[Sales] Crafting a value proposition that differentiates your offering with Claudia Andretta

Whether you're talking therapeutic or service or whatever else you're selling, I think early customer feedback or early user, final user feedback is important. If you're doing service, do a beta test. If you're doing products, do a focus group of early users. And when it comes to therapeutics, obviously those products are going to be clinically tested. So that's your, that's your user group. You know, it's your clinical trial results that literally make you access the market. It kind of blows my mind that we're still talking about this as if it's something that is rocket science and people don't do it. People don't. Don't ask for customer feedback.

Before we get into today's show, I wanted to tell you a little bit about what we have going on over here at Succession. So 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, a community for peer to peer networking and learning, and live workshops to delivered by experts twice a month. You can get access to all of this as an individual for just $79 a month or you can uplevel your entire sales team with courses and customized learning designed for each individual rep. Come and join us over at Succession Bio. Okay, let's dive back into the. All right, Nick, we got another good episode for everybody here. On the sales DNA podcast we had Claudia Andretta. She's a consultant who works with early stage founders and even larger companies. But really go to Market Strategist that helps teams think about the value proposition, unique selling points, addressing their total market. Or as we uncover in this episode, focusing more on your service addressable market instead of your total addressable market. Yeah, a lot of good stuff in here. I think really the things that stood out to me were you have to identify your unique selling points and how they fit within the broader landscape of competition. Because you're not competing with direct competition all the time. You're competing with every other possible alternative that exists on the market to help somebody get to their objective. So I think that is something that everybody will be able to take away from this episode. But stood out to you?

Yeah, I agree with that. And I think with the parallel we was talking about between total addressable market and actually going too huge on it can seem like the right thing to do. But actually having something that's more focused and more achievable and attainable is sometimes can focus the company. Or we're talking about a rep focus the rep in a way that's much more. Allows you to be action driven. And I think that's really. It was really valuable in this.

Yeah. And Claudia also has a great story about how she literally accidentally ended up in sales, similar to how Nick ended up in sales. So so many of us do good stuff. All right, Nick, what do we always say?

Let's dive right in.

Hey, Claudia, welcome to the show. We're really excited to have you here.

Hi, Harrison. Hi, Nick. Thank you for having me.

Great to have you.

Yeah, I think this will be a really good one for everybody. But we did prep you, and I know you said you had a funny story for us, so what's a funny story that's happening in your career?

So my funny story goes right back to the beginning of how I got into sales. I was fresh out of university, graduate, neuroscientist, dropped out of my first year PhD, and I interviewed for sales role, which was my very first sales role. It was the year 2013, so 11 years ago, almost to the day. And I got the job by selling a pen to my hiring manager. When I think about it, I still wonder how I actually got the job by doing such a poor job. But, you know, I must have done something right.

Did they ask you to sell me this pen?

Yeah.

Yeah. What was your response? Do you remember it?

Not. Not to the T. But I do remember that I. Okay, I. I tried not to panic, and I went kind of by instinct and try to sell by value, actually, which is something that then you. You go on and learn how to do in theory and then in practice. But, you know, it's funny because I kind of picked up by instinct what. What I was supposed to say and do. And then when he. When he obviously came up with a. Because he was an experienced salesperson himself, when he came out with an objection, I try to negotiate my way into having him buy it. And so I sold in the pen.

Nice.

And I got the top.

So you just had it. You just had the natural ability from the beginning, huh?

Apparently.

Oh, I love it. I still haven't gotten that question in.

Really?

I'm not a fan. I'm not a fan of it, but.

No, nobody's a fan of that.

I think if you've ever seen Wolf of Wall street, the way they do it, it's some version of this in the movie where he's like, yeah, send me this pen. So he takes the pen and. And he's like, hey, can you write down your name for me? And so, like, he basically is, like, creating the need for the pen with like one simple question which I thought was like, pretty, pretty clever.

So yeah, that's a clever way to do it, actually.

Awesome. Well, yeah, that's a good one. And so maybe a little bit more kind of into the reason you moved into sales. Like what, what kind of prompted you to say, hey, sales is going to be what I'm going to try out. I'm going to go into this role or just kind of happened by accident.

