[Webinar] Sales Skills 101 - Part 2 of 3

Awesome. Yes, thank you. So we're going to talk today all about scientific sales skills. So what, what kind of skills do you need specifically around sales and how you can apply them to not only help prepare you for getting a job if you're trying to get into sales, but as well, if you're already in sales. There could be some good refreshers in here and some good things to keep in mind. So what we're going to talk through today, we're going to talk about what a sales process is, and we're going to talk about territory, planning, how to do it, pipeline generation, what the heck that means, and how to do that. Discovery, solution, presentation, deal management, mindset, and then ultimately talk about how you can actually go and build these skills and then wrap it all up at the end with some Q and A. So you'll see a lot of the different skills that we have here are very specific to what we'll identify as a sales process. And so throughout the sales process, you'll have different specific sets of skills that you'll want to develop, not only now, but over the course of your sales career. So when we think about a sales process, it's everything that you need to do from like the either trying to get a meeting with a person, so trying to get them interested all the way through to even beyond, say, like a closed one or closed lost opportunity. You know, there are some sales processes where you work with existing customers and you have to go and nurture those relationships on an ongoing basis as well. But what you're seeing here is just an example of a typical sales process where ahead of discovery, I might prospect and find an opportunity, or I might find a deal that I want to work with somebody. And then discovery will typically be that first conversation that you have with that individual. And so you're trying to understand what's going on in their world and potentially align your solution to it. And then the next stage, you'll hear about, you know, sales stages at some point as you get into sales. And so this next stage is typically some sort of solution presentation. It might be a demo of your product. It might be you just talking about your product, your service, how it works. And then next stage is typically some sort of evaluation where they're either evaluating it from a technical feasibility perspective, it becomes like a service. It could also be an evaluation of a product, maybe a free trial, an actual demonstration of it in their lab using their own samples. Then there's typically some form of, like, proposal and negotiation around price terms, whatever it might Be and then closed, meaning the deal is either won or lost. So this is just an example of the sales process. And different companies have different types of sales processes. You have complex sales and you have more transactional sales. So on the transactional side, these are going to be things that maybe more, maybe more inexpensive reagents. You might just be one person as the ultimate decision maker on it. Typically low ticket, low ticket items, and let's say they choose something or they choose to buy something in a more transactional sale, there is not as much of a negative consequence, I would say, of making the wrong decision on the product you're using because they could probably go and then find a replacement or an alternative. That said, on the complex side, these are typically much more expensive products or services, probably in the tens of thousands of dollars. And they're typically multiple sorts of decision makers, either decision makers themselves or influencers of the decision. So if you think about, if you've ever made a purchase of something, maybe within your household, there might be other influencers that influence your decision of whether or not you can actually make that purchase. And then there's also people then that are also the decision maker. And so we, I don't think I have the executive buyer. Oh yeah, economic buyer. So one thing to note on these complex sales really is there's a term called economic buyer. This is the person that has the purse strings, that owns the budget, that can really like actually cut the check to say yes or no about your product or service. It doesn't always mean that they are the user of it. And so it's important to understand the different roles and dynamics that different people play within a complex sales process. All right, now let's dive into territory planning. So territory is if you're, if you're a rep, a territory is pretty much like the amount of counts, amount of accounts, the amount of companies, the amount of people that you have in your territory that you are able to go and sell to. So it could be like a company list. It could be a list of names of people that you need to go after. It could be geographical. So it could be covering Europe, it could be covering a state in the United States. So it really just depends on how the company sets it up. But as a rep, it's your job to create a territory plan, meaning how am I going to attack my territory and how am I going to, you know, win business either from new customers or from existing customers. And so some of the things that you want to incorporate in your territory plan are your goals. So your goals will probably be something around like your quota. You might have the number of units that you have to sell, a number of new accounts that you have to get into. These are the types of goals that you'll be setting for your territory plan. And then you have to have your strategy which is how will you actually go after them? How are you going to actually go and hit those goals? A lot of this might be prioritization of the people that you go after. So targeting the best fit accounts first and then working your way down to maybe some of the accounts that aren't as great of a fit. And then the actions. So these are going to be specifically the things that you do. So this might be, I'm going to do, you know, email prospecting. I might go to events, set up seminars, go to vendor shows, whatever it might be you want to come up with. Then those sets of actions that you're actually going to do that roll up in your strategy that help you hit your goal. And then this is one I think a lot of people miss in their, in their territory planning, which is preemptively thinking about the obstacles that might get in your way if you try. And if you just assume everything's going to go well, it never will. There's always something that's going to come up. And so if you think, think about and preemptively address the obstacles that you might come up against, you can work either with your manager as well, you know, calling these things out ahead of time and then remove these obstacles. That way you're better set up for success in the long run. And then lastly, personal development. It's really important that we all focus on personal development as well. So how are you going to plan to up level your skills and improve yourself as well? And so all rolls up into your territory plan. And the other piece that's really important.

To know really, really quick, Harrison, if I want to say something about territory plan. So if you're, if you're currently not in sales and you want to get into sales, one way to really show you're committed is to do some work upfront. And one of the things that you could do is to build like an imaginary territory plan for a specific role or company. So if there's like a product that you're applying to, to, to sell, go through and just imagine you're already in the, you're already in the job and you want to go through and basically build this territory plan. If you send this to the, the interviewer ahead of time or the hiring manager. This really shows that you've, you're committed to this, to this transition, that you've already put the thought and the work into it.

