[Sales] The differences in selling products, services, software, and instruments with Malek Haddad

I think the easier you can make whatever vertical you're in, the easier you can make the sales process for the customer, the better. So for them to hop On a call, 30 minutes, you understand their pain points, and you can directly translate that to your solution and what value your solution can bring to them. You can do that quickly, efficiently, and you can talk their language. The trust is immediately built with the customer, and that doesn't matter what vertical you're in.

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 shelf. Hey, welcome to another episode of the Sales DNA podcast. We have Malik Haddad on the show today, and we have both worked with Malik. I worked with Malik at Syntago. Nick currently works with Malik at definigine, and so he's a good friend of ours. And so we'll get into some really interesting topics here today. But, Nick, what stood out most to you?

Yeah, I'm not going to say anything nice about Manic at this point, because the first thing he says in this episode is he throws me under the bus for some dodgy expenses. So I'm going to leave that one for everyone to listen to. You can say some nice stuff about it.

Yeah. All right, well, this episode, for those of you here and listening, is all about the differences between selling products, services, software, and instruments. Malik, I think, is uniquely qualified to talk about these things, as he has done all of them at different companies. Uh, and so all of them in the Life Science space as well. So it should be a really good tactical episode. Um, and with that, what are we going to do, Nick?

Dive right in.

All right. Hey, Malik, welcome to the podcast. We're pumped to have you here.

Really excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Yeah. So it's obviously good to see you as we all go back both into our past and current roles that we're all in. So this will be a fun conversation, I think.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. I have some pretty funny stories with all of you guys.

Well, I think. I think that's how we're going to kick it off. So give us a crazy or funny story that's happened too.

Then we decide whether we.

That probably includes one of us in it.

Yeah. Well, since I've been in Europe for the past couple years, and I used to cover Europe even when I was living in San Francisco under you, Harrison at Synthego, there is one story that comes to mind that is. That is pretty hilarious. So, you know, as salespeople, we always get questioned about our expenses, and it's a very normal thing in our industry. But this one in particular is quite. Is quite funny. So when I was living in San Francisco, I used to remotely cover Western Europe, which included Amsterdam and the Netherlands, and they actually have quite a large cancer institute there. So I think this was in 2020, right before. Or maybe 2019, actually, right before the COVID lockdown, Nick and I actually gave a seminar at the Netherlands Cancer Institute. And usually after seminars, you know, there's a lot of stress and planning that goes into them. So after, we wanted to just grab a quick beer after dinner, and we just ventured into some random cafe we thought it was called, and you know, we had a couple beers, had had a good time. Nick being himself might have had a quick little boogie, because I remember they had music on, nothing too crazy. And then we ended up going back home, and when I uploaded the expense receipts, it actually showed up as Club Smokey. And our. And our boss at the time, Kai Vilkins, usually he was okay with everything, but I remember getting a call from him and he goes, weren't you in Amsterdam last week? And I go, yeah, what's wrong? He goes, well, I'm seeing €50 here at Club Smokey. You know, I think legally I'm just. I'm just required to ask, you know, you know, Amsterdam plus Club Smokey. Putting those two things at the same expense receipt might be a little suspicious, but, you know, I had to explain it to him. It was a bit embarrassing but quite funny at the same time. You remember this, Nick?

I do remember, and I. It's not the first, it's not the last time something like this happened, and I experienced it either. So you all know Rachel, Brenda. Rachel. She was in a call where they decided to teach everyone expensive. And they said, do you mind if we just use one of your receipts, expenses, Rachel, as an example. And it was after a few of us had been in Nashville.

I do remember this.

And it came up on the screen in a team meeting of like, 30 people with just, like, several receipts on the Nudies. And for anyone who knows now, I do now, Moody's is nothing. Like, it's not a strip club. It's nothing. It's just a bar called Nudies. The main thing I remember, I have something. They had lots of, like, coins glued to the bar. But, yeah, anyway, it's called Nudies, but all over our adventures, one of the whole sales thing was this. This panel, which is quite amazing. But, yeah, so it's not the last time it happened to me, and hopefully still not the last.