I feel like it didn't happen by accident, by absolute accident. So I, as I said, I was out of uni very freshly, like six months out of my, of my degree and then stayed in the lab, waited for the, for the scholarship to come in, never came in. And then so I said, okay, I'll just get an actual job because that's, that's how students sometimes think about academia. And thankfully I had the beginning of a network. That's how I think about it now. And particularly. So I was an expat. I was already in Strasbourg, where I am now. I had moved from Italy two years prior, almost three years prior then. And so I had a network of Italian friends whom I went out with. And you just to have that home feeling when you were home, safe, because when you're in school and university you can't actually go back home very often with exams and so forth. And this friend of mine, well, more of an acquaintance, but then he became a friend later on. He called me up, I think it was April 20, yeah, 11 years ago, April 2013, and said, there's an opening in my team. And that was Merc Life Science. So that was my very first employer, very big company back then. It was still called Merck Millipore because they just two years prior had acquired Millipour, which was an American company. Merck is the German one, not to be confused with the American Merck Chemistry. And he worked as a technical support scientist in the bioscience division. So there was an opening in his team for a bi or trilingual person. So someone who spoke Italian and French and English. And so I applied. So I sent him my cv, he passed it on to his manager and I was called for an interview. But they. So the interview went well. I went three rounds of interview, so hr technical interview. And I don't remember what was the third one, but then I was called. It went well, but they were looking specifically with someone with cytometry experience, which I didn't really have. You know, just my, my background, my technical background was more of a Molecular biologist rather than cellular. Never used the cytometer myself. So how could I, you know, be there for clients and, and troubleshoot something that I never actually used? And so I was passed on for that role, but they kept my cv. And one week later I was called by the guy who would become my future manager who was setting up the very first inside sales. So inside account manager team, which was a multilingual team. And again, I was hired because I was bi, or say trilingual, but really bilingual. So I spoke Italian and I was working remotely for Italy. And so it happened completely by chance. I never actually applied for the job.

Wow, that's so interesting. Everybody has such a different journey. That's why I know you just kind of took it. You're like, yeah, let's roll with it, let's see what happens. And fell in love with it.

Sounds like it was, it was a lot of fun and I learned a lot. A lot of things.

Yeah, that's a, that's such a cool story. I think there's a couple interesting things I took from that, which is one, if you're hiring.

Yeah.

Look at the resumes of other people that may have already been passed for other roles within the company. Right. Because I'm sure this other person wasn't just, you know, sitting around looking. Wasn't like part of your original interview process at all. And so it's like found you somehow. So it's like, how can you repurpose resumes, repurpose people that maybe weren't fit for one role but might be fit for another? That's interesting. And I think the other one, which is from your perspective, it was let's just jump at this opportunity, let's take it, let's go, let's see what happens. And it ends up working out really well.

Yeah, yeah, it did. And I think there was also probably a part of me trying to find. So when I did a technical interview for the first role where I didn't have all the answers, obviously, even though I prepared the presentation and stuff but didn't have all the answers and probably the way I went about trying to still answer the questions in a way that would not necessarily provide a solution, but come from a place where I would find out the solutions for the customers because the hiring managers were playing the customer and I was playing the support scientist, it was probably what spoke to them and they thought I had a good customer. Customer approach, basically, you know, a solution oriented and customer centric approach and which is probably, I mean, it's what they told me afterwards and which is why they decided to keep the CV and pass it on to another high manager in the company. But obviously there's also a dimension of complete coincidence because it was, was nowhere, nowhere was it already written that there was someone else hiring for someone who spoke Italian, you know, in the same, in the same department.

Similar story. When I went for my first opening, actually I got offered two jobs in a room. One of the jobs I didn't know I was applying for, but two people, two different jobs. One was commercial, one was the lab.

Yeah, there you go.

Be prepared. You don't know who's offering you a job.

Yeah, exactly.

I think especially too like earlier stage companies, like you just don't know or like in your case, they're building out a new team, right. It's like oh yeah, who's going to be the right fit? So it's exactly both of those instances. Yeah. Awesome. Well, I know a lot has changed in the past few years since making the move into sales and so now you're doing a lot of work with earlier stage companies and I know things we really, we really wanted to talk about was like developing a value proposition at an early stage company because if they're doing it, maybe they're not doing it very well or they're not doing it at all and they're just really talking about their technology, which we see all of the time. So what would be some of the initial advice you would have for people, early stage companies, trying to figure out where do they fit in the landscape, how do they put together their value proposition.

