[Sales] Recruit, train, and retain top sales talent with Amber Penrose

Gen Z wants more like professional development than I think previous generations. But then I think the issue is you've got older generation are more of the leadership, right. And they were of the mindset of I'm going to go figure this shit out. Whereas I think now there's more expectations from the younger generation that says I want you to show me, show me the way, teach me, I'm going to learn. They're hungry for like personal development, but you have this like mismatch of leadership, doesn't know how to provide that for what people want. And so if people feel like they're not getting it, they're not seeing the career progression, they're not learning something new every day, they're more likely to then want to look for that company that's been provided.

Yeah. And do you know what I have noticed which completely verifies your point is that Generation Z sales specialists and BGMs, their average tenure and the length that they're staying at companies is scarily sure. They're becoming really demotivated. Like you said. I think Gen Zs are more motivated by missions and feeling part of something and feeling like they're really being not only professionally developed, but personally developed. And this generational gap is just growing and growing and growing and gosh knows where we start with that. But yeah, it's scary to see that this has actually been reflected in average tenure.

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 and sales membership that includes on demand courses to up level 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 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 welcome to another episode of the Sales DNA podcast. Today Mick is traveling so you are only going to get to hear from me and our guest Amber. Amber Penrose. She is the CEO of Moxie, which is a life science recruiting with a focus on multi omics. So she focuses heavily on the technical roles as well as the sales roles in the multi omics space. And she's really passionate about recruitment marketing as well. And as we talk about in this episode, she goes into why she's built her personal brand, how it's actually helped her grow her business. And then we also talk a lot about your sales training, or a lack thereof, some of the requirements that are needed for Gen Z and the jobs that they're asking for and what they want out of a role and of a company. And then we even talk about how the one size fits all training model is dead. So a lot of great topics in here across sales training, personal branding and recruiting. And so with all that in mind, let's jump on in. Hey, Amber, welcome to the podcast. So excited to have you here.

Thank you for having me. It's one of my favorites to listen to, so it's cool to be on the other side of the camera.

Well, I appreciate that. Yeah, it's always funny because you don't know who all out there is actually listening to the podcast when you put them out. So hard to get all the details on the listeners.

Yeah, sometimes it feels like you're just speaking into the abyss, but no, you. You have a regular listener over here.

Well, thank you, I appreciate it. And so as a regular listener, you know how we start off every episode. So give us a crazy or funny story that's happened in your career.

Yeah. So let's backtrack to. I think it was 2017, so I was fairly new into my recruitment career and I was posting semi regularly on LinkedIn at the time, and I landed my first inbound lead. And if anyone's ever had an inbound lead, it's like the most exciting thing ever. And it was from a talent acquisition specialist at a really large multinational molecular diagnostics company. And she only had about 10 to 15 minutes to talk me through the role and actually do the job in Take Call, which is partly the reason why now I only work with startups, but I digress. And it was for a business development manager role in Birmingham, and I'm based in the uk and so I went off on my merry old way, started sourcing, speaking to candidates, doing the interviews, and then about 60, 70 hours of work later, I had a call booked in with the SDP of Sales and the VP of Sales. And. And again, I was about, you know, 21 and 22 at the time, so I was already fairly nervous to jump on this call with these two employees. And I brought up my shiny slide deck, was chatting through all of the data, my findings, the challenges that I'd had, and then it was time to move into the resumes. And I'm confidently talking through the first candidate. I'm like, yes, I've got this. He's perfect. And then the SVP just interjects and says, Amber, can I, can I just stop you there for a second? And I was like, yeah, of course, sure. Do you, do you have a question? And he responded with, you do know that we're looking for a sales manager in Birmingham, Alabama, right? Not Birmingham in the uk. And I was like, middle ground. Just follow me up right now. Because not only was I like so embarrassed that that was the first impression and I'd lost all of that time, but I also then had to go to 9 really engaged, excited candidates and be like, guys, I'm sorry, but this role isn't even in your continent. It was pretty embarrassing, but that was my fault for not doing a thorough job intake and I've definitely learned from that now.

Yeah. Especially when they call out specific cities where there's an overlap in the US and in the uk.

Yeah. So now I make sure to check because the US has stolen a lot of names from us.