Yeah. Can confirm no illegal activity happened at Club Smokey. All right, just. Just to be clear, for the.

For the podcast, this reminds me of a place in. I think it's Palo Alto or Redwood City, where it's called the Office. It's a bar. So basically you can be like, oh, where are you going? I'm going to the Office. And it's. It's bar. It's good. Names for bars are. Look good on expense receipts.

Yeah.

You know, one called Still Working. I was. I was still working.

There you go. Yeah. Awesome. Well, with that in mind, we're going to pivot hard into a completely different topic, which is something that I think you are uniquely qualified to talk about. And not many people have sort of your background as far as different types of companies in the life sciences that you've worked for. So I think one of the main things we want to talk about is the difference between selling, like, products. So it's like reagents, surfaces, software, and instruments. I don't think many people have the ability to say they've sold all of those different things in the life sciences. And so, yeah, I think that would be a fun topic to go into, but maybe just to kind of give everybody context that's listening, give them a little background into just maybe the different roles that you had and the companies. And I think that would be a good framing for this conversation.

Yeah, absolutely. That's a great question. So a bit on my background here. So after my studies at UC San Diego, I worked quite a bit at Takeda and in stem cell lab doing pancreatic cell differentiation. So I feel like I have this bit of a weird, unique skill set. Right. Coming straight out of the lab and then going straight into biotech cells, where, again, I worked with you, Harrison, first at Synthego for about two, three years, essentially working in genetic engineering, both products, so reagents and services, selling cell lines. And then in 2020, so about, like I said, close to three years later, after I moved to Europe, I moved to a life sciences software company called Benchling, which did big data management essentially for companies as small as 5, 6 people. Little startups all around the world, all the way up to your large pharmas like your Sanofis and things of the world. Right. Did that for a few years. Ended up working for another colleague of ours, George ISO at, at Nuclara, and they were working with digital microfluidics, which is essentially, if you know, kind of like an Amazon, was it called a Kindle? Essentially the, the way that droplets are the screen, the pixels are moved around on that screen. They were using that technology to essentially manipulate reagents and to produce proteins. So that was a bit of a mix of instrument as well as the reagents needed to make said proteins. And then just to kind of close the loop here, I did that for about a year and a half and then to close the loop here, I'm now at Definogen as a director of business development for working under Nick and back into the services and products. A little bit of genetic engineering, but more in the, the liver cell kind of world, I guess you would say. I worked both in the US and, and in Western Europe, mostly based out of London in the uk. And there's a lot of differences, right, both geographically, but also regarding with regards to the actual services and the products that you're offering.

So if you look across those things, you did give us some of the differences because like you talk about the differences in selling products, selling equipment, selling service, as Harrison said, you uniquely positioned to have experienced them all. So maybe you could break down where you see the differences and challenges.

So maybe that's a great question. So maybe one thing that's easy to answer is the commonalities I see between all of them, right, because there are quite a few. The first one, and I think we all know this as sales professionals, essentially it's value selling, right? So the one thing that does not change across all of the industries is having to prove the value and attach that to the price point at which you're selling said product, right? And to be honest, the way that you do this across all of the different verticals that I've worked in, it doesn't really change, right? You start with your discovery calls, you have to qualify, set, deal, and as qualified professionals, you never want to sell a product to somebody where you're not actually bringing them a change or a value right into their workflows. So that's, that's very common, right? Across all of the different. The verticals. But the way you do that is completely different, right. I think the most obvious example would actually be within the instrument world, right? So for one, the sales cycles are much longer, much, much longer. So I would start conversations, let's say January. When did I start there? January of 2023, I believe. And we were seeing purchase orders come in for that conversation about nine to 12 months later, which is a lot longer than if you're talking about services or reagents, for example. Because reagents can be an overnight thing, you know what I mean? Because people need that now. And the way that you have to value pitch for instruments, for example, is largely through demonstrations of some form. And this is some. This is something that's also quite common, right. Across services or across software as well. For example, people love their trials, they want to actually get hands on. But the difference with instruments is it's a big physical thing and sometimes it's really difficult to get said instrument to the client site in order to trial it. And it costs a lot of money and it takes a lot of infrastructure, to be completely honest with you. So we had to get creative at Nuclear with how we did that, you know, with limited resources as a startup. And we ended up doing just virtual demos, right? So being that people would send us their projects, we would run a kind of pseudo service in house onset instrument and produce the data. And really the reason why we did that, coming back to the value discussion that I was just speaking about, is because at the end of the day, people just want data. And that's exactly the same across all of the different parallel, the different verticals.

