[Sales] Start with the problem not your solution with Sylwia Mankowska

In sales, the same like you have to adapt how you communicate, how you connect, depending on a customer. So you have to be very, very flexible and very receptive to what you're seeing, what you're hearing and adapt. So I think this kind of adaptation or like this adaptability, you learn during sales, which not necessarily you have opportunities to learn and practice as a lab scientist because you need to adapt to something different. You have communicate with your like other scientists. It's very different than going being in sales and having all kind of types of people that you interact with day to day.

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 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 show.

Hey, welcome to another great episode. We've got Sylvia Mankowska on the on the show today. I've known her for a long time. We used to work in the lab together, sharing some space, growing some cells together. And she's got a really interesting journey where she started out in the lab, made a transition into the commercial world just by, as she says it, following an open door, and then has actually transitioned back out into more of a role of director of operations for Maxion Therapeutics. So really interesting to learn about her journey. What did you take from this one, Harrison?

I think she talked about a couple really cool things. Is early stage startup, how important it is to focus on the problem versus the solution. And I think that's something we can all take away in our sales process fees. I think she brought up a really great point which is how Sales is great at teaching adaptability and even shared some experiences from her time in the lab, both positive and negative when it came to working with salespeople. So I think a lot of good stuff in this episode. Great.

So what do I always say that you say that? You always ask me to say, all.

Right, let's dive in.

Let's do it. Hey, Sylvia, welcome to the show. It's good to have you here after not seeing you for a while when we used to be in the Lab. So it's good to have you.

Thanks so much, guys for having me. It's a pleasure.

Alex. Been here, right?

Well, with every podcast we ask our guests the same thing and we ask them to kick off the show with a crazy or funny story. So let's see what you got for us.

So, I mean, life in the lab is funny. Depends what you consider funny. But I guess the craziest thing that happened was during the time when I was in the sales team. So when you go and do live demos or go to conferences and try to do live demos than when always things go wrong. So one of the things where when you do double double act. So you always have someone to have a partner in crime. So when you do a demo, especially in a during the conference, you expect something to go wrong. So you have one person is showing other one is looking for the signs, accused when to distract and there was mood when you go. It was a device that had sensors going into places and obviously you have a customer coming in. Show me what this thing does. Show me how it works. I'm like, you sure? Come have a look. First thing happens, they try to put the sensor on, put it in and machine goes. And it just doesn't do what it's supposed to do as it never does flows straight into the person. So lucky it was a small sensor, didn't end up anywhere. So the second was split seconds. Your partner was like. And this thing that over there, can you have a look over there? So luckily it wasn't going into the eye, just shut off somewhere else. But you already have this broken device where you did the best not to show it to the customer. And so blowing up devices and shooting sensors, that really was entertainment for after, not during the things happening. But that's always goes wrong.

I. I've never actually. Equipment's probably the only thing I've never been involved in a commercial and I didn't realize that you get this kind of double act of always hand and distraction whilst trying to sell the equipment. We're going to be watching out for this now for people.

So if you have.

Have you been swindled in the lab, Nick?

Yeah. Outrageous. This is like, you know when magicians are not meant to reveal their secrets, how the tricks have done and you've just. You've thrown them all under the bus.

Most people just nameless are salespeople. So the secret will still be safe.

Well, I enjoyed that story. I like that. The reason I was really keen to get Zoom to get you on these though, we've known each other for a while now. And looking at where you've been and what you've done, it's quite an interesting journey from me and you in the tissue culture hood. Culture in a way, chatting and picking our music as we went through to then you feeling our fluorescence microscope at a different company when you needed one because it was a startup and all above. And then you went into the commercial side of the business and it'd be interesting to hear a little bit about that transition. Transition and why you made the choice to go from the lab into science and, and how that, how that went.

So I guess that follows my life story really. So you see a door opening somewhere in front of you and you would just wonder what's behind it. So I had before, at the beginning, I was like you, I was based, lab based. I thought that's my path. I'm going to be in a lab, do different things. Tissue culture, molecular biology, DNA synthesis, all sorts. And then this opportunity happened and, and open the door saying, hey, how about now you try to build a device that uses the science. And so you kind of combine your background, you're like putting engineering background and you know what, as a customer, you know what you need. And if someone tells you, oh, we're building this device, because obviously that was a startup, because I have a thing for startups and they say, all right, do you know, like, do you want to get involved in something, building something from scratch effectively? And we need someone who knows proteins because we know engineering, we know software development, know nothing about proteins. So I was like, why not? I always was curious, how do you get to build a device that then scientists use? So that's what gave me this very unique opportunity to see, to see behind the scenes and how things work. So that's what really drove me to it, just the curiosity of seeing how things work. So I saw how things work in the lab. But building device from scratch and building software and see how this whole thing comes to me, that drove my curiosity. So I started off as the head of product there, building the device, find applications. And once we had something that was ready to be used, I was then the frontier of launching the sales process and looking for customers, looking for the early adopters. So we, at the stage where we were at, or we got to, after two years, we got to the point of recruiting early adopters and early sales. So that's how I ended up on that site.

