[Sales] Maintain your composure in high pressure meetings with Jocelyn Foye

That's kind of interesting. One of the key differences I personally see between instruments and services specifically is that selling instruments are really empowering the researchers to say, if you adopt this technology and start using this technique, you guys are going to be so much more efficient, you're going to be so much more capable. You're going to be able to do X, Y and Z. And so you're really working to empower them. Services, it's really the opposite. You're working to gain their trust that you're essentially an extension of their own work and that we're smart enough, we're capable enough to actually provide you information that, that you would normally be doing, but in a manner that you would be proud of. And you're asking in both instances for somebody to change their standard day to day process, which is really different. But I think with the instrument side of it, it's a little bit more straightforward. Whereas with services it's. We know that normally you would probably be doing this yourself. We're going to do it for you. You should trust us. You're smart enough to sort of spend.

Your time on this thing. Yeah, don't spend your time on this. Do something more fun. 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 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 up level 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 show. Hey, everyone, we got another great episode for you here on the Sales DNA podcast this week we have Jocelyn, who's the senior manager of America's business development and sales for Fortis Life Sciences. And this one is a lot of fun because we get pretty tactical. So we get into a lot of different sales tactics, tips and tricks that you can actually use in your sales process. So you're going to want to stay all the way till the end and not miss it. You may even want to go back and listen to it to make sure that you actually implement some of the things that you learn. What were some of the stuff that stood out to you, Nick?

There was a lot in this yesterday. Justin was really. She's Very smart and very in tune to the sales process and the psychology, and I really enjoyed that conversation. We both had a bit of a geek out about our favorite bit of equipment as well. So me particular pieces that I enjoyed was her understanding of the purchasing departments and buying process and how that differs between different sales. That was really good. And if you listen out, there's quite literally a light bulb moment for me and Jocelyn. So listen out on that one.

Nice nugget. That was a good one. All right, well, let's dive into it. Hey, Jocelyn, welcome to the podcast. We're really excited to have you here.

Thank you very much. Happy to be here.

Awesome. Well, we asked everybody the same question, so give us a crazy or funny story that's happened in your career.

I had just finished setting up for Lunch and Learn seminar for about 60 people at a company in New Jersey, and my main contact came into the room and let everybody know that the VP had just resigned, and they all realized layoffs were likely pending the following day.

Oh, no.

And we immediately canceled the lunch and learn, and I drove myself another six hours back home.

Yeah, that's pretty wild. It's the actual opposite of somebody else we had on the podcast. Jeff, who we used to work with, he went into a meeting and he's like, I'm supposed to meet with this person. Nobody's showing up. Turns out they just sold the company and everybody's partying, so he got to party with them afterwards. So, like, literally the polar opposite. You go from one.

Yeah, that's a fantastic experience. Mine, not so much. It was rather uncomfortable. My. My contact just looked at me and he goes, I'm. I'm really terribly sorry, but I don't see any reason for you to be here.

Yeah. Oh, that's rough. And I recently said it, and they didn't leave you there sitting around all day. That's nice.

That is. That is true. It was just odd to not work there and be in the setting where you could look at the faces of the employees who were just absolutely terrified. So that was definitely, I would say, crazy. Not. Not necessarily funny. Funny now, maybe, but crazy story. Yes. Awkward.

I do think that that's one thing that's underestimated in a skill that reps have, which is the ability to sort of wander into an unknown situation and evolve as it happens. Right. Because as a rep, you can prepare as much as you want, but you can't Predict, I'd say, 50% of what happens in meetings, in rooms, in, like, on the. On the journey, and it's that adaptability I think that is underestimated.

Yes. I think early, very early in my career when I was still quite naive to sales, I went and conducted a technical presentation and I always would lay the groundwork that I was not the subject matter expert, that I was the salesperson and I would try to do my best. And there was a gentleman in this group that was just determined, absolutely determined to demonstrate that I was not a subject matter expert. And you gotta just keep rolling along and, and trying to get through the presentation, hopefully get a sale at the end.

So yeah, yeah.

There's always that person that feels about being able to prove you wrong. They look better in their role.

Yeah. They just want to feel like they're smarter for no reason. Right. Well, so if anybody out there is feeling that way sometimes in calls, well, just know that it happens. It's not just you. Yeah.