Interesting. So it's like the output that people want is the data, whether they're using it as a product or service, an instrument or even more. Software could be analyzing the data, right? But this data that you're getting and your output is data of some variety, right?

Exactly. And that's the idea at the end of the day, scientists. And even if you talk director level or, or above that, at the end of the day, a lot of the time it's not about how you got to that point, it's just the data that does come out, right? I've said whether it's the instrument, the service or the reagent or whatever that you're providing, right? And people just want to get hands on with that a lot of the time. So. So that would be one major difference, I would say with the instrument sales is the actual process of getting them. That data can be Very complicated.

Did you find that because the instrument sales is much. Well, from what you're saying as well, you always have to provide the value. But if you're going to invest a bit more time and a bit more effort or provide a piece of equipment, then you've got to really know that these people are involved. So did you find that your discovery goals and that you really had to qualify much harder for equipment as well?

Absolutely, Absolutely. That's a great point, Nick. When it came to qualifying the different projects and deals that came through the pipeline before we would even entertain, you know, some form of virtual demo, and we even did some on site kind of beta testing sort of demos, you really had to make sure that they had skin in the game and the way that we did that, because, you know, how many times do you, even as a consumer, how many times do you get free trials for this? X, Y, Z. And then if it's free, you're like, I'll try it. You know, eventually you don't really have skin in the game and then therefore nobody's really getting value out of the demo. Right? So actually we would make people pay for demos upfront just because that proves. And they have to have the, you know, financial means to do it. And that actually essentially puts the ball in their court saying, hey, if you truly have this pain point, and we can solve said pain point, let's work on this together, let's be collaborative, right? And that's how we would qualify these things, essentially. One, do they have the budget? Do they have the need? And is the timing correct? And of course, the scientific fit. Right. And I know, Harrison, this is probably speaking to the band's qualification criteria that we all know, but it's especially true in instrument sales and demoing.

I agree, but even in, like, products. For any reps listening out there, I've always advised my reps and myself never give a freebie because it goes in the freezer. And no, there's no emphasis on using it, whether that's timelines now or in 12 months time, like you, you can. You can help support, but instead of giving stuff away, because if they really value it, they'll. They'll put some skin in the game.