What did you see outside of crazy demos and sensors flying off of equipment, what sort of challenges did you see trying to get early adopters? Because it's one thing when you've got a known product that you're taking to market that people are aware of, but it's a whole other different story when you've got no data to back up anything that you say. You don't even know if the machine works. It's basically a prototype, if it even exists. How is that? What were some of the challenges you had there?

You really need to understand the problem. So you need to find out what is done that people actually need to achieve in the lab and understand that phenotype really like of people who you're going to be talking to and what is that that they need. Because everyone likes cool devices, so it's easy to show something. So people are usually curious. Everyone likes gadget, so it's easy to get people's interest to hey, I have this cool new thing. Wanna see? Easy. But to actually get across the line of would you like to buy this thing? That's a very different story. So at the beginning of what once you show something cool, people just buy especially that we were looking at them affordable tool, something that is really everyday use sort of equipment. We thought it's easy, if it's cool, people will buy it. That's not the case. So you need to really know if it's useful and really pinpoint the thing that people really struggle with in the lab and then come with the solution. So you don't come with the gadget, you come with the solution. So starting the problem and offering a solution, not a gadget, that was the main learning, I'd say from the experience.

Start with the problem, not the solution. I like that.

Yeah. Often people put out features and benefits versus like solution settings. So you turn up with a box that does x and Y and not solved a problem and not solve, make something better, worse, does whatever for the customer. It's more about here's what we have, here's our box of tricks, right. And that's where even experienced reps can go really wrong.

Exactly. So people ask so what? So like oh, it's cool, what do I do with this? And you have to have a good answer. But to have a good answer you have to before find out what is the problem that they're facing.

And I guess too how do you. How did you dig into the problem that they're facing and make sure that it was relevant to what your box could solve? Because people have a whole bunch of different problems, right. So how did you narrow down like oh, that's the one that I can solve. I'm going to help solve that one.

Yeah. Interviews. So that's, I think people do it all the time. So it's customer interviews. So we had found people who not weren't customers, they were looked through network and do research. So we quite extensively had. I mean Cambridge is quite easy in a way. So once like you know, once you in Cambridge and people move around 20 companies and they know people. So it's like two degrees of separation usually if that. So we use the network to actually get potential users and do lots of interviews before to see what people actually struggle with, how do they describe it, what kind of things they're facing. And then we found, we looked for common denominator to see what actually they have in common and we went for that first. So we kind of understood that and then tried to find people who have the same problem or might face the same problem.

So rather than turn up with the.

Equipment or turn up with what you've got, you actually went for an open conversation and an interview to, to find out what the, what your potential customers would need and what your potential customers would value. And then you re engineered your message and your approach based on the response.

Exactly. And that's exactly what we did. And then we look for places where you can find them.

Yeah. So I guess your kind of output from these interviews is you've got a list of problem statements that you can potentially solve and then you've got criteria of what a good customer might look like. But again these are just hypotheses. Right. It's like, okay, we got that from this cohort of people that we've interviewed, but now we have to go and test this even further. So now we have to go take this initial set of criteria, figure out where they are, go find them and then have meetings with them to then determine okay, were we right or wrong?

That's exactly right. That's how it was quite good. So you can see that it worked. So in go to iterations like with.

Everything like that, I think they're often that approach you've taken is an approach we should take even with existing products because often the market moves, the market changes and maybe you are trying to sell at the same time when you're a rep. But often we, what we call pitch slap. We walk in a room and we just start spouting all of our, everything we think is great about our company rather than listening and what you, you suggest what you did as of a pre product launch, you can continue to iterate and continue to do as a good rep and as a good scientist and continue to listen to those signs and, and restructure how you approach.

That's exactly that. You just got it, Nick. So you just listen. You just need to listen and listen for cues and ask lots of open questions and try not to guess what they want to say, try to lead them to actually open up. And sometimes you find things that you didn't expect, so think that you assumed. You just came up assumptions and you just need to come to conversations like that with open mind and hear what they say.