Yeah, that's funny. Oh man, that's a good one. So, yes, I know a couple of the things that we really wanted to dig in today were one specifically around sales training. So we've had a number of sort of back and forth on LinkedIn about this, whether we think that sales training is actually good in the life sciences or not. I think you have a couple of opinions around that. So love to hear your thoughts and I know I have some as well.

Yeah. And I think so. I'm quite passionate about this and I think sales training comes up on a lot of my calls because it replicates recruitment as well in the sense that sales training is fairly outdated in recruitment at least it hasn't really changed since like the 1990s. We're still all being taught about Sandler. It's a very one sized fits all approach, which is, is definitely replicated in life sciences. And I think, especially if it's like a founder led biotech, for example, they're driven by scientific advancement and it really, they overshadow the need for sales and business training. And we're only taught the basics and we're not taught about creative outreach. I could count on one hand, for example, the amount of life sciences sales specialists who have used video outreach or voice notes on LinkedIn. It's very much, here's a conference, here's some companies that might be relevant for us. Message them, meet them, off you go. There's not a lot of variety, so I don't know if you've kind of experienced that in your talks as well, with people in the space, yeah, very similar.

The, there is such an over reliance, I think on events where just it's like you set your whole like go to market strategy around events. So like we're going to go attend this event, we're going to be there, we're going to have a booth, we're going to like send half of our team, you know, have this all, you know, event presence. And so you have this whole like go to market strategy just around events. And it's not like, it's not wrong necessarily. Right. Like there's probably good things that come from it, but there's so many other ways and better ways that you can connect with more people in your target market. Like not just in the little area that your event is at. Right. Because you know, Bio is coming up. I guess at the time this goes live, Bio would have already been done. But you know, that's huge conference. But you're just going to be, no matter who you are, this is a massive company, you're going to be a small drop in the bucket at that event. And so, you know, it shouldn't be like something that you're basically betting your whole company on.

Yeah. And like I'm going to Bio on Monday and I have a list of people that I would really like to meet there and I don't know if I'll actually see them. It's a huge conference and like you said, I don't want to base my whole prospecting tactics around conferences because I don't know if I'll even bump into these people or if they'll have the time. And often it then just equates in a video call, doesn't it, a few weeks later if they can't meet with you. But because there isn't a lot of creative prospecting outreach done in life sciences, I think it is so easy to stand out because in areas like SaaS sales, for example, people are doing that all the time. And so it does become a little bit redundant when your LinkedIn inbox is full of 30 second videos from sales specialists. But my gosh, if a CCO saw that from a biotech sales specialist, they would 100% listen to that and you would definitely stand out. So I think the opportunity is huge, but it's just not utilized.

Yeah, I mean, think about it from a recruiting standpoint or if you're a candidate, if you send a video message to the CTO or the hiring manager of why you are the best candidate for that role that they're looking for you're going to be towards the top of the list no matter what. Like, you're just going to stand out head and shoulders above every other candidate.

Yeah, I think not enough salespeople when applying for roles treat the interview process like a prospecting sequence. And often I'll be speaking with sales managers who I know are amazing. They've been surpassing quota for over a decade and yet they're applying to roles like everyone else. When if you got a cold call from someone, that would mean so much more than just putting your application into LinkedIn, where there are 200 others doing exactly the same. And even things like people don't write quantifiable achievements or anything on their resumes, it's just crazy. Often the CV does not match up with the person that I speak to on the phone. And the resume bias is really prevalent at the minute. So I think you should be doing everything that you can to stand out.

Yeah, I mean, that's tough. With a resume bias. Like, it's, it's hard to put your personality and all of your, like, real, I would say, like accomplishments and like your real experiences, like down on a piece of paper. And so I guess to your point, it's like, how can you, how can you share that insight into who you are in other ways? So if it means, like, instead of putting a cover letter, send a video message on LinkedIn to them talking about why you're going to be the best fit as a candidate. Right. Like, I think that might be a great way to stand out.