Right? What's interesting, I mean, I imagine I could be wrong here, but even at benchling, I'm sure you had some version of like paid pilots or paid proof of concepts, right? Maybe with some of the larger pharma where you had to bring in like your implementation team to be like, building out a bunch of stuff Like, I'm sure there's like. Yeah, it's almost like creating friction in the sales process can. Well, it's a, it's a great qualifier to figure out what opportunities are real. I think sometimes we end up in this situation where we're trying to make deals go as smoothly as possible as quickly as possible. And so when we do that, we skip steps in the sales process where we're working deals that aren't actually qualified because we get happy years and we're like, oh yeah, they want to buy this thing, they love it. Right. And in reality they haven't like put the skin in the game or they don't have the actual budget or the willpower to actually push this thing through to get the deal done.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's great that you bring up benchling because I actually really enjoyed our demoing process there. And no, I guess you'd say sales cycle was ever the same. So I worked in the mid market section, I guess you'd say, of benchling, where essentially we were working with companies as small as five, 10 people, kind of all the way up to the top 20 that you'd find in pharma. So kind of the thousands to maybe close to 10,000 people. Right. And you could imagine the way that you might demo to a small startup is going to be completely different to a larger mid market startup where you might have several hundred people on the platform. And at least at benchling, the demoing was a very collaborative process. And actually through the demoing process, you were almost pseudo qualifying your deals because the more involved they were with sending over their data configuration for sending over the different kind of cell types and the different reagents and things that they wanted to track in the lab, if they, the more they sent and the more that they interacted with our demo team, the better the demo process would be. Because eventually while it's highly configurable and it's super user friendly, you still have to configure it even for a demo. And no one demo was ever the same. Right. And essentially what would happen is they'd send us this, we'd go back for a couple weeks, we'd make a benchling environment for them and then we'd actually run through a demo either on a group by group basis within the larger pharmas, or we would even do interactive ones where we go on site and we say, hey, here's a day in the life. If you were to use benchling and actually use, have people kind of follow along. So I did it. I did several on sites like that around Oxford and Cambridge mainly, and a bit in London as well. But I think the key here is, to Nick's point, having skin in the game. And that's a commonality across all of them. Right. So the more time that they put into helping us build said demo, the more resources they dedicated to it. Honestly, it was very rare. Even at Nuclara in the instrument world, the groups that were the most engaged and sent us the most proteins, for example, sent us the most DNA sequences, for example, paid for our on site visits. Those pretty much close at a rate of about 80 to 90%. Because as you go through this process, you one, show that, hey, we're here for you, and if this is not going to be a good fit, at the end of the day, we will tell you that's good sales. Right. But two, it proves that essentially they want to put in that time in order to improve their processes. And if you kind of put those two things together, usually it works out.

So we're talking about kind of like adding friction when it comes to software and instrument sales. Do you think the same can apply for something like reagents?

I think so as well, because at Synthego there was a big kind of free trial run that we did when we first, when all of us first started working at Synthego. Right. And it worked in some instances, didn't work in a lot, I would say the close rates were much lower. Not like it's a right or wrong thing to do per se, you got to try different things. Right. But typically, again, the people who actually paid some kind of minimal amount in order to test said product, they were usually the ones to come back because they were willing to put resources into again, fixing their process. Right. So again, there's no right or wrong way to do these things. You just have to try it and see what happens. But to your point, Harrison, I think that adding that kind of adding to that friction and saying, hey, I have these reagents, I spent a grand on them, I should probably use these. Right. That actually adds the urgency, I think is kind of the key word here, the urgency in order to fix their process. Because now they've allocated the time and the resources to it. I think that's very important.

Yeah, And I think people misunderstand friction because like in the sales process, friction can be seen as bad, but I see it more like a volume dial. And depending on which part of the sales process you are in the same whether you want to reduce or increase that Friction and often at the discovery call phrase phase. Friction's good because qualifies people if they're in filters.

Not the bad, right?

Yeah, yeah, it's always out the bad. And we want to get rid of those quickly because we want to move on with people that are interested and work on that. Once you get past the point of them saying, yeah, I'm interested, I want to buy or I want to move forward, that's where you really want to reduce friction. And you want to get rid of red tape, you want to get rid of any additional documents that are actually just there for the sake of it and just really move the process through as easy as possible for a person. So if you think of it of this volume dial, when you turn it up and down for process, that's where I think we need to go with it.

Yeah. And I think it too depends on the sales process, like where you dial that up or down. Right. Like if you're talking about doing in person demos with instruments, you probably want to dial it up ahead of that, to your point, charge people to do it. It's like you're only spending that amount of time and effort on the ones that are most investing in it. Whereas if it's something like a hundred dollar reagent, you probably don't want to put too much friction on that. Right. Because you want that to be a little bit more transactional. But one thing that was actually interesting, I actually just thought about this. We did include some friction and we had, even in the free trial, we put the $19 shipping.

