[Webinar] Landing your ideal sales role - Part 3 of 3

All right, welcome to the third webinar in our three part webinar series. Today we're going to be talking all about how to land your ideal sales role. And so if you missed the first two sessions, don't worry, we're going to put all of these things together for you in a single place where you can have access to all of the different recordings and we'll answer a bunch of different FAQs for everybody as well. Couple housekeeping items we are now recording and if you do have questions along the way, throw them into the chat and we'll answer them as we go and over time to answer them at the end. And so without further ado, I will pass it on over to Anise who will take us through the content, introduce himself and we'll go from there for sure.

So, hi everyone, my name is Anise, I'm the founder of Science to Sales. We're a one to one coaching agency platform to help scientists get into scientific sales and business development roles. I'm wondering, Harrison and Nick, do you also want to introduce yourselves?

Yeah, I suppose. I guess I forgot that we did it the last three times, Might as well do it again. Yeah, I'm Harrison, co founder of Succession. We're skill development platform for life science sales reps. So all of the sales skills that you need to be successful in the sales role, you know, platform helps set that up for you.

Hey, I'm Nick Claire, scientist by training for about 16 years, then moved into the commercial world. And for Harrison to be a co founder there has to be at least two and I'm the other one. So that's nice and simple.

Wonderful, thank you both. So a couple of additional housekeeping things to add on to what Harrison said. I'm just dropping some links into the chat. So the first one is that as you might have seen on LinkedIn, this is a pretty dense slide deck with the intention that this is something you can take and use on your career transition journey when you are job hunting, when you are looking into making the jump from scientist to sales or BD rep. So if we don't have time to get through all the slides, which we might not, you can wait until early February when we're going to build that landing page and fill out the FAQs for all the webinars or if you sign up to the Science to Sales newsletter, which is the first link, you will get access to this deck right after this webinar. So early access. The other thing, if you're looking for coaching to make this transition, if you're ready to go. The second link is my calendar. You can find 30 minutes, no obligation chat and we can see if we're a good fit to work together. The last one, Succession, which is the number one life science sales training platform. If you are in the life sciences as a sales rep and looking to build, build your network, I highly suggest you sign up and send Harrison and nick a DM on LinkedIn or something like that. Wonderful. Okay, let's get into this. So as mentioned, this is a pretty dense slide deck and the idea is that it is a high, let's call it a high level, step by step strategy for getting that scientific sales or business development role. Right. So first we're going to look at what is your ideal role. What is something that's a good fit for your experience as well as your interests. Then we're going into the external makeover. So this is everything from resume, cover letter as well as your LinkedIn. The last thing is network, network and network because this is the absolute key to getting this role. If you're looking at doing any career transition, not just this one, you have to network. Last part is actually applying to roles which we don't cover explicitly but that's part of, of the process. Pretty straightforward. The last two, which I'm pretty proud of and that we're going to, or at least the sixth one, which is something we'll dive into is how to differentiate. There's a couple of key secret sauce things that we're going to get into today. Number five, continuous improvement upskill before you get the role. So BD and Salesforces, we'll go into some resources and then finally some high level intro on interview and negotiation. So honestly, all of these things could be its own presentation and are and are their own book. So this will be a very, very, let's call it a fire hose of information. But hopefully once you have time to review this on your own, you have time to kind of absorb it, let's say. Okay, so at a high level, how do you figure out what is a good sales or BD role for you? So the first thing you need to do is self reflect and these are the three questions you should be asking yourself. The first is what is your technical expertise? So what is your scientific expertise? What sort of projects did you work on? And this really fits into services. So would you be a good fit for CRO or CDMO roles? CRO stands for contract research organization, CDMO stands for contract development and manufacturing organization. And so they offer Contract research, so essentially outsourced research or manufacturing. And this is for clinical trial as well as commercial drugs. Second question, what products and instruments are you familiar with? And this relates to pretty, pretty obviously instrumentation as well as consumables, right? If you have experience with, you know, say Western blot or PCR instrumentation, that you'd probably be good at selling that equipment or at least you would be a good fit for those same thing with larger pieces of equipment. If you have experience, from my experience, I'm from a chemistry background. So if you have experience with NMR or gas chromatography or LC ms, liquid chromatography, mass spectrometry, those sorts of big capital equipment purchases, you would also be a good fit to sell. And the last one is probably the most important, honestly, is what excites you. Because when you're getting into sales and bd, and we covered this in previous webinars, your self belief and your self confidence is a huge, huge, huge part of your success. And you need to work for a company and sell a product or service that you genuinely believe in and that genuinely excites you. So think about what you've done so far in your academic or scientific careers if you're already in industry, and how does that line up with potential roles in the field? Okay, quick breakdown, right. Of the two main areas. So you have products on one side, you have services on the other side, right? So products is kind of where everyone and anyone can land up. So the main reason is this is a fixed good, this is tangible, this is something you can point to and be like, there's the thing, there's the thing I'm selling, here's how you use it. And this can range from pretty simple transactional sales, like if you're selling columns or resins or cell culture media, like that sort of thing, from an account manager standpoint all the way to big complex instrumentation. So we're talking like aseptic filling, robots, bioreactors, even whole factories at some levels. So there's really something for everyone here. On the other side, you have services, right? And so this is R and D and manufacturing. And this gets complicated because this is an intangible good, right? This is a service. You are offering some sort of imaginary future outcome for your clients. And so there's a lot of pieces that have to go into putting that together, right? Especially if you're dealing with regulatory and with gmp, then it gets super complicated. And so these deals are typically big, like we're talking multimillion dollar and not only that, but it takes years to fully deliver. Right. Some of these clinical trials take years to complete and they need clinical trial material the whole time. So you're going to have to be manufacturing doses the whole time. So for these sorts of roles, if it's your first sales or BD role, typically you need a PhD or industry experience that lines up directly with that specific service role. Okay, so job titles, they are somewhat arbitrary. There are some, there are some delineations, right? Like you know, a VP of sales or director of Sales, they're going to have certain responsibilities that you would assume. But for the most part these aren't really standardized. So I would recommend you read the JD Right, Read the job description, obviously. On the other hand, there are some example job titles that I would suggest. If you are looking at intro in, let's say entry level or associate level sales or BD roles, these are the sorts of job titles you should look for. So inside sales, Business development representative or business development associate, Account manager, Business development manager. The last two are somewhat sales. So like technical sales specialist, you don't carry a quota, but you will be working hand in hand with a sales rep or an account manager to help sell and troubleshoot technical questions for the client. And then the field application scientist, which I think Nick and Harrison, they had a recent podcast in the sales DNA podcast which I suggest you check out and they interview somebody that talks about how you work really well with your field application scientist. This is not sales yet, but it's client facing. So if you're looking to make the transition softly, you don't want to jump directly into sales or BD targeting. Sales specialist or field application scientist role is also a good way to kind of ease your way into it. Yes. And then as Harrison mentioned, things get kind of complicated because business development could be services, could be products, could be strategic. Like you have a bunch of accounts or you have one big account that's like a Pfizer or Merck size. And then you see business development thrown around when it comes to pharma. So we're talking licensing in technologies or licensing out clinical programs. And we're not going to get into that here, but that's also another entire can of worms when it comes to business development within the sciences. Okay, are we doing for time? Okay, so how to find roles, this is pretty straightforward in a way. So LinkedIn, go on LinkedIn, type in tech area and then sales. So an example would be cell therapy and sales, you're using Boolean logic, Cell therapy and business development this will bring up a bunch of potential options. Play around with the filters. So I'll jump ahead here. This is what LinkedIn jobs look like. Go to all filters and you can play around with the seniority, you can play around with the industry because even though you're putting in, you know, a specific tech area, you sometimes get like stray jobs out of the, out of the woodwork that aren't specifically within the life sciences or the hard sciences. Yeah.