Yeah. And communication is a skill that hiring managers in sales are really looking for at the moment. And not in the sense of being able to stand on a stage and communicate eloquently, but in the sense of, you know, technology has more and more call points and more and more potential customers and you need to be able to communicate your science in a way that perhaps even non academics can understand. And so if you send a video showing that you can clearly communicate and easily demonstrate your value and your unique selling point, then that's just a tick for the hiring manager, right?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's something unique and different that stands out. And I guess this kind of comes back to the fact that there's not much training around these topics when it comes to, like, if you're using these every day in your prospecting, in your actual sales process, you're probably going to be more likely to do them in the recruiting process as well. But it's, to your point, the same sort of stale, outdated tactics being Run and taught to, if they're actually being taught at all, to sales reps. And I don't know if you've noticed this, but I think one of the biggest challenges I've seen when it comes to sales reps in general is if you are coming from the lab and going into sales, your first professional experience isn't typically in sales. So it's in the lab. Right. You're a scientist first. And so your professional experience and everything that you know up to that point is like being a scientist. Whereas if you think about what people do to get into software sales, a lot of the times your first role out of school is going as an sdr. Right. So like your first professional experience is in sales, using technology to do prospecting, to be creative, to figure out how you want to get in front of people. And so you have this like process where you have the scientists that aren't really. Then when they make that transition to sales, not really taught those skills, it's not like the first thing that they're learning. So they fall back on all of these things that they know, which is, oh, I'm just going to talk science to people. And so they're not, I guess, learning all of those new skills that they need on the sales side.

Yeah. And as you know, a lot of people think the science will sell itself, but that ain't the truth. And as you mentioned, you have sales specialists that come from a PhD background, but then you also have amazing sales specialists that don't have even a BSc in biology. And the training is the same for these two people. When everyone, even if you do have two PhD sales specialists, they will have entirely different strengths and weaknesses, but the training is the same. And the training is only often conducted at the start of your hire. It doesn't continue throughout your journey in that company. And life sciences is evolving so quickly. And if your sales team are going to stay up to date with those trends and therefore be able to communicate their value proposition at that point in time, that training needs to continue. But it often doesn't. And if you're a startup, it's hard, right, because you don't have the budget, you don't have the time to do this. But it's sad to even see the large multinationals not focusing on that. And there's often cases where I speak with candidates at 200 to 300 employee companies, and I know this sounds shocking, but they don't even have a CRM. It's crazy employing. Yeah. And there's just this reluctance, reluctance to change, I think isn't there in life sciences when it comes to new technologies and automation as well in sales enablement?

Yeah. So, I mean, you mentioned, I think when we were talking in the pre show, you mentioned that there are candidates nowadays that are like looking for new roles because their company's not investing in them.

Yeah. And so I always ask, you know, at the start of my call, like, why? What is really driving you to want to look for a new role now? And people really open up. And the answer used to be salary all the time. All the time, 100% almost. Whereas now and particularly in 2024, understandably, biotech and life science companies, their main focus is just maintaining a financial Runway. And I get that. But their sales teams are frustrated because their quotas are often going up. But their training support, sales enablement is not changing. And it's really demotivating when you have these crazy targets on your shoulders, but you don't have the support from your manager or from technology to help you to achieve said targets. You don't have the mentorship either. So, yeah, the answer of tech stack and training is becoming more and more apparent. And also when I am recruiting, often one of the first questions or only questions that people ask me is, what does the training look like? When is it? Is it continuous? And yeah, in the past year I've just noticed such a visible uptick in that question, which is interesting.

Why do we think. Why do you think that is?

Obviously, with AI, there's been like a lot of advancements in automation and not having to spend hours and hours on tasks that just don't need to be conducted and don't need to waste a sales specialist time. Because as you know, our roles encapsulate so many different facets of things and it's already hard enough as it is without you having to update an Excel spreadsheet or a CRM that can honestly take like 20 hours at times. And you know, we've all been a sales rep where we've not been updating our CRM and then we're like, shiz, it's Sunday. And I really need to do that before my boss shouts at me when all of these things can be automated and so easily and there are affordable technologies as well that can help you to do this. So I think maybe the adoption and people just becoming aware that there is more help out there. But also I just think because more and more salespeople are struggling to hit quota, perhaps them now thinking about, okay, what can I do to actually achieve My targets is coming up in their brains a little bit more.