I often enjoy though, because sometimes you'll see that their colleagues, you look around and you realize that actually they think they've like got the room and the whole room is looking at them. I actually had one customer once email me after that scenario and say, just so you know, three of the team members had a go at the VP after you left because they felt it was out of order.

Yeah, I'm uncomfortable.

Yeah, that's right.

For sure. So yeah, yeah, I mean I've in my career in managing, try to bolster reps and to let them know that, you know, titles should not be something that intimidate you, that people are people. And as long as you can relate to them as people, there's going to be speed bumps like that where somebody's going to potentially try to trip you up. And if you just remain focused and try your best to keep your confidence, you roll through. But if it's a founder, if it's a CEO, if it is a postdoc or somebody that just graduated and they're in the lab, anything in between, the title shouldn't influence what you appear to be as a salesperson.

I really like that. It's one of those ones though that I think is great in theory and it's hard in practice where like if you're talking to, I don't know, CEO of a 10 person company, it's going to be a lot different than talking to a CEO of 100 person company, 500 person company. So I think how have you, how have you seen people get more comfortable with that? Is it just practice and having enough of those conversations or what's sort of a trick that somebody can take to feel more comfortable in those situations.

Two things. The first is practice for sure, being out in group settings with mixed audiences of different responsibility levels in an organization and asking the hard questions like you're trained your whole life not to talk about money and you have to go and ask, you know, supposedly very important people about their budget situation. They have enough funding to do business with you. So getting comfortable in really appropriate and strategic ways to have those discussions is key. And so practicing that. But also it's just a mind shift. It's, you know, why is somebody's title? Why is a CEO of 100 person or a thousand person company, why is that intimidating to you? And you know, typically when you think about it, it's, it's influence, it's likely intelligence. And so if you can go in with the confidence that you know, you're the salesperson, you're presenting to them, but you're presenting to them to teach them something, also position it that you're looking to learn from them, it becomes much more of a conversation. And so the individual roles start to, you know, kind of fade away. And then you're just having a conversation with somebody and hopefully at the end they've learned something and you learn something and you can keep the discussion going.

I think one of the other challenges that I sometimes see too is that reps are product focused, so they know all the things about their product. And then when they get into a conversation with an executive of an organization, they're not really sure how to have like a business conversation to talk about the impact of the business that it's going to have. To your point, talking about money, right? Talking about the ROI or whatever it is, the business impact. And so they might get asked some of those questions, but they're used to just talking about their product. All they know is how to talk about the product and not the actual business implications of it. And I think that's also an area where if you get more comfortable having those conversations, learning about you're developing your business acumen, you know, could help a lot too.

I think one quick shift to help you what you sound like when you walk in a room, the title, the position often scares people. And this goes back to something I actually thought about. I've got kids of like teach my kids is actually any kind of power or title or sort of grandeur you somebody's got is because it's, you've given it to them. It's not something about them. You personally have thought about what they are, how Important they are and given them that power where actually you need to walk in there and put yourself on a level. And that's easy to do if you realize it was you that gave them that seniority in the first place.

Yeah, I would agree with that. I also think the people around you, if you're presenting to an audience in a group, would be able to pick up on that if you're able to show up in that manner and have that kind of confidence.

So another thing we wanted to talk about, I think, is the difference between selling instruments, services, reagents, and I know you and Nick had a little common ground around one of the instruments you used to sell. Why don't we kind of start there, kind of talk about some of those. Those instruments and, you know, what do you see as the. Some of the main challenges or differences in selling between those areas?

And I'd love to start with your familiarity with the Inky site and how you know the instrument.

So I had the version one originally when it was still.

Where. Where, uh.

So where did I first have it that would have been. I was at AstraZeneca when it was Medimune and I was culturing lots of different cells, and I used it for wound healing assays. I also mainly used it for quality control of growth profiles of cells so that when I saw the cells, I could check the health of that bank based on the profile of when I froze it down so I could see growth curves overlaid over time. That was my general thing. That was the instrument that was great. But you had to time your scans because otherwise it would overheat your incubator. They then got better versions where it didn't do that.

Yeah. Because yours had an actual light bulb in it, didn't it? Yeah.

Right.

