, how are they progressing? Right, those are company level objectives and initiatives that are being worked on. So if you think about it from a project level, department level and a company level, when you're having a conversation with somebody, most of the time we're probably sitting down here in this project level bucket talking to scientists about how we can help them with their specific project. And what we really need to be doing is figuring out how we can go up a level. So think about how you can progress from project level discussions to program level discussions and how impacting a project rolls up into solving departmental and program level initiatives. If you're talking about things at the program level, how can you roll those up into company level initiatives and ask questions to find out what those company level initiatives are? And if you think about how these sorts of things get allocated throughout the org, or how things are oriented from a percentage perspective is project level Objectives are typically 80% of projects that happen within an organization. Right. So most of this stuff is going to be happening at the project level, but 80% of the budget and initiatives get allocated from the top of the company down. So CEO board executive team says, hey, you have this much budget to work with, they distribute it out to different programs, to different initiatives, through different departments, whatever it is, then those departments decide to then allocate that money down to the project level. So by the time you're talking to a scientist about one particular project, that budget has been whittled in, whittled down to the lowest denominator possible. So if you can tie your solution to higher level initiatives, higher level programs, higher level company values and problems that they have, you are much more likely to unlock budget for what it is that you're selling. And so to help you with this, we have a technical sales discovery framework where VC is a framework that you can use to ask questions throughout your discovery conversation, which is typically your first conversation with a prospect, first conversation with a new person that you're talking to to where you can understand everything going on in their world to ultimately align to these business level initiatives. Right. So first step is the current state. What's going on in their world today? How are they being measured? What do they care most about? What are they trying to accomplish? What's going on? That's the current state. Problem identification. What's stopping them from getting to where they need to be? What problems are they facing? You want both technical problems and you want business level problems. Root cause analysis, right? This is actually a really fun one where you can go back and forth and brainstorm what the root cause of a particular problem is. What is the root cause of a challenge that they might be facing. For example, if your car breaks down on the side of the road, how do you know what to fix? Where do you start? You have to do some sort of root cause analysis to figure out are you out of gas, petrol, depending where you are, is your battery dead, do you have a flat tire? All of these different things that could be the root cause of why your car broke down. And that's the first step that you have to do, right? So you have a problem, car broke down, but why did it happen? So assess why the problem is actually occurring and then you can start to talk about what a solution might be. But before you do that, now is something that's really important. Where most people go wrong is they don't talk about business impact, meaning what is the negative impact to their business if they don't solve this particular problem, if they're not able to meet a deadline that they're trying to hit because this project gets delayed because of whatever problem they're facing. That set of conversation is going to be how you level up your conversation to higher level initiatives within an organization to find what is the most important priority. And then now once this, you start talking about the different solutions that they could deploy to solve their problems, right? So now you're talking about your solution. But you can see in this conversation we haven't talked about your product or service. For the first four whatever parts of the framework, it should be all about them, their company, their business and what's going on in their world. Then once all the bat, you can start really talking about your solution and how you can help solve those particular problems. If you walk into a meeting, you pull up the same pitch deck that you give to everybody and you give a presentation about the same stuff and hope that's going to resonate. It's no wonder all your deals go Dark, because that person is sitting there being like, oh God, another sales rep. Give me another presentation about stuff that I don't really care about. And what are they going to say? They go, oh yeah, this is great, we need to go talk about this internally and we'll get back to you. And then of course, they never get back to you. Don't treat a conversation like a presentation. If you're presenting a deck and that's the first thing that you're doing, stop that and go deep into the discovery framework and ask great questions to uncover the problems that they're facing, the root cause of those problems and the business impact. And then start talking about your potential solution and how you can solve the problem for them in a differentiated way. And then lastly, always get next steps on the calendar. At the end of every discovery call, essentially you want to get them to commit to evaluate your solution as a potential fit for the problem that they have. Depending on the sales cycle that you face, this could be maybe purchasing. At the end of that call, it could