[Sales] From rep to manager and back again with Jeff Chamberlain

I think one that I've seen kind of again and again and in my own experience where I changed this and it really kind of leveled up my. The conversations that I had and just opened up a lot of doors from a sales perspective was to not be scared of the big questions or the scary questions. You know, don't beat around the bush. Just, you know, don't hide about. Don't hide the price. Don't be scared to ask somebody if you know what they actually want, how committed they are. Just have the conversation, you know, ask the question. That might feel a little awkward sometimes, but the more you kind of make it awkward, the more it's going to feel awkward and, you know, the more time you're potentially going to waste if somebody is just not ready to tell you no.

Really excited for this episode with Jeff Chamberlain. He's got some really good tidbits in here that he's going to share with us. I'm also pretty excited about what we've been talking about, particularly with. I've known Jeff for a while as an individual contributor and a manager and he's been great at both and I've learned from in the past. So I'm excited for you to learn from him. What are you looking forward to, Harrison?

Yeah, same thing. I think he talks about some really good stuff around the transition from individual contributor to manager, back to individual contributor and then back to manager again. And then I think he's got a really good tip at the end of the podcast for everybody out there around, don't be afraid to ask the hard questions. It's going to be really important to do that in your sales career. No matter what. It's going to help you win more deals and help you come across as like an expert. So stick around for that. Lots of good stuff in here with Jeff. Hey, Jeff, welcome to the pod. Pumped to have you.

Hey, Harrison, thanks for having me. Hey, Nick.

Hey, mate.

Good to see you as well.

So we did prime you. We gave you a heads up. So we asked the same question to everyone. Give us a funny or crazy story that's happening in your career.

Yeah. So this is a fairly easy one. I suppose a sales call that I went on probably like eight years ago or so a couple jobs ago, first time meeting, this guy had a really good kind of qualifying conversations and in person meeting was in a San Francisco biotech company. I showed up to their location. They're kind of in the Oyster Point area and just outside the building. From the very beginning, I had a bit of a Weird feel there. Like people kind of all over the place, you know, talking to each other, very excited, like a lot of activity. You normally, you go to a biotech company, it's pretty buttoned up and, you know, people are just going about their days. So I got up to the fifth floor or something, wherever their offices were, and I was supposed to meet and get out of the elevator. And it. There's more people just milling about and excitedly talking, no idea what's going on. Walk into their reception area, and it's honestly just like a total mess. There's nobody at the reception decks. There are people walking past me. Nobody's asking me if I've been helped. And so I'm just sitting there waiting patiently, watching all of this happen around me, doing my kind of reaching out to the contact to see if he's there and if he can come give me. And done my research on the company and knew their leadership. It was small enough, and through the lobby comes the CEO, and he's talking animatedly and just like totally boisterous. I mean, this is like 11am too, so it's not late in the afternoon or anything. It is on a Friday. But I. I questioned, is the CEO, like, drinking right now? Because of everything that's going on and the way he was acting. He was actually super nice. He came up, said, hello, have you been helped? You know, he's the first person to ask me that. And I said, no, I'm actually waiting for this guy. And, you know, we're supposed to meet today. Oh, let me go find him. They disappear, and I'm waiting there again. So I was chaos, kind of people milling about, walking through the lobby. And finally this guy comes out who I was supposed to meet with, and he's like, I'm really sorry, but we can't have our normal meeting today. We were actually just acquired. And so I showed up literally as the announcement was coming out and won't disclose the company or anything, but it's a very big acquisition, so everybody should be celebrating and happy. And he's like, so, I'm sorry, this obviously changes any potential work we might have done together. Probably don't need to have the regular meeting, but if you want to come back to our celebration and hang out for a while, then you're welcome to. And again, this was Friday. Getting into the afternoon, I was like, yeah, sure, let's go. So I went back, they had beers on tap, everybody's partying in their break room, and so spent the afternoon with them, celebrating their acquisition. As you know, a total outsider, but certainly one of the more exciting sales calls I've ever been on.