We're like. Yeah. There's one of my first, like, things that I did at Merck in New Jersey for the Inca center, as I showed up to replace a light bulb. Like, I drove down with an actual light bulb in a box and I had to go. And I'm sitting there going, why does this thing have a light bulb? Yeah. And. And it would kick out a ton of heat.

There's got to be a joke about how does it take to change your light bulb, right?

Yes.

Yeah.

Just one. You had to drive.

Luckily, I answered the question. It was just me, but, yeah, it's wild. That's amazing. Yeah. That's when I actually started was after there was a handful of placements for the first version. And what had been going on was essentially There was a service person in Europe and a service person, slash IT person, based in Michigan in the states. And those two gentlemen were basically the ones that went out and did the installs and the training. And if there was anything that needed to be fixed, they were handy enough, they would fix it. At that point. The instrument was so stuck simple that calibrating it for setup was just some. A tray and positional scanning. And then you plug the thing in and you connect it to a computer and you're done.

There was some application notes that were out for the incusite that I actually helped produce at one point as well.

That's amazing. Did you have the wound healer that we called it the Wound Maker with a black base with the handle and you had to put the tip. So I was literally called the Wound Maker. And I mean, God love everybody in the organization. I adore everyone. But it looked like somebody just like put it together in their garage.

Yep.

And then. And then sold it. It was, it was pretty amazing. I just. The Wound Maker, you could tell we did not have marketing.

The application to work on at the time was at another company. We worked with Ethan at the time and it was to do LPS tagged fluorescent particles for macrophage. And then we made a video on the of them going along and gobbling up the particles, the macrophage particles.

So that would have had to be, I mean, at the earliest, would have been 2009 or 2010. Yeah. Yep. That's when we launched the green fluorescent capable instrument. So luckily there were LEDs.

Yeah. Yeah. I think it was a bit later than that. That was when I was at a company, a different company with a colleague of mine, Zoe. But yeah, cool.

Yeah, that's where sales for me started. And it was on the job learning. I mean, I had a sales manager, but she was based in Michigan. And I spent, you know, once I was hired, I'd been previously an application scientist. So the direct selling part to me was I was kind of like, let's see how this goes. I didn't always want to, you know, carry a bag, but the fact of the matter was that I was going to be the first person in the States that was selling. So I knew it would be a combination of sales and applications. And So I spent 18 months after getting hired just traveling out on my own, using an Excel spreadsheet of people that were previously interested and trying to figure out how to sell an instrument. So it was pretty exciting. Yeah.

That's wild. Yeah, I mean, like getting into sales so many I feel like that happens so much more in this industry is it's like, hey, you're kind of technical and you might know how to do this. So, like, why don't you just go talk to people about it and like, good luck. And they don't really teach you that, like, there's a lot more to sales than just, you know, showing up and bringing your pitch deck and slides and data sets.

I had done selling for seven years before I got sales training. The first sales training, like formal sales training was thin selling.

Oh, that's a great one.

And it was, it was seven years after I'd been selling, so I had friends who had already done it and they're like, you're already, you're already doing it. You just don't know what it's called.

But how was that, though? How was that, like, having some experience and then getting training, like, was that training, like now beneficial for you to give you sort of a framework and some, like, understanding of, like, why it is that you do that? You do and it works?

Yeah, I mean, exactly that. It provided me a framework so that the things I was already doing, I actually was able to just refine and organize a bit better. But then it was validating in the sense that, oh, yeah, I do ask questions like this, but now I can understand why it's working. And then again, you can start to refine a bit and just try to get better and better. I already knew that there was a psychology to selling that I think definitely opened my eyes up to how much psychology is part of selling. And so I was, I just. After that, I was able to lean in a little bit more to that. I, I wasn't questioning anymore if that should be factored in. It was now validated that, yes, that's actually a technique that works well.

That makes a lot of sense. And I guess. So then what have you found as being. I don't know, maybe what, maybe in regards to like, your sales process. Right. Maybe the ones that you started using for seven years. How did it sort of change once you had that formal sales training? Was there something that you just, like, were like, oh, my God, this is eye opening. I'm going to get, I'm going to do that more. Or was it really just more around refinement or I guess maybe even. Have you thought about that changing over the years as well?