One thing I think that is helpful there too is if you go back, I think you have industry as a drop down. So you can, if you do industry and you do biotechnology research, it's another great way to filter as well.

For sure. Yeah. So that's, that's one of those filters you want to, you certainly want to look into. Make friends with recruiters, right? Like hit them up on LinkedIn, Connect and DM them. Their entire job is to fill roles. And so having a network of recruiters that know about you and are aware of your skills and expertise and your desire for specific roles is really handy. One thing I do real quick on.

The recruiter front, because we actually just recorded a podcast, it's not live yet, but one of the things that they were talking about was this, this sort of trend that's saying like, hey, don't work with recruiters. Don't be transparent about what you want when you're talking to recruiters. And I think where that is coming from is this thinking that the recruiter is like the hiring manager. They're not like looking out for your best interest. And so one thing just to note is if you work with a recruiter that's working for a recruiting agency, they are basically your advocate. And so the more information you can give them and the more transparent you can be with them, the better they're going to be at finding the right company for you and giving you what you deserve when you go into that company. I think where some people get confused around this is confusing a recruiter with a hiring manager because they're not the same thing. So if you go and find a recruiting agency, highly recommend going and finding them and talking to them and making friends and giving as much info as you can because it'll be, it'll be massively beneficial for you. And don't be ashamed to like, tell them how much you want to make because they're going to be able to then find the jobs that will help pay you that much money.

Yes.

Yeah, I was going to say something similar and something else that came out on that podcast was about the LinkedIn. It's great for finding roles. It's maybe not always the best place to apply if you want to hit that easy apply button because it's kind of just you, you're in the masses.

There's.

It's really hard to stand out. Whereas you've probably got an algorithm actually checking what you do. Whereas if you take that job well and hand it to a recruiter, they're going to go off. They're. They're essentially your salesperson to sell you and they'll take that information and go try to sell you and at the highest value because they get a percentage of what you sign for.

So, Nick, quick question there. Would you suggest that people like, if they find a job on LinkedIn, do they go and try and find that same role on the company website or on another job board to apply to as opposed to applying straight through LinkedIn?

So not even that my. And this is obviously down to preference, but I would, the two things I would do is I would find, try and find out based on the role, where it is, who the hiring manager is and reach out to them directly myself through LinkedIn, through email. Basically. If you can get in touch with them and get them to take a meeting straight away, that's like your first interview because that's what you've got to do as a job, as a rep. So if you show proactiveness, it's going to be a good sign. The other one is if you're not sure how to do that or you're new and lacking the skills and confidence, then get a recruiter to do that on your behalf.