That's awesome. Yeah. It's like you get to show up at the party's just for you, Jeff.

I was welcome with open arms.

That's it. But everyone's going to remember the sales guy that turned up to the acquisition meeting. So you ever need to talk to them again, they're going to answer you. That was a good networking opportunity as well.

You know, it was. I didn't get that sale. But the guy who I was supposed to meet with, we've stayed in touch. He's been at multiple other companies since then. He's made great introductions for me. We continue to meet and get coffee whenever we're in town together. So. Yeah. Still a very good relationship.

Yeah. Great piece of career advice. When asked to come party with the company, do it.

Always say yes.

Yeah. And also the CEO is definitely drinking, which is awesome. As you should be when you're celebrating.

That, uh, he had something to celebrate that you.

You see, sometimes people, you go to a conference and there's this group of people that, like, you'll know, they never go for the beer afterwards and stuff. And that's where the best connections happen. And I just never understood those guys that don't take that opportunity.

Yeah. I mean, to break down some of those barriers and have a real conversation and develop a real relationship. That means a lot.

Yeah.

Yep.

Great stuff.

That's your point, Dave. Remember you for years to come and, you know, are now, you know, great recommendation for you to other people. So love it.

Absolutely.

Awesome. Well, let's dive into some of the topics we have today. So I think one of the main ones we really wanted to talk about was the difference between selling products and services. So you've done both of these things in the past. And I think for both people that are entering into sort of a sales role that are thinking about, should I be selling products, should I be selling services, what are the differences? What sort of things do I need to consider? You know, what kind of, you know, advice or experience would you share with them?

Yeah. And it's funny because I actually totally flubbed this question. And the very first interview I had for a sales job, you know, somebody on my interview committee, while everybody was around, after I gave my presentation, she asked me this question, you know, what's the difference between selling products and services? And naively at the time I said, you know, I don't think there's that much of a difference. And to Some extent this is true. Some of the core fundamentals of how you approach a sale and how you work with customers is the same. You know, you always need to do your research, you always need to be able to talk about your capabilities and how they will address a client need. But, you know, I was corrected in that interview and in my experience at that first sales job that I had, which was selling services, really learned kind of the intricacies of the differences between the two, I'd say, you know, especially for someone just starting out. And I just saw a nice LinkedIn post about this that kind of summarized some of these differences and recommendations for, you know, your first sales job. And the service tends to be more complex, not just because it's a actual process that needs to happen. And in science, processes are highly variable. You can't control biology in all cases, but also just because you can't just read off a list of features and to get ramped up for selling a product. It can be a complex product, but you can just really do your homework and understand how that product works and what its benefits are, what problems it addresses. Whereas the service involves the process of doing science. And so it's really important to understand that process in as much depth as possible. So I think from my background, coming from more technical training, that was a big advantage for me because I could understand kind of from beginning to end what they were doing in the lab that comprised the service that we were selling. And so that's not something that you need a PhD for necessarily. But having been in a lab and worked in a lab, I could relate to those different steps more directly and then present those to customers or answer questions when they had them. I think the biggest thing, though, the biggest difference is the importance of building internal relationships and then being able to facilitate the conversations between the operations side of the company so that the people who are actually doing the work to provide that service and to again be that interface from that process to the customer and being able to share and kind of facilitate any conversations, any questions that they might have, status updates. Why is this not on track? It's an incredibly important dynamic to be able to kind of be the intermediary between that.

Yeah, so I think that's important that you're saying about the process of it, because often I've had a similar conversation with people and they're like, well, but is it just the price? Because services are normally more expensive, but if you take a 50k service and a 50k product, you still have that difference of complexity in the process. Right. Because a product is, here's its features and it's not changing.

Yep. And with a product you'll often have a sealed application science team or something like that who can go out there and be the technical on the ground. Whereas the service, they can come and visit your lab all they want but ultimately they're going to have to be hands off by design when it's a service.

Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. And one thing that you did mention which is sort of being the conduit between the customer and the internal team, we've seen it happen before where reps get really bogged down in sort of like the customer support side of stuff when it comes to services like status updates, doing essentially these repetitive, I would almost say like non sales related activities. Right. So it's not something that's going to help drive a like a new opportunity. It's more of how do you kind of maintain a relationship in a way because not every team or not every company has internal resources to manage these communications. So how do you balance that? You know, when you're selling complex services and you have, you know, you need to keep that relationship positive but at the same time you've got a quota, you got to go hit. And so how do you maintain that sort of balance?

Yeah, I mean it could be really tricky and depends I think very much on how the company is set up to be able to respond to those types of requests. At my current company, which is smaller and has a lot of focus on kind of being responsive and really supporting the customer and partnering with the customer, which I think is just critical for any type of service organization, that's a pretty smooth process because I can either walk down the hall or I know the scientist or scientists to be in touch with and I can get updates from them. As you start to grow and scale that, that gets really challenging and I think important for company leadership in those situations to establish the communication channels and the ways that projects are going to be communicated, the status of projects are going to be communicated to customers. So just having that in place and knowing that that challenge is going to come up of your sales team can't handle all of that all the time because they need to focus a good amount of their time on actually selling. So I guess the answer, long way of answering is you need to calibrate based on what your internal systems are set up for. If you don't have any communication then from a sales perspective, in my mind you have to step into that role because this is your not only your current customer, but most likely your future customer as well. You know, if they're not happy with this project, then they're not going to come back to you. And that's repeat business is the easiest business to get and the most important from a services standpoint. You know, if you're selling a product that is an instrument, say they have their instrument, they'll run with it, maybe they'll buy more instruments in the future. But the service is set up that, okay, we're done with this contract, what's the next one? And so those relationships are really important to maintain. And so if you don't have the systems in place to provide those communication updates, then my perspective is that I have to step into that wherever needed.

Thanks so much for listening to the podcast. If you could do us a quick favor and share it with someone, you know, it would mean the world to us. If you want to up level your sales skills or just network with other life science sales reps, check out the succession community at Succession Bio. Join. Okay, now back to the show. Another I think interesting component between services and products is maybe it's more around like how deep you have to go from like a discovery standpoint to. Because I think if you're selling certain types of services, right, I guess there's a spectrum of services. You have some services that are kind of like productized services. It's like, hey, we'll do this specific service for you and this is the deliverable. Whereas you also have very customized services where it's more like maybe doing a big study or there's a lot of moving parts and you're putting together custom proposals. So I imagine in an instance like that where you're doing these like really big customized services, the level of discovery and stakeholders that need to be involved is substantially higher than maybe like even like a product tie service.

Yeah, yeah. I mean the complexity, you know, again will increase a lot based on, you know, the kind of how defined the endpoint is from a service. And sometimes, you know, that's kind of the important thing to establish up front in those discovery calls is what, what is our endpoint here?

What do you find by endpoint?

So kind of, you know, what are the set of experiments, what are the questions you're trying to answer or what are we delivering? And really clearly defining that because you can get into situations with services where you're basically an extension of their research team and you could just continue to do research for them under that same contract. If you don't kind of Define, okay, this is how much we'll do, this is how much troubleshooting we'll do, this is how much exploratory investigation will do to get to that endpoint. But you really have to have kind of that endpoint and the steps along the way to get there. Pretty well defined in the contract from the beginning.

And I imagine there's lots of different people involved in that process too. Right? Because you're probably, it's a complex service, you're probably touching multiple steps, multiple points of like, you know, the deliverable essentially. Like there's probably a lot of different workflows, a lot of different people that have to be involved to approve that. So how do you kind of navigate that buying committee, if you will?