All right. It was really turning qualification into what qualification was. So I would say and have conversations with customers around, oh, well, if you need this, why do you need it when do you need it by? But that was very much hepatitis hazard. I would not necessarily ask those questions if they weren't mentioned or offered by the customer. Budget was something where I think I got more emboldened by bank qualifications where, you know, I would kind of broach the subject. But after getting formally trained I went head on into it. I think I saw that, you know, putting out your list per price and saying this is the price of what we just discussed, let's keep the conversation going, was something that I would do depending on the customer. And then after formal training I was like, no, this is actually a sales technique that can work to my benefit. I should be doing this every single time. So it was really around the qualification, the technical details, those kinds of things. It was, you know, Nick can probably comment on that. The instrument was really successful and would really be eye opening for customers. It was very accessible. So if you were someone in the lab that was really well experienced in cell culture, you got it. And if you were newer to research, you got it. So that aspect of the sale was sort of the easier I think it was digging into qualification and really understanding that going in with those details from the start benefited the overall sales process.

I think one thing you said there that I really important for any reps listening that don't do this is when you said about putting your list price out there, I don't mean like putting on a website, but as part of your qualification process, people need to know how much. If you get all the way down the pipe, like meetings and meetings in and you've not mentioned the price, all you're doing is wasting their time and your time because if there's no budget or no availability for this, then you may as well end it amicably and save everybody's time so you can focus on something else. But so many people are worried about giving the price in case they lose the deal, which is a backwards way to think. Right. So I think that I wanted to highlight for anybody listening who's not doing that now.

Also be careful of saying this is our list price because then as soon as you say list price that assumes a discount and so they're going to ask for it. So just say this is the price.

Price. Absolutely. Yeah, great, great. Catch on.

Yeah, the other, the other one that I see people do all the time is they'll be like, hey, this is going to cost 20,000 DOL dollars. But hey, we'll probably be able to work out like a deal or something. You immediately start negotiating with yourself. I Had a rep that I worked with years ago and he still remembers this to this day. He still gives me crap for it. Where he says, I told him, stop negotiating with yourself. Don't negotiate with yourself. Put out the price. Just sit there and sit in it and let them think about it. The silence is them thinking about that price. It's not them like scared of what you told them. Right.

I actually had a conversation once with and someone more senior than me wanted to join the call, won't say where or what. And it was with somebody in farmer and basically the farmer bought a pig.

Yeah.

The farmer person said, oh, we need to get to this point. And the person with me think I said we can probably get there but we wouldn't want to. And it was just like.

Well, you've.

Told me that now and that's where I want to go, but I don't want to cripple you. He actually let him charge slightly more in the end because he felt so bad for his negotiation skills. But yeah, that was crazy.

Yeah. I mean, have you, have you had an experience directly where you got too far down the conversation around a purchase and then pricing sort of weird, its ugly head because it hadn't been discussed before.

Yeah, definitely. For me, when I was more junior in the role, it's a mistake I made a few times and particularly with like academics or something you like. I don't want to scare them off. If I could just get them really interested. If I can just show them everything it can do somehow.

Right.

Yeah, they'll. They'll buy it, the date reset itself, all of that sort of stuff. Right. And you only do that a few times, hopefully before you realize you're just wasting your time. Like you need to. I don't like putting prices on websites for a complex thing because you do have to be able to position value in what you're doing and position it with somebody. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't have mentioned it by the end of the first call.