be setting up a secondary conversation, it could be setting up a demo of your instrument, demo of your software, platform, whatever it is. Essentially you want to get to the next step and agree, get them to agree to evaluate you as a potential way to solve their problems. So that's the discovery framework. Now I want to give you one killer question that you can use in all of your conversations. Literally every conversation that you have moving forward, you should be asking this question because it's going to get you to level up within the organization on the problems that your product or service solution can help solve. And that question is what's going on in your company lab or department that is making this a priority right now? That's it. It's a really simple question. What's going on in your company lab department that is making this a priority right now? So once you understand that there's a need that there's a problem that they need to solve, find out what's going on within the organization from a broader level that is making this a priority right now. If they don't know the answer to that question, you have not aligned to a high priority and urgent initiative. If they do know the answer to that question, make sure that that is the need that you are aligning to going forward. So if they have some sort of high priority initiative that the company said, oh yeah, we need to meet this deadline by X date, this project is super highly important to that, whatever that is, that's the thing that you want to Be aligning your solution to going forward. What is that higher level initiative going on in the company that is making this a priority right now? This is the best question that you can ask in your discovery process that's going to help you level up that conversation. Cool. The fourth skill that you have to figure out is you have to figure out how to demonstrate differentiated value. How are you different, better, more unique than other options out there in the market? So I want to talk about two things here, the differences between features and value. So features are the what, right? This is what you can do, what you can provide and what you deliver. Value is the why? Why should somebody care about this? What is it going to do for them? Why is it important for them to actually use you? Why is that feature relevant to them? And so what you want to do is you want to show them how they can achieve a desired outcome that no other provider can. I specifically want to talk about an outcome here because you might have differentiated capabilities, but if they deliver the exact same outcome that another provider can deliver for them, it's really not a differentiator from the prospect's perspective. While you might do something unique or you might do something different, if the outcome is exactly the same, it's going to be really hard to show how you differentiate. So think about the outcomes that you can provide, especially those that are unique that they can't get from other providers. And so when we think about our differentiated value, we have a Venn diagram here where you got your competition, customer needs and you. Where all three of these Venn diagrams overlap is you have commoditized value, right? These are things that the competition can do, customers need and you can provide. This is like talking about your ISO 9001 certified lab, whatever. This is like saying you're GMP compliant. These are maybe that you've got fast delivery times. Whatever it is, you're high quality. These are the same things that everybody. What you really want to focus on is the stuff that the competition can't do. So what can you do that the customer is needing those unconsidered needs that they have and the competition can't deliver that they're not able to deliver on that particular value, that particular outcome. This is how you want to think about all of your differentiation. And so there are three different types of differentiation that you can think about. There are unique capabilities. So these are things that you do that are unique to you and your company. Right? So only you do this and it's unique to you. There are comparative capabilities, your competitors also do the same things, but you do them better, right? So you are better at certain things than your competition. Then there are holistic capabilities. So these are collections of things in your organization that you are uniquely different for, right? So you have a collection of different types of capabilities that make you unique and your customer or prospect values those holistic sets of capabilities. So as an example, like you could, one of the things I think Thermo can really say is that they have basically entire workflow of everything you could potentially need, all under one roof, under one vendor. So it's really easy to work with them pretty much however you want. And so they have a massive set of holistic capabilities that they can use as a differentiator over, say, a smaller startup who can maybe only do one thing really well. So again, talk about your unique capabilities, your comparative capabilities, and your holistic capabilities when you think about your differentiation. Now I want to call out a few things because everybody gets these wrong as well, which are what are things that are not differentiated? So if you're thinking about your differentiators, these are five things that you need to not use at all. If you're talking about differentiation, one is high quality. High quality is subjective in nature. It's high quality compared to what. Also, no company out there is going to say they're low quality. So you need to be more specific when you talk about quality and you need to understand what quality means to the person you're talking to before you can actually say that we're high quality. Scientific expertise. I think every single