So, yeah, you jumped ahead, Nick. We are going to get into the networking part of it. And yeah, part of that is if there is. Yeah, no, that's okay. That's okay. Like the enthusiasm. So if there is a hiring manager, for sure that's someone you're going to have to reach out to. And we're going to get to that. We're going to get to the recruiting, the networking part today in the slide deck. And then last quick thing, so there are some companies, I've noticed, at least with Danaher, which is, you might not have heard of Danaher, but you know, their parent or their, their child companies, I guess you'd call it, like Sativa, Paul, Cepheid, Waters, there's a bunch of them. Right. So with this Danaher specifically, I haven't really seen them posting on LinkedIn very often and they have hundreds and hundreds of job openings because of how many companies they own. So this is one company as an example that I would suggest, if you're keen about them, go look on the Danaher job board. There may be others out there, but this is the one that comes to mind. Okay, we did that. Okay. This was a question that came up I think in another webinar and I guess we're gonna try and address it here. But there was this question of what is inside versus outside sales. So it's not really clear cut, let's say. So it kind of comes down to the wording. So you're not going to see a role. You might see a role saying like inside sales representative, but you're probably not going to see a role that says outside sales representative. Right. So inside sales sometimes can refer to entry level roles and sometimes there's a lot of sometimes here can refer to just lead gen roles. So your entire job is just prospecting, is just calling people, emailing people, trying to bring in leads, qualify them, and then pass them off to somebody else that does the rest of the process. So an account executive or an account manager, et cetera. However, you can also do the entire sales cycle, right? So this comes down to read the jd, figure out what they actually want. There's also less travel involved, hence the word inside. Right. You're inside a building, probably might be home, might be an office. And because of this, typically you have a much larger territory. Like you might have the entire coast or an entire country to cover because you're working on the inside. Typically on the other hand, outside sales, you are going to be responsible for the entire sales cycle. Typically you'd see this as like an account executive or an account manager. And because you're covering the entire process and there is the word outside, it will probably be a smaller territory. You might be expected to travel more and have face to face meetings. You're not prospecting face to face. That would be a waste of your time. But you are expected to book meetings in person and go and go on site and figure things out that way. Cool. Okay. Okay. So I'm gonna actually change things up here a bit because the next few slides are resume and cover letter. But to be honest, everyone and their dog has an opinion on how to do this. And I think there's a lot more value here if we jump right into the other parts of the of the process, which might look a little bit different if you've only been applying to technical roles. So please excuse the jumping ahead. This is something I would suggest you. Oh, I Got ahead of myself. This was something. I'd suggest you get the slide deck and look it over yourself. But here's we're going to jump into LinkedIn profile. So you probably found out about this webinar on LinkedIn. You probably follow myself, Harrison or Nick, and you'll notice that we're pretty active on the platform and there is tremendous value to. To not only having an optimized profile, but also posting, which we'll get into. So ultimately, why should you optimize your profile, right? This is basically your advertisement. This is advertising you. And so it's a way to convey your value, especially when you're networking. It's to show that you're a real person. Which sounds kind of funny, but, like, you know, especially some of these people you're trying to network with, they might get dozens and dozens of these requests, right? And some of them might not be real people. Some of them might be trying to sell them something. So you want to cut through the noise and make it very clear you exist. As well as the third bullet point, you have a very clear career mission statement, right? So it should be very easy for someone to look at your profile and very quickly understand, oh, this person isn't trying to sell me a software or a widget. They're looking for a role or they're, you know, in an industry that is compatible to mine. Like, it would be good for them to be in my network. That also relates to the fourth bullet point. It provides context when you have an optimized profile, provides context as to why you're reaching out, why they should connect and chat with you. And the last thing, it humanizes you, right? It gives a glimpse into your personality, depending on how often you post and how you have it set up, as well as your motivation. So really, what drives you? What makes you get up in the morning? What really? Yeah. What motivates you when it comes to your career, your professional career? So there's a few parts. First one is your headshot. So have one, right? Have a picture. This is important. Clean, solid background. Make sure you smile. And this is, you know, this is up to opinion, right? I know some people don't do this, but this is how I've. This is how I do my profile. On the left is my actual passport photo. As you can see, it's quite old because I have hair. And the one on the right is my current profile picture. And this one I got free at a conference. So, you know, take that as it may, but it's really easy for you to do your own photo. If you don't want to go into a photo studio, buy a ring light on Amazon. They're like what, 10, 20 bucks? Have a friend, family member, partner, kind of hold it up with a phone and then take a picture. Phones these days are pretty high quality, so it's not really a big issue to get a nice professional photo. Okay, Headline. So this is, other than your picture. This is probably the first thing people see of you, that is of your personality and of your specific profile. So who's reading this? They probably don't know who you are. They probably saw your, your tag with your headline and your picture come up as a comment on a post or as a post you made. Right? And the thing is, they're going to judge this within a split second. They're busy, they're scrolling through LinkedIn, they're procrastinating like they're on their phone or something. They're gonna have, you know, a fraction of a second to look at it and judge whether or not I want to click through and actually get in touch with this person. So within like six to eight words, you, you need to spark curiosity for them to actually click into your profile. Right. And so I'm showing you mine, which is like somewhat related to what you want to do, but I have mine set up in the same format and I think it works pretty well. So in the beginning you want to have a career mission statement. Never lead with your job title. Right. Because as we've discussed previously, job titles are not standardized. They can be misleading. Just because you have job title X at company Y doesn't mean it's the same as in company Z or company G or company H. Like it's, it's all over the place. So be super specific with those first. I guess in this case it's like seven to eight letters describing, let's say, who you are, what you do, or what you're seeking. So for me, I help scientists get into sales and business development. Right. And on the next slide you'll actually see, like, I'll just jump ahead, actually. So on the bottom is the full headline. On the top is what you see, right. So it's cut off. It's only those first few words. So I'm getting, I'm trying to convey as much value as I can in those first few words by basically providing this like high level overview as to what I do. And then after that you can include your job title, which is what I did. And then after that you can include a description of what your role is or searchable keywords. So if you have specific technical expertise, be it pcr, ngs, cell culture, whatever, you can include those as keywords because then if someone's searching as, let's say, recruiters, searching for people with that specific technical skill, it'll come up. And lastly, emojis are a nice touch. Kind of add some personality, add some color. Okay. Okay, Banner. This is the top, right? This is behind your profile picture. And there's two key things you want to do here. You want to show why you're awesome. So you want some high level, like super cool career accomplishments. And the last bullet point you want is what you're seeking. What is your next role?