Yeah, I think in a lot of ways it's, it's similar to selling capital equipment because it tends to be a higher value exchange. You know, it'll be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars rather than a few hundred dollars for like reagents or a few thousand dollars. And so that's kind of defined by the client and how they have their purchasing structured. And so for these higher value purchases, services, capital equipment, whatever the case, they're going to start to trigger, okay, well now, you know, director level and below can improve up to this much. But if you get over 50k, 100k, whatever the case, then you start to get procurement involved or you need a VP level to sign off. And so again from the beginning, kind of knowing and sharing what the scope will be, not only the technical scope, but kind of the financial outlay that would be required once the price of this service you can start to get at who is the customer buying team that needs to be involved and the decision makers that need to be engaged with from the beginning. And so yeah, I think services tend to have a bigger group, but that's mostly a function of the cost of the services rather than the complexity. In some ways service is outsourced and so they may not need as many technical stakeholders internally involved as like a large instrument purchase might.

Nice. Yeah, I appreciate that. So switching gears a little bit, if you don't mind, want to talk a bit about your transition? So at Synthego, you were individual contributor, you came on as a rep and then you were promoted after being very successful, I might say, and you were promoted into a regional sales manager and then now you've kind of come back into a smaller company as a individual contributor again and want to kind of talk through these nuances. Some of the things that come up, things that people can think about and need to be aware of, as, you know, maybe they might be going through similar situations.

Yeah. The first thing I would say is that I think I'm a much better individual contributor now that I have had the experience of being a manager. And I think I'm a better employee for my boss because I know the types of information that he wants and I can filter the right things to him, ask for the right help from him, but largely be highly independent to kind of make my own decisions and credit to him as well for kind of giving me the latitude to define, you know, how my day to day looks and the type of work that I do to reach the ultimate. What our ultimate goal is bringing in more revenue from the company and helping our customers. So, you know, we're really aligned on the important things. But as an individual contributor now I can kind of, you know, set up my day as if, you know, thinking of what would it be like to be managing me and, you know, how do I, you know, how can I be the most effective, but both employee and individual contributor.

Interesting. Okay, and so then when you made the initial transition into management, what were some of those kind of wake up calls? You're like, oh, wow, this is way different than I thought it was going to be.

Yeah, I think I enjoyed being a manager far more than I thought I would. And Nick, I think you and I talked about this a synth ago. You know, kind of the fear, I think initially of taking on that role is, you know, as an individual contributor, you have all of your own challenges and problems that you have to deal with. And I sort of just saw becoming a manager is suddenly having to deal with everybody's problems. Right. It's like, I've got enough. I'm successful as an individual contributor. I have good accounts, good relationships, like, I can manage this well. But moving into the manager role, yeah, you do get more people's problems that you have to help solve. But I found that I really enjoyed engaging with them and helping them solve those problems, helping them, you know, troubleshoot their own sales process. And so I think that was kind of a very good, happy realization that I enjoyed it a lot more. I also had a great team and enjoyed working with them, so that certainly helped. As far as something that I think helped me be successful is that some of my natural instincts and my own process for being an individual contributor of taking really good notes, being really prepared for meetings, that translated really well to being a manager as well. Now most of the time, instead of preparing for meetings with potential clients. I was preparing for my one on ones or preparing for a team meeting and helping coach my team on how to do that themselves. So, yeah, I think I was fortunate that kind of my own workflows translated well. But those are some of the important things that I did previously that really worked well as a manager, too.

Something you said there was really important because you and I are very different in the way we approach things, and you're much more methodical than I am. I still hope that I was quite useful for my team as a manager and anyone else I've managed in the past. But I think what's important is that you lean into your strengths and don't try and be something you're not as a manager. Like, my team knew that I'm not as methodical as you, and they're your team, they're part of you. They actually pick up some of that slack knowing what I could bring with something else. And we worked as a team, and I think sometimes as a manager, people forget that you're part of that team. You're not just sitting above it, you have a role in it. And I think that's really important. And you kind of said that, but I just wanted to make sure I highlighted it.