company out there has PhD level scientists on staff that can help with questions and provide expertise for clients. So this again is not really something that you can differentiate on this term. Accelerate your research. If you use this in any of your messaging, if you have it on your website, stop, get rid of it, go away. It means literally Nothing. It's on 28 million pages on Google. The term accelerate your research, 28 million pages. So if this is the way that you're positioning yourself, your company, it means nothing to the person on the other end. Save time. Again, I think every tool out there has some cape or some like component of how it can save time. And so you need to figure out how you can differentiate in a more unique way than around time. And just because you can shave off a week over a competitor doesn't really give you that much differentiation in the grand scheme of things because they could always figure out their turnaround times, bring those down. Sometimes clients just don't care if it's you know, one week to the next. And make sure that you think about differentiators outside of just time. Time is one thing that you can talk about, right? It's part of your realistic capabilities, but it's not something that you really want to be focusing on as the main differentiator. I would say unless you have an extreme time savings over somebody else, I think that can work. If you have an extreme value that you can provide from like a decreased time perspective, like you're five times faster for whatever reason, like, then you can probably use it, but in general, time is just not a huge differentiator. And then lastly, easy to use. Again, this is subjective. It's like easy to use compared to what? So you might have a really easy to use platform, but again, compared to what? And I don't think people are really going out there making hard to use platforms or talking about how challenging it is to use their product or service. And so I wouldn't really use this as a differentiator. It might fall into your holistic differentiators again. But I wouldn't say that this is something that you want to lead with. And one thing that I want you to remember and beat into your head is that the customer doesn't care about any of your capabilities. So if you say that to yourself out loud, you know, maybe when you're starting to write an email and you're about to walk into a presentation, just remind yourself the customer doesn't care about any of our capabilities. They care about the outcomes that you can drive for them. And so think about outcomes versus capabilities. All right, so we're on to number five. So the fifth and final skill that you need to master is building decision consensus. So far we've talked about relentless prospecting. Deliver expert insights, align your solution to high priority initiatives. Demonstrate differentiated value. And finally, now that we've gotten to this point, how do you actually drive decision consensus to get the deal across the line? This is where a lot of people get wrong. It's why a lot of deals go dark. So here are some stats for you. There are seven people involved in the average buying committee, right? This number could obviously be a lot more. If you're selling something that's a million dollars, it's probably going to be more than seven people. And if you're selling a simple hundred dollar reagent, you might have less than seven people that are involved in the buying committee. However, on average it is seven people involved in the buying committee. And I can guarantee you it's probably more than one and so the next stat here is 78% of deals that reps work only have one point of contact. That means that there's six people. That majority of opportunities don't have the right number of people involved in that opportunity or you're not talking to six people that are influencing that particular decision. And so if there's one thing that you can take away from this right now is however many opportunities that you have in your pipeline, go and look at them and say how many of them have one point of contact? If that's the case, go reach out to more people. Like do that right now. Pause this and just go do it. Because that's going to be a huge impact that you can have on your quarter on the rest of your year is just start talking to more people that are involved in the buying committee. And what this ends up leading to is that 58% of deals end up in no decision. Almost 60% of deals end up in a situation where they stick to the status quo. They stick with what they're doing. Maybe they end up going with a competitor and don't tell you. And so you put it in your CRM. It's no decision or unresponsive. Right. But so many deals just end up in no decision. And this often comes back to the fact that you just don't have contact with all of those other people involved in the decision making process. And so we want to talk about here is one of the main skills related to building decision consensus is multi threading. And multi threading is the process of developing relationships with multiple people involved in the buying committee. I want to specifically call out relationships because this isn't just because I know who this person is or I presented them in a group presentation. We really want these relationships to be one to one. So building the process of developing one to one relationships with the multiple people involved in the buying committee, that is what multi threading is. So if you're talking to one individual, you're not talking to enough people. Make sure that you're building deeper relationships with all of the folks involved that are influencing the decision. And so what you want to do when you're multi threading is you want to find a champion. And now there's a difference between a champion and a coach. And we're going to talk about that here in