Right.

What is it that I want to do with this profile? What is it I want to convey? So I think, yeah, okay, you can let your creativity go here, right. You can kind of play around with it. I'm not really graphically. What's the term? I'm not really graphically inclined. So mine's pretty basic. But if you want, you can kind of go crazy here. But I recommend solid background color because your profile pictures on the left have your graphics on the left. And then three bullet points max. First two career accomplishments quantified ideally, and then bullet three is what you're looking for. So an example I made up. Right. So the first two bullet points is kind of your experience, what you've done. I hope this isn't too dated. Do we know who this is? This is. This is the Green Goblin from the first Spider Man. Okay. Don't worry about it. Okay, so the first two bullet points are the high level. Yeah, yeah. Steve Bushemia. No, it's not.

No, it's not. It's actually. So we'll default.

There we go. We'll. Yeah, yeah. Okay.

But this photo looks like Bushemi, though, which is funny.

Yeah, that's.

I'm too young to realize who this is.

It doesn't matter. So the first two bullet points are your career experience. Right? So in this case, this is a scientist entrepreneur with a bunch of years of experience, and he founded and scaled a multibillion dollar enterprise. This is from Spiderman, by the way. And the last one is saying exactly what this person's seeking. And so because they have entrepreneurial experience previously, they're saying seeking new roles in scientific sales and bd. So for your third bullet point, right. If you don't have any sales or BD experience, which is potentially the situation you're in, if you're here, you could say something like seeking opportunities to apply my technical knowledge to scientific sales or BD rules. And you can get even more specific here. You could say like, you know, wanting to apply my NGS PCR expertise to sales and business development if you're being super, super targeted with your, with your job search. Okay, this is all my opinion. Right. So I'm curious, Harrison and Nick, what do you think?

Yeah, I mean I think having a, I think if you have a background like this, it's going to help you stand out drastically. So if I'm looking through, you know, a list of people that I might want to hire and I go to their LinkedIn page and I see something like this, it's going to be, this is a much easier for me to read because I'm probably looking for dozens of different people at a given moment. And so having, having something really quick and bite sized that gets to the point is really important. Especially like, I think you're gonna talk about this later. And he's just like focusing on like what differentiates you. It's like what makes you specific and like interesting is gonna be better than talking about like surface level things.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think don't put stuff on there like, I'm organized, I'm hardworking, I'm a team player, but I can work on my own, all that sort of stuff. We have a phrase sort of in sales, when you're sending an email to get a customer's response, those are what you call table stakes. Everyone can say them, everyone can do them. Right. They're not differentiating you. So it should be things that you're differentiating yourself from the crowd to get attention from the people looking for the roles.

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So what, what Harrison and Nick mentioned in terms of like. So first off, yeah, differentiating yourself, a big part of that is going to be in your approach. So that's going to be your networking as well as your potential cold caller and prospecting individuals to really get yourself truly show that you're committed to the Transition, that's something that'll come up later. The other part is the soft skills, as Nick mentioned, and that's in the resume section we skipped, which you can look at the slide deck after and review. But this is not. You don't list out soft skills. Never list out soft skills. You can list out hard skills, right. If they're very specific to the role. But the soft skills you always want to demonstrate as part of your accomplishments. Right. If you're a team player, like Nick said, then show it. Mention an accomplishment you have where you worked on a project and it succeeded.

Right.

Are you going to problem solving? Okay. Include a bullet point in your resume that talks about how you had some catastrophic problem that you ended up fixing. Right. Something like that. To kind of show those soft skills.

Do you mention about how your, your image can be a video as you.

Go forward, or do they still have that? I thought they removed that as a feature. They do. Okay. No, Nick, please, please enlighten us.

Well, I've still seen it pop up on people's accounts when you go to them, but unless it's been removed recently, if they still have it, it's a cool feature. So where your image is, when someone lands on your page, it can.

Your headshot.

Your headshot?

Yeah.

Where your headshot is the. As someone lands on your page, it can become a, a video clip. And you can use this to get effects. If they go there and they scroll across you, then you sudden go, hi, I'm Nick. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to exploring new roles with my technical ability. You know, you can give that pitch and it's just a bit non personable and also once again will make you stand out. And, and those are the kind of tools and skills you need in the role as well.