Right. That's how I see it. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Like you really, really want to at least get it out there as part of the qualification. And for people that don't know what the acronyms were that we were using earlier. So spin selling is a technique, stands for situation, problem, implication needs payoff. It's just, it's a way that you can frame and ask certain types of questions. And then bant is a qualification terminology that stands for budget, authority, need, timeline, which has to do with if you have a Qualified opportunity. It means that they have the budget, the authority, have a need, and they can purchase this within a given timeline. And so that's sort of the general idea around these concepts. And I think you want some sort of framework that you can work within. Doesn't have to be one of those. It can be something else. But if you give yourself a type of framework that you use for your discovery conversations and for how you qualify opportunities, it's going to give you a better understanding of what a real opportunity is to know, like, do you spend your time on this opportunity? I think right now, Joss, I would love your thoughts on this, actually, is that a lot of reps are trying to, like, hold on to every opportunity they get because it's so hard to come by them. And so they're trying to do. They're like, basically forgetting how to sell on these, like, initial discovery calls. And so then, like, they basically have this call, they do all this pitching, and then, you know, just go dark and they just never hear from the person again because they're not really trying to, like, qualify or disqualify these opportunities. I don't know if that's something that you've seen as a trend as well.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, you were talking about the difference between instrument selling and selling services or commoditized products. I mean, quite honestly, one of the thing that rings true and is always the same no matter what you're selling, is people will ghost you or you will just sort of stay on the hook. Right. People don't really like to give bad news, and they feel guilty oftentimes knowing that you have spent time on it. I wake up every day and think about what I can sell to somebody. They're not waking up every day thinking about buying. So I find it that it's best to fail fast. It's my perspective that I don't want to waste my time, definitely don't want to waste the customer's time, but they're clearly not interested. So I don't want to waste my time. And instead of thinking about it in a manner of like, oh, this is what I get paid per hour. If I take my salary and I break it down, and I don't want to, you know, waste my. My hour on that, I actually think about what I'm meant to be generating for the company on a given day or in a given period of time, a given week, how many opportunities I need to create, how much business I have to close, and if I take it that way, how am I Going to spend my time so I can support those goals. And it's not going to be by focusing on opportunities where the customer is not actually in need. And so there's a difference between somebody being interested and somebody being in need. When they need you, they are communicative. I've had customers that have said, hey, listen, I'm going to go on vacation for the next two weeks. Don't check in for another month. Fine. That customer is in need of something because they're giving me their schedule. Someone that just doesn't reply, they don't need me. And so you should fail fast and focus on how to accomplish your goals from opportunities that are truly viable.

That makes a lot of sense. I mean, one thing that I've actually started to recommend to people as well is when you have that first conversation and you're not sure if it's fully qualified is find somebody else in that lab, in that organization that you can try and talk to. So instead of going out spending your time prospecting cold, find another person or group of people in that organization that you can get in front of, because they also might be a champion for what it is that you are looking or what it is that you provide. Oftentimes, the first person we talk to isn't always like our champion because they may be the person that's shopping around, so they may be going around talking to a bunch of different vendors, and then their head, they already may have somebody that they know they want to work with, so they talk to you and then then kind of ghost you. But if you can get to somebody else in that organization, you can potentially build up more of a groundswell and create other champions because you know that there's some sort of need, because there's some sort of conversation that's already happened.

Yes, that's interesting. I think that's a really useful technique. Do you have recommendations on how to find that other person? Do you often ask for, like, a referral from your main contact, or is that just sort of individually? If you're able to secure a group of like two or three people that you're already communicating with, addressing them individually as opposed to a group, I think.

There'S probably a couple ways you can do it. So one of the main things I like to do is when you're having the conversation with the first person, you always want to ask the question, like, who else is impacted by this decision? Or who else needs to be involved in this type of decision? When you say, like, who else needs to be involved? Or who else is making this decision? It can feel like you're going over their head. But if you ask like who else is impacted by the decision, it means like more downstream, like consequences of, let's say you move forward with a product or service, whatever it is, who are the other people that are impacted by it? Then they'll tell you. They say, hey, well how are they impacted? And then they might have an idea of how they're impacted too. And so now you have a message that you can reach out to somebody else with. Like if we just said, hey, Nick is going to actually be the person that's using this instrument. Right, but I'm the director that you're talking to or whatever, then you could then reach out to Nick and be like, hey, Nick, heard that you might, you'd be the person who would actually use this instrument, this, this chat and see if it's something that'd be helpful for you before I take things any further with anybody else. So I say that's one way. The other way is just like go online and go look for other people in the same department in the same group, find their contact and go and reach out.

I think it's a pretty important tactic as well because we often hear either as sales leaders or people telling us to go out there, we often hear like we really need to speak to the VP because they've got the budget, this and the other, or the director. But I was actually having a copy and in a conversation with two VPs of large pharma, separate Large pharma, we was chatting about this and I was like, I don't decide anything. We buy like they've got teams of like 40, 50, 100 people below them. Well, I don't decide anything. We buy all I decided whether we can afford what they need. I don't decide like what it is because I'm too far removed and we're busy trying to sell. So people up there. When actually in a certain size organization you need those multiple touch points like you talking about.