That's interesting. I wonder. I think that's probably a piece of the economic environment, which is we kind of came from, I don't know, the last 10 years. It's like, you know, I don't want to call it free money, but you know, it was a lot, it was a lot less emphasis on needing to have like a roi, a business case, and like to be able to prove like your investment, like to focus people were just like bros at all costs. We're just going to spend money, hire people, throw money at the problem. And that even happened on the, you know, the buying side of the biotech pharma, where they would just be like, oh, we're just going to test all of these different things. We're going to try all this stuff out. Oh, we have a really cool idea, let's just test it. Whereas now there's like all of these filters on how they're making purchasing decisions. It's like, well, if it's not like really close to the clinic or it's not like going into the clinic, we're not going to spend money on it. Right. So you have to like work with a much smaller budget earlier in R and D. And so you're seeing all of these sorts of trends happening. And so I wonder, I actually wonder if all of those sales reps that you were mentioning, their sales skills were aligned to this sort of free money environment where people have money, they just want to buy cool stuff. And so you could walk into any, you know, lab, tell them how cool your tech was, and then they would buy it because they're able to. It's like if you could just solve one little problem, give them a little extra data here or there that might be interesting, they'd buy it. Whereas now I think it's probably a lot harder. You have to like prove. They have to do like deeper discovery to find out, is this really a problem that's worth solving? Is it a high priority on their list? Then you have to tie your solution to it. Then you have to show the ROI of what they're going to get for actually using your solution. And so I think that's just like a new set of skills that people aren't or haven't been taught because that's not really how sales training has been done historically or even what has led to success in the last like 10 years.

Yeah, I completely agree wholeheartedly and I really feel deeply for sales and business development folks who join the industry in 2021, 2022. Because as you mentioned, they probably thought, gosh, why doesn't everyone do this? Great, this is a walk in the park. Everyone I reach out to wants to buy my 1.2 million instrument. But that isn't the case anymore. And I've even seen it reflected in recruitment agencies as well. And even in my own, I've had to completely change my tactics and how I go about prospecting and defining my product market fit and really niching down. And that's what biotechs are having to do as well. But yes, I really feel for these people because I think perhaps training therefore wasn't as much of a focus in those years because it didn't need to be. They just followed the process that they'd been using for years that had been working and now it's biting us on the butt.

Yeah, well, I think the other, I think another interesting angle of this too is Gen Z wants more like professional development than I think previous generations. But then I think the issue is you've got your older generation are more of the leadership. Right. And they were of the mindset of I'm going to go figure this shit out and I'm just going to go brute force it and it's kind of like I'm going to own this myself and go do it. Whereas I think now there's more expectations from the younger generation that says I want you to show me, show me the way, teach me, I want to learn. They're hungry for like personal development. But you have this like mismatch of leadership, doesn't know how to provide that for what people want. And so if people feel like they're not getting it, they're not seeing the career progression, they're not learning something new every day, they're more likely to then want to look for that company that's going to provide it to them.

Yeah. And do you know what I have noticed which completely verifies your point is that Generation Z sales specialists and BGMs, their average tenure and the length that they're staying at companies is scarily short. They're becoming really demotivated like you said. I think Gen Zs are more motivated by missions and feeling part of something and feeling like they're really being not only professionally developed, but personally developed. And this generational gap is just growing and growing and growing and gosh knows where we start with that. But yeah, it's scary to see that this has actually been reflected in average tenure.

Yeah, that doesn't really surprise me. I guess. And so it's like, how do you, if you're one of the, if you're, you want that, I guess from a job you have to be very clear of the things that you're looking for. When you're going to search for those companies that have like training programs, skill development, career paths. I remember when we were hiring at Synthego, everybody in the job interview was always like, what's the career path look like? All those things. And so we had to, we learned the hard way. Our first kind of batch of newer sales reps that we had brought in, we had a hired churn. And so we realized we needed to actually like show direct career progression and career paths. And so we built out plans specifically around that to show that career progression that we were investing in them. We had different programs that we would put on the team. We call them committees. Right. So they could be a part of like a mini group on the team responsible for something just outside of the work. People loved that. We had like a party planning committee. Right. So every month they do a little game and so we'd have a, you know, group that's dedicated to stuff like that. We had one that was around teaching the rest of the team like more technical, scientific topics. Right. So you could have these sorts of different committees give people ownership of them and it's in addition to obviously their work but it's something that's fulfilling outside of your day to day activities.