just a sec. But you really want to find a champion. And so to know if you have a real champion, it is somebody that has the power and influence within that organization to drive the deal to close so they have the ability to drive this deal to close because people care about their opinion and they have the influence over others or they just have the power to make it happen. They have access to the economic buyer. So the economic buyer is the person that's literally going to sign the PO that says, hey, we're going to spend this amount of money to solve this particular problem. And then they have to be willing to sell for you, essentially willing to sell for you when you aren't in the room. So they have to basically put their neck on the line to say, hey, I want to bring in this solution and I want to bring in this particular service, this product, software, whatever it is into this company. And I want to do that because it's going to make our company better. And so they have to be willing to do that for you when you can't be in the room. All right? Reason I say that is because most deals get done when you're not there. You might be on a call, and pretty much every time, forever, in every deal, there's some sort of internal conversation that is had where they are actually making the decision with which vendor to pick which solution to move forward with or do they decide to buy something. And so there has to be somebody who's willing to put their neck on the line to sell for you when you can't be in the room. And what you're going to want to do is arm that champion with a business case to sell on your behalf. Remember, scientists aren't salespeople. So if you're talking, if your champion's a scientist, that's not. They're not a salesperson. They don't know how to sell your product or service. They don't really know the differentiated capabilities that you have. Like, they might know it in their head, but when it comes to actually then going to present it, like, they are probably going to just talk about, you know, your commoditized capabilities with people internally. And so it's on you as a rep to literally train that champion how to sell internally for you. Right? Go through the different objections that they might face, talk through the potential risks, the timelines. Right? What are the things that might be going on that they might get questioned of from their. Their boss or the actual decision maker and give them the tools and resources that they need to sell on your behalf. And one thing that you can do with that is a business case where you can literally create a written document that outlines the problem, the root cause, the negative impact, the solution that they want to move forward with the expected results, the timeline of when they can expect those results, and then risk mitigation, which are what are the potential risks or dependencies that might come up down the line. And because this is a written document, you can essentially work on it with your champion and other people involved in the buying committee. So you can create an initial draft of this document, go and use it to talk to multiple different people within that organization and make sure that you get it right. When you're talking about the right problem, the right impact, the right root causes and the outcomes that they're trying to drive. Yet feedback. Refine that business case to the point where everybody is basically in agreement and saying, yeah, this is awesome, this is what we want to do. Then present that to the economic buyer. Either you, if you're able to be in the room when that happens, or arm your champion with it so they can present and share it with that economic buyer who's going to ultimately make the decision. Right? So create that document, share with everybody, get feedback. Now you've got a real solid business case that will differentiate you and make sure that you are tying your differentiated capabilities to the outcomes that they're trying to drive. So you'll be able to write that in a written narrative to then help get this deal across the line. And also just the process of doing this is going to tell you how real this deal is or not. If people are willing to spend the time to go through this with you, it may not be a real opportunity. Right. So just more things to consider when you're thinking about the qualification of these opportunities and really want to leave you with this is that if you don't have a champion, you don't have a deal. You need somebody who's willing to put their neck on the line when you can't be in the room. And if you don't have that individual, you really don't have a deal. So those are the five skills that you really need to focus on in order to sell in today's environment. Number one is relentless prospecting. Use sequences, better messaging, focus on better versus more to get in front of the right people, deliver expert insights. And so make sure you're talking about your. The, the client's potential unconsidered needs. Right? Asking great questions to lead them to why they need those things and then tie those back to your differentiated capabilities. Align your solution to high priority initiatives. Right? Ask the killer question, what's going on in your company today that's making this a priority right now? Drive that conversation up within that Organization to align to higher priority initiatives at the business level, not just the project level. Demonstrate differentiated value, show how you can drive unique outcomes for your prospect, for your customers, right? What are those outcomes that you can drive? How are you different? Make sure you're not focusing on the things that are not differentiated. And then lastly, now that you've got them bought in to all of this, you actually have to drive this deal to close, which is help is to build decision consensus. So right