So first of all try to have one or at least ask yourself the question, do I have a value proposition? What's my unique selling point? That's another way to put it which probably speaks more to sales oriented people rather than unique value proposition which is, you know, it was kind of obscure. When I first started business school, I'm doing the mba and when I first started business school, unique value proposition. What is that? And for a salesperson, you know, calling it the unique selling point of your technology or of your product of your asset is probably something that's, that's more easy to understand especially from, for someone like me who came for, from eight years, 10 years of sales and I think a lot of early stage companies think that being the first ones on the market with that very specific target or drug delivery system or whatever makes them the, they, they think that is their unique selling point. And so a lot of them, oh, interesting that a lot of them come out Saying we have no competition. We are the first one. We're the first. First in class. And what I would like them to understand, and sometimes I do tell them, sometimes they don't want to hear it, is first in class, doesn't matter. What matter is best in class. And if you don't have any competition, probability is that it's not going to work, because no idea is original. Everything has already been tried and done and tested. I mean, it's my firm belief, and I'm sorry if people might take this the wrong way, but I firmly believe that everything has already been tried and done and tested it and there's nothing quite 100% original out there. And so if you have no competition, then odds are someone has already tried to do what you're doing and maybe there just wasn't a market for it. And so that's not your unique value proposition. Saying you have no competition. A new delivery system could be your unique value proposition. You know, it could be, I don't know, a vaccine that's delivered intranasally rather than having to puncture the skin of a patient. That could be a unique value proposition. It's as simple as that. But just ask yourself the question, what makes my product unique? What is the unique selling point? How am I selling this to people who might have already and bought something similar or something that tackles the same issue? And I think it's as important in the early stages because you're selling a dream to investors as it is when you're selling direct to customers.

There's a couple of things I wanted to pull out from what you said there. And I think one of the things is that there may be, like, innovative technologies or, like, innovative, like, first to market, like, delivery mechanisms, whatever it is. But in general, most people are getting, like, I want to call it, like, getting their job done, right? So most of your customers are doing it some way. So one way or another, they have figured out some form of combining different workflows, like a smorgasbord of different, like, products and services, but they're finding a way to get it done and they're getting to their objective. Otherwise, like, they wouldn't exist as companies. And so you have to figure out, like, you might not have what it's called, like, maybe direct competition, like somebody doing it exactly the same way you are, but you have some sort of, like, secondary or indirect competition, which are people that are solving the same problem in a slightly different way. Or you even have, like, completely, like, indirect competition where they're solving for a completely different problem that makes like the problem that you're trying to solve for obsolete. Right. So there's like, there's all these dynamics at play that people don't think about. They're just like, if they're so zoned in on their technology, that's all they're going to be thinking about, Right? Yeah, exactly.

And I have another example from, again, this is another therapeutic area, I would say, rather than industry, that, that I'm not necessarily a specialist in, but thinking about diabetes, I, I heard a pitch some time ago, a few, a few months ago, and when asked the question, the, the founder or co founder, I don't remember, said there's no competition on the market. How can you say that? How can you say on such a crowded market as diabetes that you have no competition with. Well, with. Maybe there's no, there's no molecule that does what your molecule is doing or is going to do for, for patients. But how can you actually think that there's no competition on the diabetes market when it is one of the most competitive markets out there? So, yeah, this is kind of what blows my mind.

What they're saying is actually nobody has the same solution as us.

Exactly.

Not saying there is no. They're confusing these two things. So nobody has the solutions that evolve them in the same way that we do. That doesn't mean no one else can solve the problem solving it.

Which is why I think selling by value rather than buy solution is what's. What's key here. What is the value to the user? What is the value to the patient? You know, if you're selling to diabetic patients, then why is your product going to be more valuable than, say, traditional insulin or GLP1 inhibitors or whatever else is out there? So sell by value rather than selling by. We're first in class in that molecule category. So, you know, doesn't work that way.

Yeah.