Yeah, 100%. And because they're more technologically minded Gen Zs, I guess a lot of them are probably frustrated when they walk into their first day and it's like here's a two hour Zoom call which you're having with 83 others about Sandler sales and here's an Excel spreadsheet that the whole team shares and then they have friends that are working in SaaS sales with all this sexy snazzy tech and all of these benefits, like no wonder that they're moving. And then biotech and life sciences doesn't have the salary perhaps to at least incentivize them to want to stay. So unless you're incredibly scientifically minded and, and passionate about driving healthcare forward, I think it's tough.

Yeah, I agree 100 with that. Yeah. So, so what's the, what's the solution here? Right. How do we, how do we help give. Give some of these sales leaders some tips, some advice on, on fixing the problem.

That is like a hard deep question that needs about three hours. But I think this sounds so simple. But just Listening, being open to change, that's where it starts. Because I think it's hard though, right, if you're coming from such a different generation that as the Gen Z's I really feel for as well, they've been through a lot, they've been through the pandemic during their academic experiences, it's been a lot and hence I think that's why a lot of them are driven by a bigger purpose and a lot of them are realizing that if this is somewhere that I'm potentially spending 8 to 10 of, you know, 12 hours a day, if you're working in a biotech startup, I want to be in on this mission. So I think just the openness and willingness to listen and change and accept that things are different is a starting point. But I do not know, I am not sure. Joining succession.

Sure. But yeah, I mean to kind of add to your point there, it's understanding what the people want, right? Is understanding what reps, what the reps are, what they want and what they need. It's they need to be constantly developed, they need to be improving their skills. Right. I think you mentioned this a couple times. So one size fits all training and I think this, I have a whole theory on why I think this doesn't work. Right. But when you run just these training sessions teaching everybody the same topic, you have a wide range of skills and experience levels in the room. So if you're teaching the 15 year veteran around how to format questions and how to ask discovery questions, they're probably going to take a nap because they've seen this all before and they don't need to, they don't want to be there. So the board, whereas somebody new into sales might love that and they might need that sort of training but then you could flip it and say hey, that person who's been in the industry for 20 years probably doesn't know how to put together a prospecting sequence, doesn't know how to set up any sort of automations, doesn't know like what's working for prospecting, doesn't know all these tips that they could use on LinkedIn. It's like they might need that sort of training whereas like the younger rep who maybe wasn't SDR in their time, they might know all those things so they might be more well versed there. And so you have to, I think we have to rethink how we train people and we need to train them around like the specific skills that they need to improve. Not always, but trying to like say oh we need to teach the team about prospecting because you have such a wide range of skills, so you need to be more personalized in that approach. And I think that's going to come across in the fulfillment that people have when they're working for a company, knowing that you're investing in their personal development them personally, not just like, you know, standard sales training that you do, you know, once or twice a year.

Yeah, and I think so. For example, in my last recruitment agency, there was something they did that I really enjoyed and this could even be done in, in life sciences. So we had like training weeks and each session would be run by someone who held that strength. So, for example, at the time, I would lead the personal branding one. Someone else might lead the cold calling training and just accepting that everyone has their thing that makes them special and you should be able to learn from that person rather than just like having an external trainer come in and be like, here's how you use. Sell the training. Because everyone knows how to do that. There's lots of YouTube videos. So just, yeah, remembering that people have their selling points and learning from those around you. And I think it's getting harder with remote working as well. Right. Because you're not sat always in an office and being able to learn from people. You're often just in your home office, like, what do I do now that can be hard?

Well, I totally agree, but that is a good segue. So you said your specialty was around personal branding, and I know that's something we wanted to touch on a little bit. You've done, I think, an incredible job building up your personal brand. I'm sure it's led to most of the business you have today. Like, how would you, what would you say to somebody right now who's thinking, should I get into, like, should I be building my personal brand? And then like, how would I go about doing it?