now you're probably only talking to one person for an opportunity. There's going to be at least another six other people involved. So make sure that you expand the number of people you're talking to, reach out to them, build one to one relationships with them, find a real champion, which honestly your champion is probably not the person that you first talk to because the first person you talk to might be shopping around other vendors as well. So you might think that you're champion, but they actually aren't because they might be championing another product behind closed doors, right? So the more people you talk to, the more likely you can build champions. And so once you build that champion, then arm them with a business case to sell on your behalf when you can't be in the room. If we do all of those things, I guarantee you, you will close more deals, you're going to find more opportunities, you're going to get ghosted or aired a lot less. So these are the five skills that you really should be focusing on getting better at probably over the course of the next year. And so I want to talk about this concept called skill stacking. So skill stacking is basically the ability to combine similar skills into a single portfolio to increase your overall value. So if you think about a any professional athlete, let's take the example of football or soccer, you have many different skills that are involved in becoming better. You have to be able to dribble, pass, you have conditioning, you have to be able to shoot, you have your positioning on the pitch, right? So there's all sorts of these different skills that you have to get really good at in order to become a great player. And the same thing happens in sales right there. All of these skills related to getting better in sales, right? We talked about just five of them today. But even those five skills have a lot of sub skills as you have to ultimately improve. And by doing so you're increasing your overall value and how good you are as a rep overall. And one thing that's challenging within sales is that if you have a weakness of one particular skill it can basically bring down everything else along the way. As an example, if you're really bad at Discovery, you may be really good at generating pipeline, but if you're not good at Discovery, you're going to probably not win that many deals because Discovery is so important in closing opportunities. But let's say you're really good at negotiating, but you're not any good at generating pipeline, you're not going to have any deals to negotiate. Right. So you have to have a bunch of these skills stacked together and you have to be good at all of them. And so that's the concept of skill stacking. And so what you can do is when you think about how do you improve these skills over time is okay, say today what we're going to do, we're going to focus on this first quarter is we're going to focus on skill improvement for pipeline generation, discovery and presenting. All right, I'm going to work on those things. Great. Next quarter I'm going to work on territory planning, deal management, networking and then I'm going to work on following quarter again. I'm going to come back to pipeline, generation, discovery and presenting. And now when you look at who you have become just over the course of the last couple of quarters, you become a much more well rounded sales representative where you have, you don't have something that's really pulling you down and weighing you down from a skills perspective. So concept of skill stacking is systematically improving all of your skills over time just make you better at sales. And so one way that you can do that is you can come join succession. So we have a online training platform and a community where we have live and recorded workshops on a regular basis. We have tons of on demand courses around all of these different topics that we just discussed today. There's a community forum where you can ask questions, get your questions answered, you'll share wins, leverage, learn about AI, like all sorts of cool stuff like that. We also do weekly skill up sessions where we talk about different topics, give you a quick tactic here or there, what we see that's working in the field right now and you can access the knowledge of a bunch of other people in the industry, other life science sales reps that are going through similar challenges as you. We have guides and resources and tools that you can use so you don't have to start from scratch. So templates, quota formulas, like all sorts of cool stuff that we've put together and guides and resources to basically make your life a lot easier. We also do some fun stuff like book clubs and different accelerators on different topics too. So lots of great stuff within the community. If you want to join it's Succession Bio join. And lastly, just a reminder from what we do here at Succession, we really help you across lead generation, sales skills and training. We'll help you hire and onboard new reps and we'll even enable your entire team with the tools and tech that they need to be successful. So if anything of these things are top of mind, just reach out to us, send me a message, an email, find us online Succession Bio and we'd love to chat. That's all we had for today, so hopefully you enjoyed the presentation. Remember, focus on these five skills over the course of the next year, systematically improve all of those different skills and you'll look back a year from now and be like a completely different rep. And you're going to be so happy that you invested the time to do thanks all. Thanks for listening. We'd love your feedback on this. So it's a new format so if you have feedback you either throw it in the comments here or send us a message, but would love to hear your thoughts. Let's see if you want us to do more of these. Thanks again.