There's just.

You say that because I've heard reps multiple times recently say like I asked what's the goal for the meeting that you're about to have? And they're like, oh, I want to, you know, tell them about this product or I want to tell them about this service that we have. It's like, that's not. That shouldn't be the goal. Right. The goal should be to come in to ask the great questions with the open mind, to figure out if there's like an opportunity for you to even work with them or to potentially help them. Right. Like you have to, you have to, you don't want to assume how you're going to help somebody. You want to come in with an open mind, ask great questions to then confirm if you have a ability to help them.

That's right. So I guess you're doing a lot of interviewing with customers, don't you?

Well, we'll try to do it during the, during the sales process on our end even sometimes, sometimes I forget, like sometimes I go into a call and I'm like, you know what? It would be a great fit to like do lead gen for these people. And then, you know, sometimes I forget that, oh yeah, we gotta like, you know, not make assumptions.

Yeah, it's easy to do. Right.

Well, I, in terms of scientifically and as a wreck, one of the best examples I can think of from my own experience about making assumptions and if I'd have stuck to my assumptions and stuck to the company's assumptions, we would have missed probably the biggest market segment we had for this particular product at a time. And it was actually sensory neurons, so nociceptor type neuron. And we're like, great, they're involved in pain. We're going to go out through every pharma, we're going to send them to people for pain research. Right. Weirdly out of our eye, another market started to develop and it turns out they were really useful in sensitivity studies for cosmetic companies that they didn't have to use mice. But had we have not paid attention and listened and we had gone with our assumption, gone with it, we would have ignored those cues that we were seeing and I would have missed potentially the biggest opportunity for that product at the time. And that's why we need to listen as much as we need to pick.

Exactly right.

So then you, so you were in sales for a bit but now you've left sales. Right. You kind of moved into a different role. What prompted that?

Same. So there was a new role that was opening up and with a different startup. So like I said, I like seeing things at the very beginning and the starting line and this company was scaling up so they just closed the funding round that happened last year and they were looking for someone doing operations and never done operations before on a bigger scale than that as in the previous role a little bit when we setting up a company. But I was most on the lab side. So I was a scientist in this very early startup where we had to start things up but never actually officially operations. So I felt like the same, like how does it work? What does it come with stuff like well, we'll give it a go.

Yeah, I like your, I like the mindset you kind of have. It's like, oh, this time this seems interesting. I'm intrigued by this. I'm just going to go jump in and go and do it. I think that's, you know, something we can all admire. That's awesome.

Yeah, I think that's kind of, I think what you guys this morning, you just explore and see what happens after you make this jump. You don't know until you try.

One thing I've said to people that say to me, I'm really interested in going into sales or going into marketing but I'm a scientist and I'm worried about this because what if I make the move and I don't like it? And I've always said, well if you don't like it, go back to science, go take what your skills are and go elsewhere. And I think that's what you've shown obviously is possible. These are transferable skills. Is there anything that you learn whilst you were doing your commercial facing role does now helped you in your, your next role as director of operation?

Definitely. Because that's the main thing when you, what you do when you move from the lab, more people. So actually you have those conversation connections, you build relationships and in operations you do it the same way but on A different level, but the, the main skill is to listen and to connect with people and build the relationships. And I guess that's this thing that's really, it's very transferable. Like you said, like lots of things in commercial I across different branches like either sales or operations or finance or vd. I guess VD will be the next closest things, closest thing to sales. And then it's the communication, the building relationships, building the trust between people at different parties. In operations you deal with lots of different people and in sales the same. Like you have to adapt how you communicate, how you connect depending on a customer. So you have to be very, very flexible and very receptive to what you're seeing, what you're hearing and adapt. So I think this kind of adaptation or like this adaptability you learn during sales, which not necessarily you have opportunities to learn and practice as a lab scientist because you need to adapt to something different. You communicate with your other scientists. It's very different than going in sales and having all kind of types of people that you interact with day to day.

I agree, that's interesting. One of the things we talk about a lot is in the beginning of a conversation, one of the key things that you have to do is when you're trying to build rapport is understand the person's communication style. And I think this is something that you learn in sales because you communicate with so many different people with so many different styles and you might start the conversation and the person wants to get straight to brass tacks. There's no chit chat. Right. Like you have to adapt to that type of person differently than if you jump on a call and they're going to talk about their cats for whatever 10 minutes or talk to you about the golf round that they played that week. Right. So it's like you have to know the personality that you're dealing with and.