Yeah. Okay, that's good to know. Yeah. If that's still available. Having videos to kind of show your personality like that is, is really key to standing out. Okay, this one's a quick slide, but basically you've done the heavy lifting with your resume revamp ideally. So all you have to do for your experiences section on LinkedIn is basically take as Patrick here is showing. Just take your professional experiences from your resume and then push it towards your length and just copy paste. That's all you really have to do here because before you've done this, you've gone through and you've revamped your, you've revamped your, your resume. Okay, about section. So you, if you know how, if you know how LinkedIn works, the about section is actually above the experiences section. But probably this will be the last thing someone reads, right? They're going to first see your banner, your photo, your headline. Then they're going to scroll down probably to your experience because that's the most applicable and direct. And then they're going to kind of come up to your about section. So this is the last area to sell yourself and it's really about personality and context. So in a few paragraphs we want to convey, you know, who you are, your career goals and aspirations, then ultimately why you have these career goals and aspirations. Right. I would suggest first person, I would suggest semi professional, but like casual tone. Like you don't want to come off as corporate speaking. You don't want to come off in the third person. This is where you kind of talk about yourself and really what drives you and what wakes you and what motivates you. And last bullet point is crucial. Like you really need to clear why, especially if you're making this career shift, you have to be very, very specific on why you're making this jump. Because the easy path for you is to just continue being a scientist. You need to make it very clear. This is the reason why I want to get into sales and business development. Quick note on structure. I'd suggest starting at the end, so have a hook that kind of in a sentence summarizes what you're looking for, what your current situation is. And then go to the beginning. So then talk about your. What inspired you to become a scientist in the first place, what drove you to go to grad school or get a postdoc or whatever, and then provide kind of the steps in that journey that led you to. Okay, you know what? Actually I want to do sales and business development. This is what's really driving me forward. So it almost reads like a story. It kind of follows the hero's journey in a way. And then last one, last quick points. Use I speak in the first person. It's a lot more humanizing. And the last part is if you're kind of stumped on where to get inspiration from this, these are some questions you can ask yourself. So really, who are you? Big open ended question. But really think about it like who are you as a person, especially in a professional setting? How did you get here? What led you? What are the steps that led you to get to this point? And then what motivates you? Like what are, what gets you up in the morning? Why are you doing the things you do? And that kind of leads to the last one. Why are you seeking the things you seek? Why are you wanting to get into sales and business development? And last thing about LinkedIn, really quick, make sure your profile is publicly viewable. This is super important. So that your profile is searchable and that people, even if they're casually scrolling LinkedIn, they'll be able to get a glimpse of who you are. Right. And this is something that a lot of us overlook, especially if we set up LinkedIn years ago, you know, as part of like a class project or just getting into the job hunt. So make sure that you've gone through and you've set this up. So it's pretty straightforward. You go to your me, go to settings and privacy, you go to visibility. There's a whole bunch of options, but the first two, I think are. The first two are the most important. So profile viewing options. This shows if someone's searching, if you view someone's profile, these are the ways that you'll come up. Right? So either full thing, just a really short sort of specific, but still generic profile, and then just nothing like completely private. Make sure that you are fully visible. And the last one is what happens if someone comes across your profile and they're not connected with you. Right. There's a whole bar on the right side that has a bunch of settings go through. And again, I would suggest be as visible as possible. It'll make you much easier for people to find you. Okay, last thing, open to work. Right? And honestly, everyone has an opinion about this. Some people say don't have it, some people say, do have it. My advice, which you can take or you can leave, it's up to you, is if you are out of a job, you're looking for a job, have makes it easier for people that are recruiting and people that are hiring. Like Harrison mentioned, he's going to be scrolling through dozens and dozens of profiles looking for people to hire or sifting through applications. If you're really clear about your intentions, it just makes it easier for him and people like him.

So I have maybe a controversial opinion on this, which is.

Oh, I love.

Even if you're not, even if you're not looking, have it open. Oh, you never know what someone's coming to you with. If you're, if you are genuinely open to a perfect offer for some reason. Because, and I won't, I'm a hiring manager. I would not mind if my team are seen to be open because to me, that shows that they're aspirational and I just need to keep them engaged.

I would say Though there's two. That is a hot take. But there's two very hot take.

Oh, my God.

There's two ways to do this. One is open to work, meaning you have the banner on your image.

Oh, no, no, that.

Yeah. Not that you meant to open to work on your profile, which means that you can be seen by recruiters. That I agree. Yeah, that I agree with.

Don't be.

Put your open to work banner on your image and while you have a job. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay, so maybe I can I mix the two things. Open to work banner if you're actually actively looking and you don't mind everybody knowing you're looking. But there's the.

The secret.

Open to work where recruiters and hiring managers can find you. That one never turn off.

Yeah, I would agree with that.

Right. Yeah. So this one is specifically the banner. Right? This one. So yeah. What. What Nick said. That is not controversial. Right? Like the hidden. The hidden part where all the recruiters are going to see. Have it open. You know, you never know what's going to come across your desk. But the public, like on your profile, the whole green, you know, swirl, whatever that says open to work. That's, you know, that's up to opinion. I'd suggest having it. Some people say don't, but it's really up to you and the situation you're in.

I just nearly got everyone fired.

Yeah, it just nearly. Well, I guess it's my fault because this is not a very clear.

No, no, it's probably me. At this time of night, there's still three. My three daughters running around the house as well. So maybe I was a slightly distracted Adam.

Adam has a hot take, though. Do you see that, Nick?

Where's that? Let me see.

What is it Adam said? I've heard of companies actively monitoring employees. LinkedIn's and questions them if they ever update it during their employment. What do you think about that, Nick? Don't work.

Exactly that. Never work for that company. Never work for that company and block every single one of their employees. Right, okay.

Yeah. Easy.

Find a better easy.

Life's too short.

Life's too short to be working for a really, really bad company.

I. I think it depends on your situation. Right. That's a really easy answer we all gave. If you're comfortable and you've not got bills to pay, fine, go do it. But I would say if you think your company is monitoring you in that way, then yeah, they're not. They're not. They've not got your best interest at heart. Don't work for them.

Yeah, that's a. I think.