Yeah. So it's scary, right? It's scary putting your thoughts out there. It's scary showing up every day and you often, you know, because there's a lot of lurkers on LinkedIn just knowing that there's people out there that are viewing your content and perhaps not commenting and having their own thoughts is scary. But you need to just get over that and accept that the benefits majorly outweigh the scariness. And so just as an example, I'm spending all of this money and time going to the bio conference and I will probably only meet a couple of people that I've actually planned on. However, last week, I think I had about 71,000 impressions and if I look at my followers, the vast majority are in my niche that I am trying to sell into. And I've purposefully deleted those that aren't relevant. And so there is no other way in hell that I would be able to reach 71,000 people within a week if it weren't for LinkedIn. And it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to have five biopharma CEOs popping up in your LinkedIn inbox every day like, Amber, I want to retain you, give me my bank. Give you, give me your bank details. But what it does mean is that natural conversations are generated and it prevents that icky, outbound kind of, I have a thing, you have a gap. Can we chat? And it's just felt way more natural for me. I am not the first person to admit that I'm not a huge extrovert. I don't love cold calling. I mean, who does? But it's just not something that feels particularly natural to me. But what does is sharing my stories and sharing my thoughts and engaging with people who are have similar feelings and then kind of working from there and generating referrals through that. And I think just the law of familiarity as well, like popping up on LinkedIn every day, every week and your ideal customer profiles potentially seeing that. Because when I think back to when I managed a nine person team in a recruitment agency, there was one week where I was helping everyone to write their outbound messaging sequences because I'm also kind of big into cold emails and making them fun and, you know, brief and just interesting. But somehow, some way, my responses were always way higher. And the only thing I can attest that to is the law of familiarity and these people thinking, oh, I've seen her name somewhere. And then when I jumped on the business development calls, I'll always ask, you know, what incentivized you to want to chat today? And often the answer is, oh, I've seen you on LinkedIn and I just kind of wanted to chat and see what you're all about and what you can potentially help us with. So if that's not an incentive, I don't know what is.

I agree 100% with all of that. I think you might get pushback from people though that say, how is it related to me? I sell, you know, reagents or I sell an instrument, right? It's like, you know, I'm not trying to sell to salespeople or I'm not trying to sell marketing. Like how does it help me as a sales rep, you know, do I really want to build my brand around, you know, whatever this product or service that I'm selling?

Yeah. And, you know, my ICP is not salespeople. My ICP is CEOs of life sciences businesses. So my content generally is geared around what roles I'm working on. So they know the kinds of positions that I help with, how to improve the hiring issues that they're having. So things like reducing resume bias and increasing diversity and improving their time to hire, but then also sharing stories and what I'm hearing from candidates in the space that engages CEOs in life sciences. So it doesn't always need to be you talking about the benefits of reagents. But look at, you know, like Jeff Beeson, for example. He's done an amazing job and I know that he's garnered leads for his life sciences roles through just sharing his stories in biotech, sharing what he's learning at conferences. And again, that doesn't necessarily mean that he's going to have his icps jumping into his inbox, but what it will do is initiate just more natural conversations and open that door.

So, yeah, yeah, no, I, I agree. I like, I like that reasoning a lot. Where it's, I think also too is you don't always. There's a mindset around I need to be selling my product. Like the purpose of Me posting on LinkedIn is in order to sell. And I think that is the mindset that you kind of have to get around because if you look at a lot of the content, a lot of reps post. The main things I see are one, we've got a promo that we're running. Right. It's like two, here are the, like, here's all about this new product or feature that we're releasing. Or three, is a picture of them at a booth. I feel like those are like the three posts that every sales rep in life sciences posts. But what you don't get where I think there's a really interesting, you don't get a lot of this, I should say where's a really interesting opportunity is to post like your thoughts around, like industry news, information that's coming out. You see a lot of people just reposting information or just posting links to articles. But I think the real value comes in your interpretation of them and how they can be applied to your customer base because you talk to hundreds of customers all the time that are dealing with certain problems. And so you have an interesting angle or interesting set of beliefs around like you know, the problem space that you help solve. And so I think if you talk about things from that perspective, is it a really interesting opportunity there for salespeople to take advantage of?

Yeah. Sharing your opinions on news is such a good one. I don't know if you follow. You probably do Ben in the CGT space that he does a great job at that and he even shares short snippet video clips and I just think that's such a great idea. And he adds his own spin on things because like you said, sharing and reposting a news article that already exists on Genome web, for example, that doesn't tell anyone anything.

It also doesn't tell anything about you personally. Right. Part of building your personal brand is being personable. Right. And telling stories about yourself. This is something I need to get better at. I'm pretty bad at this. Like I need to tell more stories about myself because that's stuff that people relate to. And so it's one thing to share an article, but it's another thing to share like your experience related to that article.