Like also how you also work internationally. Right. So like exactly like you said, some cultures have to have the small talk and some just skip completely and they won't take you seriously if you start the conversation. How was your weekend? Like that's a no deal already from the start, from the get go.

Yeah. Like you can't sell in the UK if you don't talk about the weather.

Exactly. So interesting to see like the process as well, like how this works and what sale or does, what makes sales or a sale successful or not. Sometimes it really boils down to small details and the relationship or like the communication you had with that person. And if you mention a cat that they are, they absolutely hate. Then he's like, oh, this is the sales rep, the cat. Like I can't trust this person. And then came over.

Yeah, I think the, the main characteristic that even if you don't realize you do it, but most salespeople that are successful in building that rapport do is they go into the conversation and they're thinking, how is the person receiving what I'm saying? How is that person wanting to be communicated with? And basically am I making them feel comfortable? Am I making this an enjoyable experience for them that they want to do and repeat? Whereas if you go in with how am I going to get my point across as brutally as possible because that's my job, then you're. You're not considering how it's received. And the good reps, good communicators, whatever role you're in, I think that's the thing they do and that's what sales really trains you.

Exactly. Because I think sales is also kind of science. So you have the experimency how this works and that and change your approach. So it's experiments all the time, but with people.

Yeah. More psychology than it is biology.

Yeah, that's true. But nevertheless very interesting. So I think that's the thing you can be, if you come with this mindset that you want to learn about the other person and then see find the solutions. Right.

That's something interesting because you mentioned this when we were chatting before the call, which is one of the things that you thought was you thought sales were going to be more about money, whereas what you realize it's more about the relationship. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Of course. So that's what I thought is about having a product and pushing it across and seeing if people can afford it, they would buy it. And it's about the transactional aspect of things.

Like if you breeder and they'll buy.

It because the data showed the specification through the price haggle the price down or like haggle price up. So the haggling process, which kind of is true at the same at some points, but it's much more about the personal touch and the communication than the product and the money. So like you don't bring the money if you don't have a connection. So you have to completely change what you. Why are you there? So if you enjoy solving problems that people have and offering solutions and learning how they do stuff and how you can help them, then you can get the sales done. Yeah, and there's a great understanding, but the money, it's the last thing you worry about, because if you do the first bit right, money will come. But that's kind of the consequence, not the goal.

Yeah, I think something he said there actually is. We all talk about connection and relationship and the kind of buzzwords that people use. But one other word you threw in there, which I think probably a better word is trust, is that when your customer has trusting you, trusting your ability to deliver, trusting your company, and the science trusting what you're saying is true. It's real data. That's when it comes. So when we say relationship rapport, it doesn't have to be that you can have a beer with them.

Right.

But it does have to be that they have crust in what you're doing. If we can have a beer together, I'm happy, Adam.

But, you know, trust and the fact that you have to understand them not just as person, but the problem. So if you don't build the credibility from the. From the start. So if you don't come, you have to come prepared. You have to know what you're talking about. It will always come across if you don't. So building the relationship is also mean the business relationship, not just a personal relationship. So that's when things go very wrong, because you can connect with someone on a personal level, but if you don't have this credibility, they don't trust what you're saying, and they don't see that you understand their problem, that you're irrelevant if you like this person, if you have to really try them as professional. So that's one of the other key things.

I think one of the things that we could recommend to any sales rep out there is like, if you could become an expert in your customer's problem, and you can be more of an expert in their problem than they are. Right. They're going to be really good at knowing what the symptoms of their problems are. Yeah. You can know it so deeply, talk about the problem, ask great questions about it. Kind of show that, you know, you know exactly what they're going through, what they're feeling. They're just going to trust you as an expert. And it's really more focused on problems than it is on, you know, your product and service. Right. They can figure out those things sheet, you know, on a data sheet or something like that. So.

And like, you only can really understand or, like, sell something or like, talk to them if you understand them, like you said, through and through. So you have to really get to the core. So that's one so they can say, say what the problem is. But if you really understand the topic, you can find the pain points and the pain point is what you're looking for. And if you don't understand what the problem is on a deep level and if you're in scientific sales then you have to really know the field and the common problems. And sometimes you're talking to a customer who was new, right. So you don't always talk to the senior leadership. Sometimes you talk to people who have problems and they don't know how to solve them. But if you know how to solve the problem, and sometimes it is with your what you're selling, sometimes you can refer them to something similar or like where you don't have the solution. So let's say you sell a microscope and they don't need a pet, right. Or like liquor's handler and you're offering, I don't know, handheld pipettes or something different. So you don't have the solution. But if you can say like right, I can't help you go there, this will solve your problem still that's you and a point because you solved the problem, you showed you understand. And then once they need something that use help or they have problem that they need to address the they'll come.