Right.

But what was great about that is that got us in everybody's procurement systems. So all of these like other companies that would buy this like free trial, pay like 19 in shipping, we got in all of their procurement systems later when they wanted to buy, we didn't have to go through procurement and stuff, which was quite interesting. I kind of like that approach.

Yeah, very sneaky. But I also thought now you're kind of jogging the memory there. That was very clever. But also I think we all remember how many people complained about 19. The $19 free shipping for hundreds of dollars, if not thousands of dollars worth of free agents.

Right.

But it's absolutely fine. Again, Even though it's 19 shipping, it kind of shows, hey, if they're willing to add you into procurement, that's a source of friction. Right. That means, hey, they're putting skid into the game. They want to, they want to get your stuff in.

Right.

Different ways to do it.

How do you think that applies? To services, though, because services are an interesting one because I feel like a lot of the time the customer is their own source of friction and that they don't always know what they want and they always go back and forth and they change their project and things just, you know, whatever one opportunity can, the project could change four times, you know, or more. So it's like, how do you, how do you view it?

You want to see me rocking in the corner, don't you? You're creating stress or friction with me now, talking about that in services. Sorry, go ahead.

Yeah, I was going to say service is a bit of a sticky one that I feel like when you're selling. Well, I mean, this probably applies in different ways across the verticals, but with services you're often competing against the customer themselves, right? Saying, hey, we can do it faster or more in a more economical way or something along these lines. Right. And a lot of the time the friction isn't from, you know, from the shipping costs or from the other things that we've been discussing, but it's. Now, how do I delicately tell the customer that we can do XYZ probably more efficiently than you in a more cost effective way? And that in itself creates a different kind of version of friction. Right. And I think you have to find that delicate balance. It's almost like a ballet that you start doing with the customer. Right. And there's different ways we've done that both at Synthego and again, what we're doing now at DefiniGen essentially. Right. And I think it all comes down to time to value a lot of the time. Right. And proving that, hey, we're going to go through this friction in the sales process, but the kind of pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, it's worth it, right? Because we are going to be bringing you that value and there's not ever a right way to do this as we've, as we've discovered.

Have you, have you found that there needs to be a different level of technical skill across the different products, services, reagents.

Great question. So just to clarify, technical skill in terms of biotech technical knowledge, right.

Your own understanding of the science where you either have an fas, don't have an fas, whatever it is. Have you seen differences there?

That is a great question. That's something that I think about all the time, actually. Right. I'm, I'm unsure. And the reason I say that is just because I've met reps that are highly technical, Nick, for example, highly technical and cell Line engineering, cell culture, things like automation, even things like that, right. And I think what it does is it makes your life easier because then as part of a. It makes discovery and qualification just a lot quicker, right? Because you can understand quite easily what their pain points are. You can shorten the sales cycle. And actually what I could say at benchling, it made it very. Because I came from a kind of a crispr, biochemistry, cell line engineering sort of background, right, from my time at Synthego and what I studied in the lab and whatnot. And I would say that it cut out a lot of that time. The time to demo was cut down. And to be honest, the field application scientists, slash, we called them SSCs, Scientific Solution Consultants. When you showed up with like a big page full of technical qualification data. Makes their lives a lot easier, right? And then it kind of improves essentially the demo without having to go back to the customer. And actually this is a really, a potential customer. This is a really, really good point. I think the, the easier you can make, whatever vertical you're in, the easier you can make the sales process for the customer, the better, right? So for them to hop on a call 30 minutes, you understand their pain points and you can directly translate that to your solution and what value your solution can bring to them. And you can do that quickly, efficiently, and you can talk their language. Your. The trust is immediately built with the customer and that doesn't matter what vertical you're in. But long story short, it helps. That's. That's the answer. It definitely helps.