And I think another, even if it, you know, value can always be sometimes like a vague word. Right. So how do you make it specific with like, what's the outcome that you're driving? Right. Like sell by the outcome or the objective that you get to. And then how's your approach in this case, your approach that you're trying to deploy or your solution? How is it slightly different? How is it better? How is it unique? Because like, yeah, you're probably going to be up against, like, if you think about the different types of competition, you're either going to have do it yourself. So if you're selling a product or service people have the way to do it themselves. Or you're going to have these sort of like alternate approaches which you mentioned a vaccine being injected. Being injected versus a nasal spray. Right. That'd be two different approaches that are probably solving the same outcome. Or you have direct competition which would be like two nasal spray versions. Right. So it's like how do you, how do you, you have to like map that whole competitive landscape.

Yeah.

To then understand how you're unique. Because the other challenge we've seen, I love your thoughts on this, is people will talk about non unique selling points as they're selling points. So they think it's unique, but it's not. It's like, oh yeah, our lab is ISO certified and it's like we hear this all the time. It's like nobody cares. Like that's just literally how you can check the box that you have that. So like how do you help people identify like what is actually unique versus, you know, versus not.

That makes me think that maybe there are actually products or services that are not unique in any shape, way or form. It doesn't mean that they have no value on the market. It just means that you need to find your competitive edge. So how are you going up against someone who's doing exactly the same thing that you're doing and you know, maybe going back to service, which is what I do obviously out there there are other hundreds, probably thousands of consultants who do what I do, you know, which is go to market strategy, how do I sell myself? I'm trying to do that by LinkedIn obviously, which is where we met and kind of communicating how I am and how I approach business and you know, my industry expertise. Are other people doing exactly what I'm doing? Probably not. And so it's just a matter of finding your niche. Is there space for everybody? And you know, it's the counter argument to what I've said earlier. No idea is completely original. And nobody's there first, at least not, not anymore, not nowadays. But there's space for everybody. And so even though you might not have a, a hyper regional proposition or you might not be first in class or first on the market or unique on the market, there's still space for everybody. Just find your niche.

I think that one of the ways I like to look at is a similar thing. But I, in my mind, I like to flip it, which is avoid being commoditized. So avoid being put into the bracket where they can say the only difference between you and X and Y is price. Your price you are.

I like that. Yeah.

Where can I be in a space that I have more value than just price? And then you found something you can offer. But if all you can offer is being cheaper than your competitor, then you've got no value and no edge.

That's unless that is the strategy you've chosen where you've decided to say we are going to create such a high throughput system and process and ecosystem that our competitive edge is going to be price. Like we're going to be so much better at doing this thing that we are going to be able to offer a cheap price, thus win the market. But even 99% of people don't do that as a strategy. They just discount to try and win deals.

Yeah, yeah. Even then I would say your edge is actually the high throughput way in which you've been able to do it.

Because it doesn't matter to the customer. The customer doesn't care. They care about the price that they're going to get. Right? Yeah, yeah.

Me? Yeah, probably. And you. You might know this Nick, because you've been a lab Brad, like I have been. When. When we used to buy antibodies for whatever immune, immune immunohisto, something we were doing, it used to be get the cheaper one. Get Santa Cruz.

Yeah.

You know, no shade on Santa Cruz. Absolutely. But it used to be the cheaper ones because you were just a lab person who was doing grad student level experiments and you just needed the cheapest thing out there because your results were not even getting published. And so yeah, pricing can be an edge because your product is being commoditized for lab work and the company used to do very well regardless of quality.

Yeah.

For the standard antibodies where we didn't need anything special, you go straight to Santa Cruz's website.

Right?

Exactly.

The ones where you know there's going to be real competition and difficultness in target, we'd go elsewhere and look for something very specific.

Exactly. And then when you have to prepare for your, for your journal publication, then you go to something a little bit more high quality.

But yeah, you know.

No shade whatsoever.

Nice. So yeah, I think we've got a pretty good idea now. So you've got your unique selling points. You've called those out. So how do you start to put that together into a more formalized value proposition? Now it's like, all right, we're unique. This is what we're great at. This is how we fit into the market. Understand the competition. Right. We're not going to be ignorant. We don't have Competition, we understand the landscape. But now how do we take those unique selling points and actually turn it into a value proposition that gets used in messaging and in conversations?