Yeah, yeah. So if you're in a position like Nick said, if you're in a position, quit and find something else. But if you're not and you need a job, then maybe you should start, you know, spending some evenings and weekends doing the steps on the slide deck to find, to find your next role. Okay. All right. This is my favorite section of this entire presentation. So networking, right?

You could really test, you could really test that company and just stick your open to work banner on and see what they do there. Sorry, I interrupted.

Carry on, Nick. Nick is a chaotic evil this morning, it seems, or this afternoon. Okay, so, okay, networking. So for a career transition, I'm just going to read this, this part of the slide because it's so important. You should never apply to a roll call, right? You should never just send your resume and hope for the best. You need to have a man or woman or whoever on the inside that knows who you are at the very least or at the best case is actively championing. Championing.

Wow.

Championing you on the inside or is providing a referral, right? So you need to be, you need to be networking. Thank you, Nick. English is sometimes hard for me. Okay, so in terms of how we start, right, At a very high level, right, we want to build on a target list of companies. So remember slide three, way in the back where we talked about, you know, where's your technical expertise, what instruments do you have familiarity with and what excites you from that? Build a list, right? I Suggest starting at 5. Rank them in terms of priority. First priority is going to be companies with open roles you want, and it's a company you want to work at. Priority two is somewhere you would want to work, but there's no open roles. Priority three is just open roles. But ad companies like, you know, Raid B grade C like you, you wouldn't prefer to work for them. But if the opportunities, opportunities available, you would after that go through and find five people, each company that have the same job title you're you're gunning for as well as one, seniority up the seniority up accounts for the potential future managers and then send connection requests, get in touch with them. And the idea here is that you're going to have informational interviews with these people. If there's a role open, you're going to get some insider info. If there isn't a role open, you've now made a connection that can potentially remind you, like, hey, look, there's a, there's a role open that I think you'd be a good fit for. Right. We don't get into like networking conversation strategy here, but this is at a high level what you would do to start as per the order of this slide deck, make sure your LinkedIn is optimized and open before you start networking because this makes it crystal clear what you're looking for. It's more likely people will accept your connection request. It's also more likely that people will actively reach out to you for networking opportunities. Okay, this is, this is one of the secret sauce things. So you might be thinking, wow, this is getting to be a lot of people, right? 25, 30, 40 people that I have to keep track of. How am I to do this? I hate Excel. I want another way of doing this. Luckily for you, there's something called CRMs or customer relationship management software. And this is actually something you'll use in your role as a sales rep or as a business development rep. And these are not some like, you know, you've heard of probably Salesforce. And like those things are just tens of thousands of dollars. You don't need that. There are free ones that you can use and you can set up to help track your job search. So what I'd suggest, go download HubSpot, Go well download it's a software as a service. Go register for HubSpot, get a free account. I'm not sponsored. They're not paying me anything. And then use that to CRM as your tracking software for your networking and your job hunt. So companies and contacts did the same. Now any networking conversations and notes you have, put them under contacts as notes. Your deals are now your job applications and your sales pipeline you can rename to the steps in your job hunt.

Right.

And now you can use the tasks as follow up reminders as part of your job hunt process.

Wanted to say something, Harrison is this is absolutely genius. I've never thought about this, but it's absolutely. Because now when you actually interview with somebody, like you can be like, I use the CRM in order to book meetings or in order to like get your attention. I use this to track what accounts I'm going after for what I want job. Like this is just like, yeah, this is really, really smart and I never thought about this before. So.

Yeah, yeah, I agree.

Can anyone do this, this finger snap thing? Like I've never got it but like some. Yeah. Anyway, sorry, Nick.

Well, comparison is just evidence. No one can do it and look cool. So what I'd is going to say is that this is great. HubSpot, the free version is more than enough for this. You were just throwing out a few phrases like rename your pipeline and stuff. People on the call may not know what they are, which is fine. I don't think we need to go into that here. But what I'd say is HubSpot is also one of the best tools for free videos and training in their platform. You go in there and there's loads of videos on how to do it, what it all means. There's loads of YouTube videos like thousands upon thousands of people telling you what all this stuff means. So it's going to be a great resource for you to get educated about CRMs as well as start using them.

Yeah, so this is one of those secret sauce things that we said we'd cover in this webinar. And there's more, there's, there's more. There's a fun one coming up that I'm very excited about just talking about CRMs.

There are two main ones that most companies use and one of those is HubSpot. So if you learn this and show your employer you've got it, you've got like 50 of the people you'll talk to, I would say.

Yeah. The other one, Salesforce, which can be amazing or can be a pile of hot garbage, just depends on how you set it up. But we won't get into that here. Yeah. Okay, so this is another. This is something that's also important but also neglected because the stats show and I don't know where they get these stats, but I've heard it enough times so I assume it's true. But 1% of people on LinkedIn post regularly. 1%, right. So it's very easy for you to differentiate yourself if you post regularly. This is a way to show off your expertise, show you know your stuff, you're actively building out your network. And the biggest thing is that you remind people that you exist. Because here's the thing, those people that you chatted with, those people that you networked with, they're not thinking about you in their day to day. They like, for the most part, they're not thinking about you. Right. So if a role comes up, right, there's a chance they might remember you, but there's a chance they don't. So if you post or you comment or you just interact with LinkedIn and they see your name come up, they'll be like, oh, wait, I remember this guy Dal. I chat up with them, they seem like a good fit for this role. Let me send them a message.

Right?