I think one of the things that it helps. But if you see someone who's pure technical, then they'll have a great discovery call and not know where to go afterwards because they spend all of their time presenting data. So you have to be careful if you're a technical rep listing, you have to remember your jobs to sell, not to do their research for them. But definitely, like you said, Malik, use it to connect, use it to speed up the process, use it to help position your product into their process. But if you forget that your job is to get them to execute on something, you don't understand what their challenges are. That, that can be a problem, obviously, with reps that are pure technical.

Yeah, and I agree with that. Nick and I think you and I were both guilty of this in previous roles where we get so into the research that they're doing. And this is one of the awesome things about working in biotech, right, Is we love science. Maybe we just don't want to be in the lab anymore. Right. But to hear about this just brilliant research coming out of places like the Francis Crick Institute, the Broad Institute, places like this, right? It's the nerd, the kind of the excited scientist side of us comes out, right? And we just want to learn all this research. But it's very easy to get caught up into the. In the weeds. But then you forget, okay, wait, what am I trying to do here? Right. I'm actually trying to secure an order, I'm trying to place an instrument. Right. So you have to be careful with that.

I think one of the things that I've also noticed on like, the product side, if you will, or like more of the reagents, is that they get caught up around their data. And so I was talking to somebody the other day and they were saying that, like, our products are better. Like, we have better. Like, like it is better data. Like, like point for point, whatever it is, right. It's like, like we actually have a better product that will perform much better in their lab, in their hands, and we have it proven as documented. But they're like, but we're really struggling to sell this product. And the thing I keep thinking about when it comes to these products is that the cost of switching is so high in that you.

The.

Unless you're. The product is so much better that you're going to be able to get them to switch their internal protocols to get to train the new team about them, to have to qualify these new reagents into their systems. Like, unless your product has that sort of capability, it's going to be really, really hard to like, make that switch.

Particularly founders and CSOs of new companies forget to ask, does it need to be better? Are you building something better that doesn't fulfill a need? Like, you know, you can have a crappy old car and it'll get you from A to B. Yeah, Lamborghini is better. But do you need a Lamborghini to get from A to B? No, look, call him one. I don't need one.

Right.

And people forget when they're building stuff to build to the customer.

Yeah. And I think again, if we want to relate this back to the topic of the conversation, the different verticals, right? At Synthego, they had the new synthetic guide rna. No one else could do it, Right. I mean, you could do CRISPR in lots of other ways, but this way gets it to. Gets it done the next day, Right. Or something like this. Right.

Well, one of the issues even there, though, was that they don't have, like, we needed like nuclear effector. Well, not always, but like we would recommend a nuclear effector. Right. And. Or Electroperation. Not everybody had one of those in their lab at the time. Right. So it's like the best way to use this product is with stuff you don't have. So.

Right.

That it's a bad, like it's, it can be tough there.

Right. Yeah, it's essentially. This is actually a discussion Nick and I have right now with one of our products here at definition, kind of a little bit of a debate going on. But with certain products you're, you're not just selling the product, but you're kind of selling the vision of what could be. How do you sell that vision? Right. And how do you actually not make them think about today or tomorrow, but think about six to 12 months two years down the line. Right. Because you. One thing pharmas really hate is being left behind, you know, because if pharma, number one, is doing something cool and they're using, you know, a software like Benchling, that's top of the top of the line and they're starting to integrate with AI and things like this. Right. They don't want to be left behind. And as salespeople, yes, you want to make sure you're, you're selling something that actually brings value, but you're not just selling that product at that time. You're also selling again this vision of where do you want to be regarding, like a lab of the future, for example, in two years time there's always going to be that cost of switching. It's just persuading them that it's worth switching now. And this is why that can be the difficult part. And it's really having, at least in biotech, you need to have the data and then you also, in my opinion, need to have publications and you need to have, you need to have kind of that backup. Right. To prove that this is where the industry is moving. Don't get left behind. Building that urgency essentially is you need to sell that.