Yeah, that's when I like to say that's when go to market strategy comes in. So that's actually when the actual big job, big work has to be done and it has to be done together, whether you're an early stage company or a bigger one. So whoever is responsible for setting up the strategy pertaining to a product, to an asset or whatever, you have to find, you know, to think about it all, to think about what's the market, who are the final users, what are the channels, what is the fair pricing that will get you a return on your investment long term, but also what is the pricing that the final user be B2B or B2C? So either direct to customer or other businesses are going to be willing to pay for your product and then your distribution channels or whatever, and your marketing channels. Let's not forget about marketing. And so I think everything downstream of finding the value proposition is going to be the hard work of strategy. Yeah, I might be partial to that.

But no, I think you're dead on. But I think where a lot of people do is they flip it and they say we're going to start selling, we're going to start marketing and we're going to do these things before they've really identified the unique selling points, unique value proposition that they have. So I like the model that you're saying here, which is find what you're unique at. And then I think maybe, maybe the way you take that next is like, well, who cares about that thing?

Exactly.

Who cares the most about it? Because what is unique to you, it's fine, that's something unique to you, but it may not matter to somebody else. And so you have to align your uniqueness and your differentiated capabilities with the people that care about. About it.

Yeah.

And then when you're able to do that, now you can start doing all the other stuff because now you have a message to send, to send to the people that care a lot about that. Right. So like to your point, Santa Cruz, they might want to specifically target grad students as an example. Right. And because they know they care a lot about getting the lowest price. Whereas if you're selling something more premium, Right. You might target a separate set of people, maybe people that are developing therapeutics because they need more high quality. And so you have like the ability to take what's unique to you, which is high quality versus price. And then use that to create a unique value proposition to different groups. Yeah.

And I think with that, in that respect, whether, whether you're talking therapeutic or service or whatever else you're selling, I think early customer feedback or early user, final user feedback is important. So, you know, if you're doing service, do a better test. If you're doing products, do, I don't know, a focus group of early users. And when it comes to therapeutics, obviously those products are going to be clinically tested. So that's your, that's your user group. You know, it's. It's your clinical trial results that literally make you access the market. And so, you know, it's kind of weird that we don't take that fact and feed it back into whatever else we're doing. We are literally having patients testing the drug before it goes to market. So how we now learn from that, you know, how will we learn that? Human. Human feedback is paramount to how successful the product is going to be down the line. So it kind of blows my mind that we're still talking about this as if it's something that is rocket science and people don't do it. People don't ask for customer feedback. You know, I see it a lot. And again, going back to the diabetes thing, have you asked diabetic patients what would make their life easier?

You know, technology. You built this technology in a silo and you have no idea how it's actually.

Exactly.

Right.

Yeah. One of the interesting things that you just said, maybe think of parallels like, okay, if you are taking a therapeutic to market, you're segmenting your target market, which is like you're stratifying your patients. Right. Like patient stratification is like, who do I pick? Who are the best people for this drug to have the most success? The same thing needs to happen on the sales side. If you're building out like your target account list that you're going after. Right. I was just kind of thinking about this parallels like, who's your ideal customer? Profile people that are most likely going to buy this product or service. And it's like almost like a. It's probably not the exact same, but similar sort of concept where you're trying to, especially in the early days, like phase one, or even in, you know, early stage of a startup, you're trying to figure out who is that ideal customer that this is going to work absolutely best on. Because I think you've probably seen this, people go wide with their messaging, they go wide with their marketing. Instead of first focusing on what's most important, where it's going to matter the most?