So that's another thing that's important about, about posting regularly. Okay, okay. But what do I post? There's a bunch of things you could do, right? We're all science, most of us, I think all of us here are scientists, right? So we have certain technical areas or literature areas that we are interested in or we have a unique perspective on. You can post those papers and provide a opinion or a summary of them. Right. If you follow the news in the biotech, pharma, life sciences, whatever industry, you can post news pieces and provide your opinion on them. Right. Or a summary of those news pieces. The third one's especially important as part of the job hunt. If there's like a desired company, let's say you're. You're targeting. I know, let's say you're targeting PCR companies, right? You could make a post that reviews the PCR landscape. You could do a post that features, you know, here's one company in the PCR landscape, here's their instrumentation, here's how it compares to the competitors. Like, there's a whole bunch of different things you could do here. And the last one is more of the personality building part of it. The brand, like, let's call brand building. Part of it is you share your journey, right? You share some snippets about your professional experience. What motivates you, what are some of the things you learned, right. This is another thing that kind of differentiates you from the crowd. Again, as, as Harrison pointed out in the comments, right? 1% post, 9% engage, 90%, 90% lurk in silence.

Right.

So there's a whole bunch of people that are seeing your content, but they're actively not engaging. So that kind of leads into the next thing, right? Like, oh, will people care enough? Well, we'll jump to the second one first. You never know until you try, right? So even if you post something and like, no one interacts with it, right. If we look at Harrison's ratio here, there's still a chance there's a bunch of people that saw it. Right. Worst thing that happens, no one reads it, which is highly unlikely. The LinkedIn algorithm is primed to increase engagement. And if it sees that you're posting for the first time, you've never posted before, it's going to be like, oh, crap, I got to make a good impression on this person. So they keep posting. So it's likely that your first few posts are going to get a lot of reach. And the first one last, you have a Unique perspective to share, no doubt. You have a unique professional history, personal history. You have things you can provide that are value added.

Okay, I can. I can talk about that real quick. Just like the process of, like, trying to start posting it is. It is daunting. I remember when we started this company, I was like, all right, I'm just going to dedicate. I'm just going to do it. I'm going to post every day and. And just see what the heck happens. It's not always, like, easy. You don't have to do it every single day. I think that's. That's a lot. I mean, I'm doing it as a business owner who is trying to build a brand for. For our company, but as a, you know, individual, you obviously don't have to do it every day. However, that being said, the consistency is what really pays off. And since I've started posting on LinkedIn, I have gotten opportunities that I never would have ever imagined prior. People reach out to you. People figure out who you are. They want to talk, they want to figure out, they want to partner. This whole relationship with a niece would never have happened if we weren't posting on LinkedIn. So there's just, like, so many things that. There's so many good things that come from it. Literally the only consequence or, like, downside is that, like, people might give you a little crap here or there on, like, certain posts, and then in reality, they may not be the people that you really want to, you know, be around if, you know, they're not supporting what it is that you're trying to do.

So, yeah, Harrison and I were talking about this earlier, and the only people that really give us crap is our partners in life, as in our wives and stuff, when they hear us talking when we've done a post. So outside of that, the actual community, quite supportive. It's just our home life at Records.

Yeah.

I accidentally said welcome to the pod once somebody. And I just got like. She just, like, gave me crap for that. Yeah, that was funny. I said pod instead of podcast, so that, that.

Yeah, I thought I'd be slick and play our podcast in the car without telling anyone, and literally my children, oh, my God, made me turn it off and, like, ask me what I was doing with my life, basically.

Well, we need our partners to, to ego check us, so it's, It's. It's nice to have that in our lives. Yes. Yeah, I'll say that. Okay, so how are we doing on time? Okay. Continuous improvement. It's one slide right it's just find courses to learn more about sales. BD, right? LinkedIn Learning. If you have LinkedIn Premium, it's free and there is like 20, 30,000, like there's a stupid number of courses and a lot of them are. They're all professionally oriented and a lot of them are sales and BD oriented. Udemy is also another place I haven't personally looked here for a lot of these courses, but I'm sure that they are also of potentially an even higher caliber than LinkedIn learning. And then finally our friends is accession. They're a skill building platform. They have courses related to sales and bd. Once you're in the role, which can help you prep for the interviews and everything prior. So if you do want to sign up, you can use the QR code on your screen now or the link within this deck once you get it and you can sign up to succession. There's a 30 day free trial, is that right? Yes.

For the next two days there's a 30 day free trial.

Ooh, jump on it now because they are seven days.

Seven days starting February 1st.

Oh man. Oh yeah, you gotta, you gotta get on this now. Okay. Oh, this is what I wanted to get to. Okay, so you're in sales, so you're gonna be prospecting. So now it's time to do that. So that means that you are going to proactively get in touch with people by cold call or cold email, which the definition is just you're making a call, you're sending an email to someone that you don't know and they're not expecting it. Right? The two big benefits here, you're showing you can do the job before you get the job. Right? Because this is part of the role. Most likely you will have to do some prospecting. And if you're doing it now, it shows that you're willing to put yourself out there and take that risk. The other thing is that it sets you apart because really how many people are willing to do this? Right? How many people are willing to go the extra mile and call?

Yeah, I've got a story on that, that we had a guy at our last company at Santa when we were hiring and he had heard me on a different podcast and he reached out directly to me, said, I heard your podcast, you know, love the concepts around X, Y and Z. And he made it like real and personal. Like you tell, you really listen to it. He's like, hey, I'm looking for a sales role. I noticed you guys are hiring. You know, can you could you introd me to recruiter, whatever. And I instantly like sent it over to recruiter, set up an interview. We hired him like within like a week. It was, it was that easy because it's, he stood out so much and just makes it, makes it easy to, you know, it makes it easy to trust that that person's going to be good in the role when they're going above and beyond to try and get it.