To you or they'll recommend other people to you that they know, right?

Exactly, exactly. So that's like because you solve the problem, you might then solve somebody else's problem. So you're becoming the go to person because you know the answers. And that's when they buy stuff because they need things to help them do what they need to do.

But I think that also ties neatly into some of the experiences you had in the lab dealing with good salespeople, right? Like what? Talking a little bit about them with us.

Exactly. So I think one of the known names named there but there were people exactly that they would offer solutions. They would have the right level of keep them in touch. If you see what I mean. You don't be prompt. Sometimes you're reminded like oh, I'm there, remember my existence but not following, oh, I'm here on your doorstep every day checking, checking in like no, he's like in the right, right level of engagement. And he would look for connect let's say of the same application as we had before. Do something new coming and say right, you use this thing, it is better, cheaper or can help in that aspect. And was always ready to make suggestions and he was very proactive and he really went an extra mile to understand what you're doing. So the guy I would always like, then recommend to people say, right, if he looking for something, ask, let's say X. Right. And he will, he will help you. And I did the cracky dance. And the bad one was when we actually met someone at the conference and they were the material. Some of the things you can hear, they don't really understand the problem. When you ask about this specific product, it's like, right, yeah, yeah, I've noticed. And the big rep, they have lots of products and you ask them about something very simple. Oh yeah. Because you have materials over there that represents your product. Right? Like no, you just looks just pretty, doesn't it? And it's like, right. They can be completely. I don't want to give a specific example because that might completely reveal the person. Next time you got their conference, you will see them.

Everyone knows that one was me and the bad one was Harrison. So it's fine.

But you can see like if someone doesn't really understand the field they're working in, how can you ask them a question and how can you trust that? All right, I have this new product. How about you check it out? Or they're offering a service like maybe the team behind them is great. So the people who the behind the scenes on other, let's say the CRO and the sales rep is trying to sell you services, the team behind might be fantastic, they might do a great good job. But then if the person on the front line doesn't understand what is being done, you will never go past this person because that was your first impression. So first impressions are also key there. And if you in sales, you can really mess up big, big time for your whole team. So that was like other thing that I found that when you're in sales, it's not the pressure of you selling. I mean there's obviously from like you have your goals, you have your things set, you need to meet your financial goals. But it's a whole team of people who work on something. Let's say device we had that we had was a whole team dedicated to building something and validating, putting lots of hours into it. And then you have to go and represent them and do justice to them. So it's more the pressure of not disappoint your team rather than not selling for the sales kind of sake. So that's kind of cause people forget like it's not about just the selling person, but representing a bigger effort in whatever you're selling.

Really nice. Yeah. So I think we're Actually coming right up on time here now that I'm looking at it. But yeah, really appreciate all the insights that you shared. I think maybe one thing that would be helpful to leave everybody with is maybe if there's, if there's one thing that you would tell sales reps to stop doing, what might that be?

To stop doing? We can't tell them to stop cold calling because that's one of the strategies that work sometimes.

Yeah, you got to pick up the phone. Yeah, I know.

But that's, that's something on the customer and like, I really hate that. But sometimes it works, I guess coming unprepared. So you have to, I think coming prepared for the meetings and like do your homework before you do anything. So that's something that annoys customers if you have a rep call, didn't do homework.

Yeah, that's a really good one. It's like, it's a big red flag when you jump on a call and it's very clear that you know nothing about our company, you know nothing about me, nothing about our business. You just literally showed up either. Hopefully you're going prepared in person especially, but preparing all the calls. But yeah, like it's so easy to just pop up a zoom and you know, jump on a call without really preparing ahead of time and especially in back to back calls. And so it's to a point you have to be prepared because just it's going to be a terrible first impression.

If you're not and it devalues their time. And while we all go very little of. Right. It shows them that you don't value their time. You've dragged them onto a call and you've done no prep work. It's a really bad, bad way of show.

Exactly.

Right. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Sylvia. I really appreciate you coming on the show and it's been a great episode.

It's been great to be here and thank you for discussion. Was really fun. Sam.