Yeah, I actually think it's also become even more critical sort of post Covid and now that selling is really done remotely. You know, it was easy when I was in the lab, even if it was just one main contact that I was having a meeting with, I would typically get a tour and get introduced to other people. And then you got names, you are then familiar to them. So if you LinkedIn connected and sent a message, it would make sense. It was just a lot easier to sort of map out somebody's Immediate group. And now it is more of a challenge. But I do think it's also critical because decisions aren't made in a vacuum. Despite the fact that your conversations might just be one on one, there are going to be groups of people that are, you know, participating in that decision. Yeah.

So always groups of people.

Yeah, yeah. The deciders.

Yeah. I mean, I mean, so the way I like to think about it too is there's a bunch of influencers over every deal, and then there's only one person that can say yes. There are many people that can say no. There's only one person that can actually say yes. And so if you think about how do you create, you need to create a bunch of people that are not saying no. And then you need to ultimately get to the person that can sign the po. And that's the yes person. Right? That's the. That's the economic buyer. You know, a lot of the cases, the quote unquote decision maker, but that person may not actually care about a lot of the nuance of the product, the service, whatever it is, it just rolls up to them. And you know that the conversation is happening internally. Like you're not going to be there when the deal is sold, Right. You're. You have to arm the champion to go sell, but you can't be in the room. Like, that is just how sales happens. And I think a lot of people think they have more influence over the deal than they do. It's like, just because you had a great pitch on a call with somebody doesn't mean you're going to close that deal. Just because, you know, they say they will, they have to go have that pitch internally, which is ultimately where that deal is going to get done.

I think that's really where the psychology comes in, right? Is that the person that has to say yes, do they need you and what you're selling enough and are you aware and are you engaged enough with how they think as an individual to trust that they're going to go make a case and actually move all the way through to purchase. And really that's all we can do, is sort of facilitate. And I always tell even, you know, my managers, reps as well, that the data is the data, it is what it is. You can have a customer that's saying, yes, I'm definitely going to buy, but they're not necessarily a trustworthy customer because they're difficult to get a hold of or to get details from. You can have a customer that's really super communicative, but they don't have any influence. And so even though they're technically the one that's going to say yes, if there's enough people saying no, you can't trust the deal's going to get done. And so it really does come down to a lot of the classic tried and true sales tactics of really justifying the purchase through need. And then, you know, being aware if somebody wakes up one day and just says, I don't feel like buying that anymore, then you're done. You know, you could have tried and tried and tried. Your hope is that, you know, they wake up and they're still motivated to go through the purchase.

That's why I say time kills all deals, right? The faster you can get them, the better.

Why we talk about qualification. We often talk about and we think about, okay, this is my discovery call, let me qualify the customer. Qualification is something you have to redo as you go through a process and the longer that process is, you have to re. Qualify, re qualify. You can have somebody who's really happy and it just doesn't have the impulse, as you said. And if you're not qualifying that as you go through, you're just going to waste your time on it again.

So it's kind of interesting. One of the key differences I personally see between instruments and services specifically is that selling instruments, you're really empowering the researchers to say, if you adopt this technology and you start using this technique, you guys are going to be so much more efficient, you're going to be so much more capable, you're going to be able to do X, Y and Z. And so you're really working to empower them. Services, it's really the opposite. You're working to gain their trust that you're essentially an extension of their own work and that we're smart enough, we're capable enough to actually provide you information that you would normally be doing, but in a manner that you would be proud of. And you're asking in both instances for somebody to change their standard day to day process, which is, which is really different. But I think with the instrument side of it, it's a little bit more straightforward because, you know, it's really like, hey, this is a new tool for you. We're making you more capable. Whereas with services it's, we know that normally you would probably be doing this yourself. We're going to do it for you, you should trust us. You're smart enough to sort of, don't.

Spend your time on this thing. Yeah, don't spend your Time on this. Do something more fun, do something more interesting.

Right.

Actually, I don't think I've heard that so eloquently put before, which is instruments are around empowering a scientist, whereas services are around creating trust that you can do it as well, if not better than they could.

Totally.

That's. Well, that's well put.

As you were saying that about the services and the trust and it's like there's the thing about we're not going to take your job at all. You know, all of this side of it where you build that trust. And it feels like me that a relevant analogy would to put that to AI. We're trying to augment you, not replace you. And I think that's very much how you sell a service. As, as Harrison said, that was very well put.