So there's one thing about cold calling and doing it is you have to show value quickly. And there's a way you can do that, right?

We.

And this is going to sound like a massive pitch and it really isn't. But if you sign up for the first, there's some stuff on our platform about how you get that messaging right in a sales role. And that's the exact same framework you would use in outreach to your employer. So if it's something you intend to do, I recommend even if you take those 30 days free, use that particular module and then dip out, it would still be worth your time because it's getting that magnetic messaging, correct?

Yes. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And this is kind of a bonus to this, is that if you go, if you got ghosted, well, guess what? You're gonna be that. You're gonna be that weird ex that's gonna call and like try and get in touch with that person, right? That's the whole point in this. And so you find their phone number, business to business phone number, email, and you get in touch and you figure out what happened. It shows you're motivated and driven. And the third thing, this is the big one, is that especially at smaller companies, right? And I've seen an example of this, which will be a LinkedIn post, I think this week or next week, where they were genuinely wanting to hire for this role, but they just got busy, right? New clients came in, new whatever came in, and they just put it on the back burner. So if you proactively call ahead, you can remind them that, oh, actually, yeah, we are hiring for this role. You're a great fit. Let's chat, right? Or you can potentially save your application from the bin if it's already been scrapped and they see you're calling in to, you know, show that further enthusiasm. Okay, very quick, when to do this? You can do it during your networking. So if there's someone you really, really want to chat with but they haven't gone Back to on LinkedIn, you could cold call them or cold email them after you're done applying or after you're applied for the role, you can get in touch with the hiring manager or even before that, as Harrison mentioned with that example. Right. Reaching out and, and expressing interest and, and putting your foot forward. The other part is if you get ghosted, right, as we said, call them, put them on the spot, find out what happened. Okay, are we almost at time? So before you cold call, as Nick said, maybe take some cold call courses. Succession has those. Work with me. I can help you with this process as well. Understand what the company is, who you're speaking with, as well as the job application and then have a why statement prepped. So why you're calling as well as why you think you'd be a good fit for the role and why you'd be interested. Right. Okay, this is what I wanted to get to. So how do I find this contact information? Luckily for you, there's a whole multi billion dollar industry focused on just B2B contact data. Right. So I'm talking emails and phone numbers. One free ish example is Apollo, which is what I use. So I want to actually share my screen. I'm going to change things up a bit. Got a boot up spender. Okay, Is it sharing? Yes, it is. Oh, there we go. Can we see the presentation? Nope, Nope. Oh, this is not going as I planned. There we go. You are presenting your screen.

Maybe.

Oh come on. One second. I really wanted to, I really want to do this.

Okay, I can maybe.

There we go. Can we see that? Perfect. Okay, so this is Apollo, right? So I'm going to log in and so this is free by the way. I'm not paying for this, right? This is just the platform as is. You get a fixed number of credits. So let's say you find this company called Definogen and you're like, wow, they're really cool. I really want to work for them. And then I find this guy named Nicholas Claire on LinkedIn. I'm like, wow, I really want to talk to this guy. And you send him a connection request. He's a busy man, he's got a lot of responsibility. He's a co founder at a life sciences skill platform. So he doesn't get back to you, but you really, really want to talk to him. So you can go on Apollo, you can type in Nicholas Claire and you can press access email and phone number. And lo and behold, here is Nick's definition email and potentially one of his mobile phone numbers. Caveat here. This is not 100% accurate. This will not always give you the right email. The Right. Phone number. But this is a step and most of the time it is, I would say most of the time it is accurate and depending on the platform, it is accurate. So this is one of the ways in which you can get in touch with people ahead of time. Sorry, Nick, for doing this, but I thought it would be a very apt example.

The other thing that you can do, the other nice thing with Apollo is it has a Chrome extension, so you can just go and visit somebody's LinkedIn profile and it will try and decipher and pull that information. And so it's also a nice way to do it natively in LinkedIn.

Yeah. How do you find. I guess we're at time, but Adam says how do you find a hiring manager to cold call if they don't connect with you on LinkedIn? Right. So this is what you do, right? You go on Apollo, you go on certain services like this and you find their contact information.

So in Apollo, the thing that Harrison mentioned was you can go to their LinkedIn profile and you get this thing called Apollo anywhere that pops out and you can get all those details. You can also do it on any website, company website. So you could go to Coca Cola and find the phone number for a VP there, right?

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. Or anywhere it works. They wouldn't give you any free Coke though.

You gotta, gotta talk to the reps on the ground, right?

Yeah.

Okay, so, so we are at time and to be honest, we went through like less than half of that bubble, about half of that presentation. Right. There's a whole bunch of additional content in there that helps you with the other parts of the process. So the resume, the negotiating, the, the actual contract, like what it looks like, because it's going to be different because you have base paid commission as opposed to a straight salary. So I'd encourage you to sign up for the Science Sales newsletter. I'll be sending out this deck now and then this deck and recording as well as all the other, all the other webinars. Harrison and Nick are going to make a landing page on succession. They're all live there. And we'll share that link with you all to, to get access to those.

Yep. Okay, I've got a. I got to jump, but thank you everybody for coming here. This has been awesome. Ani's great presentation. The webinar series has come to a conclusion. Thank you all.

Thanks everyone. Take care.