Yeah, but it's hard, isn't it? And it's tough to strike the right balance. I've certainly focused far too much on personal content in the past. And then I've also had times where I focus far too much on recruitment. And finding that unique kind of blend is difficult. And it's scary to share stories and put them out there. And when you see 14,000 impressions it's like, ah, that's terrifying. But if I think about the last three leads I've had that have landed in retainers, one of them came from me talking about how I went from working in Subway to owning a life sciences recruitment agency. And that was from a vice president of R and D, a proteomics company. And then the other two were also personal stories. They weren't from my how I or how to posts. It wasn't those. Because that isn't what generally people resonate with.

Yeah, yeah, see, I know I gotta do better at that. I'm always posting like, hey, like do this, do that. Here's a tip, here's a trick versus you know, actually the story behind it. So I know I need to get better there.

Yeah. But again, it's hard to sometimes. How many stories does each person have that you can somehow relate to your work? It is difficult. And I do think the how to's and how wise are also important to show that you're, you know, in an educational way. But it's also important to share a bit more about who you are, because then it will resonate with the right types of customers that suit your background and your thoughts on things as well.

I read somewhere, I was listening to it on a podcast somewhere where they said, you know, if you had like 10 posts over the course of two weeks, you want to have like, you know, three or four stories in there. And you want to have like three or four, like educational type of posts, like where you're teaching something or giving somebody some, some new information. And then you have like one or two where you're actually like pitching your product, service, whatever it is. Right. So you have like a, a range of different things that you're posting around.

Yeah. And even side note, when I'm doing outbound sequencing, I typically try now to stray away from emails and I take it over to LinkedIn because my response rates, whether or not I'm getting more yeses, I'm not sure I'd need to look into the data, but when I'm sending an email, I'm just a mysterious email signature and nothing else. Yeah, I'm just Amber from Moxie. Whereas when I'm reaching out on LinkedIn, I'm Amber who has a, you know, videos of me, articles that I've written in podcasts that I've been on, a bio of exactly what I do, my thoughts, my opinions, who I am. And like I said, whilst that doesn't necessarily relate in more business, it definitely does in response rates and referrals. So that's something to think about as well.

Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, one of the things that you can do as you build up a following of your target customers, you can even just go into your, like LinkedIn sales navigator, say, like, who's following me? Get a list of those people and then, you know, filter for, you know, your ideal customers and reach out to them. So it's like it, by building up a following, you kind of get access to these people and then they're also familiar with you, so they're more likely to respond in general. Right. Even if it's just asking for a referral to somebody else, they're more likely to do it because you've given them something of value.

Yeah. And it's just such a competitive advantage, I think, particularly in life sciences, because I think the statistic is only 2% of people actually post on LinkedIn. And in life sciences, I bet it's like 0.000002. So the opportunity to stand out is it just. Yeah, it's super high.

Yeah, 100%. I agree. Well, this has been a pleasure. We are definitely a little bit over from our normal time, but kind of got carried away with a lot of this stuff. This was great. Appreciate all your insights. But one final question for you. If there was one thing that sales reps should stop doing when it comes to either looking for a job or, you know, trying to make a move, what is something that they should do or not do?

I should say stop writing their resumes to read, like a job description. Write about your achievements, not about what you did day to day, if that makes sense.

Oh, interesting. That's a really good tip. So focus on the outcomes that you achieved, not the actions that you took.

Absolutely. And quantify them where possible.

And quantify them where possible. Especially in sales, because everything is numbers driven, so.

I know. And honestly, the amount of VPs, of sales resumes that I see that have not a single number on it is nuts.

Yeah. What you do when you're at that company. Why grew sales.

Yeah. No, honestly, that's a lot.

You know, like, it was a good amount. Right.

Yeah. And this seems like such a simple tip, and I. I sound so dumb sharing it sometimes, but then you see the resumes from my eyes and you realize that Honestly, only about 15% of sales resumes have quantifiable outcomes within them. Yeah.

Another great way to stand out. So it's great. Well, thank you, Amber. Really appreciate it. It's been great having you on the podcast. We'll talk soon.

Having me, Harrison. Appreciate Sam.