What you're talking about is oftentimes I think the bench scientist is in there like head down doing that experiment. They're probably not thinking 12 months into the future of like what this lab could be like. Right. And so it also depends on who you're talking to. And so I think you have to get to the right level to tell the right story to the right person to then create that sense of urgency. Like if you're trying to sell Benchling to everybody at, I don't know, like Roche or Whatever, right. Like you're not going to be able to do that by talking to every single bench scientist and trying to get them to win them over. Right. You're going to want to go as high up as you possibly can to talk about the transformation of the company, et cetera, et cetera, and the impact that it's going to have. You know, the same thing can happen in like a lab environment where you need to get up to like the head of a program or something in order to actually get stuff done to make big changes.

Yeah, and that's a great point. Right. When, when you're selling software, for example, everyone's going to interact with the software in a different way. Right. You can even use it. Let's just use expensify or expensing software, for example. I just use it to put my club Smokey receipts, you know what I mean? But my boss, Nick, he's going to use it to review and try to use it to budget for future seminars and things like that. Right. So there's different pain points. I want ease of use. Nick wants to be able to get the data really quickly. And then our CBO wants to be able to visualize and to forecast, for example. Right. Going forward. So I think that applies, right. At the software level even. Right. The way that we sell from the bottom up, you also have to consider top down. Right. They're all going to have different pain points that you're trying to solve and you'd have to insert yourself at each end, appreciate each pain point and adjust the way you communicate with the different levels. Same thing for instruments, same thing for services. Right.

And change at all either, right?

No, that's something that never changes. It's just the way that you prove it is different.

I think what's interesting that you, that you say there too is. So there's a stat that, you know, there's basically an average of 7 people involved in every purchasing decision. Right. That's going to be give or take, depending on the cost of your product. Right. Lots of nuances behind that. Right. But. But for the sake of whatever it is, let's say 7, 78% of opportunities that reps work only have one point of contact. And so you have literally six people that are involved in a purchase that you're just not talking to. And so just simply simple stuff that we're talking about here, which is just get in contact with more people and tailor your message and your story to those individuals. Right. If you can get to that person's boss, the Manager, the manager, whatever it is like. But you need to have a story that resonates with that person. You can't go to that person, selling the data that you're showing the same scientist at the, you know, that's selling them to, you know, whatever, purchase the product one off.

And there's also a point where, especially when you're talking to larger organizations, right, they're always slower to switch because it's not even that you need buy in within the same department at different levels. You. It's almost kind of like somebody want needs to stick their neck out and say, hey, we're going to do this for our department. You should too over there in that department. We should be using the same platform right now. You also got to take this department into, into consideration, right? So I feel that, yeah, you need to be able to kind of spread that web, I suppose you would say, and really, and really spread the word about what you're trying to do across the different departments and then align them. And I'll say, actually, for my current role here in Divinogen, we're largely unknown. I would say in Europe, we're a bit better in the US but it's a lot of evangelism going on and the current opportunities that are actually progressing faster and have more traction. And Nick, correct me if I'm wrong, it's the ones where both Nick and I know people at different levels in different departments in different countries, and those are the ones that are going really quickly, right. And there's the most interest. Nick, I don't know if you look like you wanted to say something as.

Well, but it was actually along similar lines. So we even had a conversation recently and sometimes people think getting to a senior person, job done, right, if I could just get to the CEO or the cso, job's done, right. But what you don't realize is we had a call with a large, let's just say a large company and we were talking to the CSO, right? And we had a meeting with 30 other people join that call and you're thinking, right, we've got everyone in the room we need, we've got 30 people going to see us. Malik and I walk into a meeting today to see somebody else who's very senior in that company and they didn't know that meeting had happened yet. What we're doing is specifically relevant to them and that. So like, you've got 30 touch points there, including the CSO and you still didn't get everyone you need.