Yeah, I think you. Yeah, you summarize that really well. And I think you're dead on that, you know, lean into the things you're good at, know where you're maybe not as good and either your team can kind of step into that themselves, or you can bring in some help to be able to do that as well. Really good point.

Yeah, I think that was something that we had really well put together at Sentago was sort of the ecosystem of people that you could bring in to help and do different things. I think everybody really supported each other really well. So I think when you get to a certain size of company, you have that ability where you can turn to your right and turn to your left and say, hey, I need your help on this and people will be there for you.

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Now, what to do at a small company, A lot of the times you just sitting there by yourself and you're just like, oh, I got nobody here. Who do I turn to? So, yeah, that can be tough.

Jeff, as an individual contributor at a senior level, you're looking over your shoulders like, I'll get so and so. Oh, no, I've got to do that. All right. There's no one there to pick it up.

It all rolls up. Yeah. And yeah, I think, I mean, that's something that excites me too though is the idea of building something and establishing good systems, processes, frameworks to then, you know, as the company grows, build a team underneath me. And so that's something, you know, again, back to your question about being an individual contributor now. You know, I'm thinking of it not just how do I do the best that I can right now, but also how do I establish systems and frameworks that will allow this company to grow successfully.

You're talking dirty to me. I love that stuff. Systems, process frameworks get me excited. I love it. Spend all day talking about that. I think one thing that would be helpful for people that maybe are in management roles today, but they are maybe thinking about making another move to another company. How should they be thinking about either a horizontal move or what might be perceived as like a step backwards? Because I think there's a, there's a stigma around, hey, I was a manager, individual contributor. It's like, is this going to look bad on my resume? Like, how can we eliminate that stigma for people?

Yeah, I think, you know, there's a few different situations where that can happen and in neither case should it be looked as a step back in kind of general. And I've interviewed people in this situation previously when we were filling out our team at Synthego. You know, people had gone from individual contributor, manager and back. And one person who I spoke with, interviewed, who I think answered it really well, is, you know, just said, look like my. I enjoyed being an individual contributor much more. I think I did fine as a manager and. But my kind of day to day and what I was doing, I enjoyed a lot more when I was an individual contributor. So she just owned it. And I loved that. I don't think I didn't have any preconceived notion about it being a step back necessarily for her, but if I did, I think she would have put those fully to rest because she came in competently and said, I tried both. I found that I was really good at being an individual contributor. So I wanted to go back to that. I think there's, in my situation at least, you know, I'm excited to eventually be a manager again in my transition is more in the way I'm looking at it is more going to a smaller company that is trying to grow. And so like I mentioned, you know, building out the frameworks and kind of a book of business that is sufficient to support growth. So if I've done my job well, then I'll be able to build a team.

I also, I think that there's no step backwards. Right. If you've got skills that you've learned and you're continuing to grow, I think that's the thing, we see it as a linear progression from contributor to manager to VP. But you know, you can be a VP of a, of a two person company or a manager of a 30 person team, they're different roles and skills. And if you've got those skills, you should go do it and contribute to the company. And if you're doing that, I think you're doing the right thing. As long as you're enjoying it and the company's getting value out of it.

Absolutely, yeah.

I mean, to your point you mentioned earlier, you are now a better individual contributor because of your experience as a manager. Right. And I imagine too when you build the team up to get to that point where you're now managing them again, you've got that book of business where it is to support growth. I imagine you're going to be a better manager having now been an individual contributor again after being a manager. So you have like, you're basically stacking all of these experiences on top of each other, like building up all of these different skills and they're going to combine to help you be the best in whatever future role you've got.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And always kind of learning from every step along the way and going, building off of that foundation that you've built historically.

Yep, love it. One other thing we wanted to talk about. So you also do a lot of mentorship work, right? You do a little work with the, the Hutch, Fred Hutch and would love to learn a little bit more about that and kind of how, how do you think about mentoring, you know, a future generation of people who potentially might want to get into sales?