Oh, yeah, and I actually wrote about that a few months ago. You know, that there's, there's this notion of total addressable market. And that's another thing that drives me absolutely bonkers when I see it. Because first of all, especially in early stage companies, because they, they want to give you that big number because they're in their mind, if I give you an enormous number, then the investor or the buyer is going to think, wow, I'm going to have an enormous return on investment. When in reality that discredits them so damn much. Because if you give them an enormous number, you know, immediately they're delusional. They're just thinking, again, going back to diabetes, what, what is, what is it? 6 million people worldwide or more than that probably are affected by the. So you take the total addressable market, but can we subtract the people who are not insulin dependent? Can we subtract people who already have the, you know, the insulin pump? Can we subtract, I don't know, underage people, patients who are under the care of an adult who is going to be the one choosing the best therapeutic approach? And so why do we think about total addressable market as the total of the people who are affected by the disease? That's not your total addressable market. So let's come down to a smaller number and see if you can still recover your investment if you sell to that niche. And that's what's going to tell you whether you're going to be successful or not. And it's also a more manageable number in terms of sales, you know, especially if you're early stage and you have literally five people, you know, the co founders and three more people selling your product, it's way more manageable to reach to a smaller number of people than the total global market for whatever issue you're trying to tackle. So think small. And thinking small, you're also thinking more realistically. And if you're still recovering your investment and down the line in two years, you're still able to pay your co founders and your early stage team, then that's fantastic.

But doing what Harrison did a minute ago, which is actually drawing a parallel from what you're saying there exactly. Sells big, small sounds negative, right? Sometimes. But actually what you're saying is think targeted.

Exactly the.

An action you can achieve and you can be more purposeful about that action because it's not too broad. And I think that's a really good thing to do in any activity, but particularly in sales. Because if you're working in oncology and you're trying to sell something that's relevant to the oncology market. Got it's, it's too big. You're never going to filter that out.

Yeah.

But now narrow it down to. Is the actual addressable market.

Yeah. I think he's like, you start with the TAM to your point. I mean, you just gave us an example of how you go through it. You start with your tam, which is diabetes patients, and then you have like, then you have all these layers down where you create like your serviceable, addressable market. Right.

Yeah, exactly.

It's actually who we can help. And then when you have something that is, you know, smaller and more focused, you now have actions that you could take to go and like directly talk to those people in front of them. And you do marketing, you run sales campaigns, whatever it is that should get in front of those specific people. Whereas if you're trying to be everything to everyone, you're going to be nothing to no one.

Absolutely. And then you, you can't quiet work out the right message if you're going too broad. I think from a marketing perspective, it's easier to talk to a. More to a smaller group of people who all speak the same language. So to speak rather than go absolutely too wide and then get your messaging wrong.

Yeah.

And that can burn bridges as well.

I mean, this is a great example of getting your messaging too wrong or too vague where we see it all the time. Accelerate your research. Right. Every website in the world that sells a product or service says accelerate your research. I think I've.

Innovation.

Exactly. I think, I suppose it's like 96 million pages have. Accelerate your research. Like that is a ridiculous. How are you supposed to stand out with that messaging? Like nobody's going to resonate with that because it's. Everybody's saying it. So there's no differentiation, there's no uniqueness and it means nothing.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

That's funny.

Awesome. Well, I think this has been really great. We talked about a lot of different things around, like how to talk about your unique selling points, build out your value proposition. How to like shrink your total addressable market down to your serviceable, addressable market and actually focusing your effort there. So a lot of good stuff I think people could take away, but want to wrap it up with something. Maybe a tip, a tactic, something that you could give for our sellers out there, you know, maybe specifically around messaging. What's something that they can use you know, tomorrow to help. Help them go sell better.

Know who you're talking to. So know your prospective customer. And I don't mean by no, I don't mean date them. I don't mean, you know, know their, their name. Although if you can, of course, it's better to phone someone and call them by their name. But know why you're tackling them. Don't think that you're going to sell your product to the buyer, maybe the big company, because they're just moving the money. The buyer doesn't really care. They just care that the invoice is addressed to them. Don't think that you are selling to, I don't know, the CEO of a big company. The CEO isn't making the decisions that, you know, that comes to, you know, buying a reagent or a product. Know your actual buyer. Know who is the decision maker. Know who is the influencer. Sometimes those people are two different people. You know, the, the one who's influencing the decision, who really wants the product, whom you actually have to convince, and then who is actually paying the money. Who, who's. And that, that's true for a lot of research centers, for example. And so know who your customer is.

And then differentiate all of your pain points and everything. Right. It's like, how can you get into their head if you know the problems that they're facing better than you?

Exactly.

Yeah. It's like, yeah, it's. How do you get into the head of your customer as best as possible.

Identify the customer first and foremost.

Yeah, that's great. Awesome. Well, Claudia, it's been so great to have you on the show. Really appreciate it.

Thank you.

We'll talk soon.

Sam.