And on top of that we had a meeting, two meetings in the past three weeks with other departments and they still hadn't communicated, but they're all interested. Right. So you just gotta be careful with how you do that.

And they all know each other, and.

They all know each other by name.

Just keep going until you get everything you need.

I would say the piece of advice there is to all the reps listening is go look at all of your deals, look at how many people you have as point of contacts in each of those deals and increase that number. Yeah, like whatever it is, whatever that number, even if you got five people, increase it, huh?

You got 35 people. It's not enough. It's a company of 35 people. You haven't spoken to enough people.

And maybe one other piece of advice. When people hear the P word, procurement people get terrified. Right?

Make them your friend.

Make them your friend. Right? And I've heard this before but with you guys, but make them your friend. Because if they see your name coming through or if you need that purchase order and you have two days left in the quarter, it ain't the principal scientist or your director or anyone who's going to push that through. It is procurement. Right.

So.

And they're not scary. But it's not just different levels within the scientific community at that, at that, that organization. It really is, you know, the IT people, the. Even actually for instruments, this might be an insurance. Interesting comment. Even for instruments, what do they connect to? The cloud? What is the cloud connected to? The IT infrastructure. So the same conversations I'd be having about it with benching, I had to have those, for example, with Nuclar. Right. So you need to have buy in at all levels all the time across different departments. Even for small medium biotech, it's all the same, everyone. Your friend, just be a friendly guy and wear Mickey Mouse jumpers. They'll always buy for anyone listening, not watching.

I got Mickey Mouse jumper.

Yeah, we couldn't have figured that out.

Yeah.

All right, Valak, but we're running up on time here. This has been, this has been really good. Really appreciate you coming on, sharing your expertise here. Maybe we'll end with one last question. If there's one thing that you think sales reps should stop doing, what what is that?

Stop burning out. I know that. I think that's my number one thing because I think especially for newer reps, everyone always wants to do more and that's fantastic. Right? But working till 9, 10pm trying to send those emails, well, I'll tell you what, that person you're sending the email to is not going to be reading them at 9 or 10pm that evening. Right. It can wait until the next morning and if anything it will have a better open rate and you know all about open rate Terrace and when you actually send it at times that it doesn't get buried into emails. That's just an example. But just take it easy. Use. You know, technology has come a very far away nowadays. Don't feel like you're, I don't know, cheating or anything or if you want to use automation, use the tools at your disposal. Don't burn out because that is so common in sales and it's a great place to be. It's really fun. You get to talk to science. Right. You get to travel if you're into that. Just, just take it easy. Have fun, enjoy what you do. Don't burn out and make sure you take the steps to, to keep your mental health in a good spot.

How, how often do you use Pocket Nicknik to help with that?

I hope, I hope for the, for those listeners on the call, we, we have not this Nick Claire right here, but our head of research is also named Nick and we've taken all his knowledge and made a Pocket Knick Nick using our favorite platform internally, Mr. Chatgpt. But yes, I use him quite frequently and he is very good at writing summaries for me.

So yeah, to your point, use the tools that you have and actually there'll be another episode where we'll talk a little bit more about Pocket Nicknick, so jump over to that one. I think it's with Tom, so I would love to.

If you, if you want any special guests, I'm happy to talk about my experience.

We bring Pocket Knickknack onto the podcast. Yeah, yeah, actually interview Pocket nickname.

I thought about it earlier. Can we give him an avatar?

That would be so good.

I think we could because, yeah, we just have ChatGPT respond with voice. It should be fine. I think we can do that.

Or have both Nick and Pocket. Nick. Nick. And then like kind of have a panel and see and see what happens.

I like it. I like it.

The drama.

Well, we'll be on the lookout for that one. Thanks, Malik. This has been, this has been great. Good Ch. Good to see you.

Lovely seeing you both. Nick, I'll see you next week. All right. Cheers, guys.