Yeah. Something that I enjoy a lot. And it's partly because I remember where I was at that point as a PhD grad student eagerly trying to get into industry. I knew I didn't want to continue to do science at that point. I decided that in grad school I loved science. I loved kind of the healthcare industry and having a contribution towards improving human health, but that transition, but knew that I didn't want to do science, I didn't want to do bench work anymore. That was not my best set of skills. And so I wanted to kind of figure out how do I translate, help translate discoveries that are made in the lab into industry so that can have an impact on patients. There are a lot of people who kind of have that vision. Very Small Percentage of PhD students or postdocs are going to actually go into industry or let alone into academia. They're going to translate those skills somewhere into industry. And it's a really difficult path to walk and not something you have a lot of visibility for as a grad student or a postdoc. So that's kind of my motivation for being involved with like the Fred Hutch. It's a mentor network. So I'm kind of part of a list that people can find me on that list and reach out. But there's a lot with like uw University of Washington, where I went as well. And so, you know, I'm just kind of open to having those conversations anytime. And I think, you know, they hopefully by advice and sharing my experience is helpful for them. I think the, maybe a piece of advice for anybody who's reaching out and kind of having some of those establishing a mentor or just having those mentorship conversations is to continue to follow up with the people who have been acting as a mentor. Whether it's one meeting or multiple meetings. Very few follow up after that first meeting.

Almost never see it all the time. Like literally we'll have a great conversation. It's like, okay, then you just don't hear from them again. It's like, well, what happened? I want to know. Keep me informed. It doesn't mean we always have to have a follow up meeting, but let's stay informed and keep that person informed of, you know, was their feedback helpful? You know, were you successful in what you're trying to accomplish?

So yeah, continuing to leverage them in any way that you can. And I'll be honest, I'm guilty of this as well for when I was in the mentee situation and you know, not keeping that line of connection. But now that's something I've added into kind of my list of advice is, you know, don't be afraid to bother me or other people. Right. Continue to leverage the network and build a relationship over time. So yeah, I think, you know, I do think it's been effective with a handful of those people who have followed up and kind of updated me on their progress and whether or not they found a job in industry or whatever that they were looking for. And those are, you know, just the low commitment but really high value relationships that, you know, now we can tap into each other as we progress in our careers, you know, at any point because we have kind of that initial kind of introduction and we know each other, we know where we've been, what we're interested in. So, yeah, they're just great relationships that are of value to me as well.

So while we're coming up here on time, so we've got one last question for you. You know, everybody listens here. They love their tactics, they love their techniques. So what's one, like, really actionable takeaway that you can give somebody that's on sales today?

A lot of kind of different bits and pieces, but I think one that I've seen kind of again and again, and in my own experience where I changed this and it really kind of leveled up my. The conversations that I had and just opened up a lot of doors from a sales perspective was to not be scared of the big questions or the scary questions. You know, don't beat around the bush. Just, you know, don't hide the price. Don't be scared to ask somebody what they actually want, how committed they are. Just have the conversation. Ask the question. It might feel a little awkward sometimes, but the more you kind of make it awkward, the more it's going to feel awkward, and the more time you're potentially going to waste if somebody is just not ready to tell you no. Right.

Yeah. I think if you're, like, genuinely curious, like, throughout the conversation that you're having and you're really coming from a viewpoint of I'm trying to help you as a customer or a potential customer of ours, and, like, I want to make sure you hit your outcome, your question is going to come across as genuine, and it's not going to come across as, you know, this, like, big crazy sales question or whatever.

Right.

We're going to come across as pushy. It's comes from a genuine place. You're in a good. You in a good spot. Yeah.

Don't say nothing for the whole meeting and then scream, where's my PO? That's not going to go well, right?

It might. It might. Somebody should try that. Yeah, we should a b. Test it on the next. Next call. Awesome. Well, Jeff, it's been a pleasure. Great to see you again and appreciate all the insights that you brought to everybody here on the podcast.

No, thanks for having me on, guys, and thanks for building succession. I'm loving what you guys are doing and, yeah, excited to be a part of it.