Oh, thank you. Yeah, it was something that I sort of stumbled into, but almost immediately. Right. Because you can't really approach a customer, you know, for services the same way you would capital equipment. And you know, it's not necessarily even budget related. It's, it's not really about dollars. It just goes back to the need and then essentially demonstrating that you have their solution. And it is definitely a significantly different approach from equipment to services, for sure.

I know we're running out of time, but I want to ask one more question because it's just something that's occurred to me. This is before we ask the final question. When you're buying equipment, there's a big purchasing piece of that it's normally big ticket items and you've got capex and you've got all of these cycles and purchasing people in that. Do you think being in equipment first has given you an edge over understanding a purchasing process within a company compared to people who just go into service? Because often reps don't think about that side of it.

So I actually miss dealing with purchasing when it comes to capital equipment versus services. I think what's interesting is if I started in services, I wouldn't really know how to work with purchasing. Sure. When it comes to, you know, outsourcing projects to an organization, a purchaser is just going to sign off. Nick, as you referenced earlier, just based on budget, they, they're like, I don't know about the, the research, I don't know about the project. I just know that this group wants this. Do we have the budget, yes or no. And so you need to be aware of those details in, in sales. But I can't actually leverage a relationship with purchasing when it comes to services. The way I did with instruments. If I were going to a pharma company, a large pharma company, I would immediately try to engage with purchasing. I mean, for some of these pharma companies, I mapped all the way up to global leads for purchasing. And I would immediately notify them and say, I have a customer that's interested, guaranteed. You're probably going to wind up buying two more of these this year. Should we just do a deal? And I would get in front of it and say, you know, that's cool. We sold to you last year. At this price, our price is increasing. If you buy instruments this year, let's connect. And I can work on the price this much. So I went like, get out in front of it. And for the customer, I would say, hey, I know so and so in purchasing, this is going to be super easy for you. Just tell me what you want. You'll be copied on the quote correspondence to the purchaser. And I would sort of work through the process for them. And that was really fun and it was really, really efficient. It made a great customer buying experience. Services. I don't have the ability really to do, do that because purchasing is like, just send me the paperwork and I'll, I'll sign it.

I, I would say one that's really great. But I would say one thing is a few times in services, because majority of my career has been services by having some understanding of that. And I don't have the level of understanding you have. I've never mapped as comprehensively of yours, but I've been able to say to a customer in, in return for them saying, oh, I don't know how long this is going to take. Purchasing is a nightmare in this company. I was able to go, actually, I've done this here before with another group. Do you want me to help? You want me to get invited? I was like, please, please take care of purchasing for me.

Yeah, they don't want to deal with it either. Like, they don't want to deal with purchasing easier. It's like, just take, take it early, get in front of it head on. Same thing with like legal, but people that are scared to get legal involved early and scared to get purchasing involved early. The earlier you get them involved, the more likely they'll be your friend and you'll be able to get deals done quicker than if you try to. Like, if you know you're going to have to go through purchasing and you know you're going to have to go through legal, like, do it because it's just going to come to bite you later.

Yeah, Norman, it's.

Oh, yeah, exactly. It's always the last day of the quarter when you want a favor.

Yeah, exactly. I will say it's. It's a question that I ask as part of qualification. Now, if you all said yes today, do you know how long that's going to take? Do you have anybody in sourcing or purchasing that you'd be willing to connect me with? And I really approach it from, like, a concierge sales perspective in the sense of, like, I know that especially with services. I know you're coming to us because we're meant to be helping you with something, so let me help you with all aspects of it. I think one thing that we can't do is really leverage the, you know, hey, purchaser, let's go have lunch and discuss this fiscal year and what you guys have coming up and. And drive the business really through sourcing that way to enable the scientists. So that is one aspect that I miss. But, you know, really supporting the customer, knowing a purchasing process for the customer, that makes everything so much better for them.

Right? Yeah. I think that's a great way to. To end it right up here on time. Jocelyn, it's been a pleasure having you here. A lot of great nuggets for everyone. Like, I think people should go back and listen to this one couple of different times to make sure they pick up everything and actually use it. Great information. Go use it. Don't just listen to this and. And do nothing with it.

Thank you.