Yeah, that's a great point. And a lot of times they may even ask you for like a, what your 30, 60, 90 day plan might be. And so this would be a great example of how you could, how you could use that. The other piece that you can do as well is sales is a numbers game. So you should know your sales math. Now when you first start into a role, you may not have all of these numbers. Your company may have a crappy CRM which is typically what you use to track all of the data and information and deals that you're working.

Harrison?

Yes.

What's a CRM?

A Customer Relationship Management tools. So it's like if you've ever heard of Salesforce or HubSpot, these sorts of tools are used as a rep to manage all of your day to day sort of activities. There's also a lot of reporting dashboards and things that take place in there. That being said, a lot of companies have really bad ones and so you may not have access to all of this like data right out of the gate. But it's important for you as a rep to start then tracking it yourself if your company won't do it for you. Because this is how you're going to know what you have to do on a daily, weekly, monthly basis to hit your goal. So this is just an example spreadsheet here where you can take your quota, inputting your conversion rates of how you move deals through the funnel from prospecting to opportunities, from opportunities to one deals. And then it just basically spits out everything that you need to do on a daily, monthly, daily, weekly, monthly basis. And so it can give you a foundation to actually plan those actions that you're going to take.

We can share a link for this right? Screenshot and copy it. We can show you guys a link.

Yep.

This is. So that's the nice thing about, about sales is that it's all about, this is where the effort comes in, this is where the reps come in. Right. If you know your math, if you know exactly how many calls, how many emails, how many things you have to do, just go and do them right. It's like one way to think of the phone if you're, if you're cold calling is, it's basically an atm. You just punch in numbers and eventually you get money. So just, you just keep doing it, Just keep, keep at it.

Yeah, I wish that's how all ATMs work.

Yeah, that would be nice. That would be nice.

I had another one I think is relevant for sales. And this process is that when things are bad, you don't rise to the level of your skill. You fall to the quality of your systems. And this is your putting in place the systems that you routinely follow.

Yep. So now let's talk about pipeline generation, otherwise known as prospecting.

Scary words, Harrison.

What is it? Yeah, exactly. Pipeline generation is the process of getting meetings with your ideal customers, and then these meetings turn into opportunities, which equal. Pipeline. So you'll hear pipeline and is a term that people will use. It's a summation of all of your opportunities. It's the same sort of concept like a drug development. Right. You have a pipeline of all of your drugs. Your drugs, in that case, are your opportunities. And so the same sort of correlation can be made there. So prospecting, this is the. Prospecting is when you are proactively going out and reaching out to another person that you think is an ideal fit for your company that that has the problem that you can help solve. So it's a proactive approach to reach out to them. There's also inbound opportunities that come in. So inbound, meaning they come into you, so they go to your website, they fill out a form, maybe they call you directly or email you directly from a referral, something like that. But specifically here, we're talking about being proactive around prospecting. And so a lot of the mistakes that we see is that people don't prioritize it, so they're not proactive about it. They're actually just reactive, and they're waiting for inbound leads to come from them. And they don't prioritize prospecting activity. And a lot of that comes down to people are scared to pick up the phone. They don't want to be annoying, meaning that they feel like they're interrupting people on a regular basis, which is true. But we'll get to why you have to get over that. They don't do it consistently. So sometimes you'll see people do like a big sprint of prospecting all in one day, but then they don't build that consistency over time. And so you just don't build the skill necessary to get better at prospecting when you just do it all at once, and then you forget about it for. For a while. Prospecting is always the first thing to get pushed. So some people will prioritize it and put a time block on their calendar to say hey, I'm going to prospect for an hour in the morning. But then a fire comes up. Something else happens. You check your email. You have to respond to an email. I don't know, you get a call from a family member, whatever, something could happen. And then always prospecting gets pushed. It's the first thing to go. And it shouldn't be that. It should always be the number one priority that you make sure you get done. And then the other problem that we see with prospecting is ineffective follow up, or lack of follow up, where you'll just send one email and you just hope that somebody opened it and will reply to it, which is just sort of like a hope. Hope isn't a strategy. And that is, that's an example of hoping that your prospecting efforts will work. Oh, and actually, oh, man. Sad to know is it can take like six touches to actually six to eight touches to actually just get somebody to respond to your prospecting effort. So just an example. You have to be persistent. And I already butchered it. But prospecting is not the boogeyman. So everybody thinks prospecting is this big, scary thing. It actually isn't. You just have to get over the mindset hump. And a way I like to frame this up for people is you have a product or service that helps people. It helps them. And so if you're reaching out to people that you think have the problem that you can help solve, you're actually doing a disservice by not calling them, by not interrupting them to understand what's going on in their world, to see how you can help them. And so if you can flip the mindset from I'm interrupting people to I'm reaching out because I can help them, you can get over this giant fear. You have the boogeyman coming after you. I had a sales manager back when I started in sales, and anytime the office area where all the cubicles were, where the sales team was, was quiet, he'd walk through and be like, what's the phone? Got cobwebs on it.

Right.

So it's just like making it. Making a joke, making light to basically pick up the phone, you know, do it, because that's part of your job. Okay. So some of the other things that we see when it comes to your high performers and low performers in sales, on the low performer side, you're really just chasing opportunities, in a sense. You're waiting for them to come to you, and then you're trying to chase them down, to close them versus actually proactively Going out and creating your own opportunities. And it just comes from this sort of fear of rejection when you're chasing and you're not focusing on prospecting. Whereas a lot of the best performers actually anticipate rejection and they seek it out. They want to find those objections as quickly as possible so that way they can start to overcome and push past that first rejection. There's a famous saying that the sales process doesn't start till you get the first no. And so you have to get. You have to get rejected first before you can actually start having that initial sales conversation.

I think a perfect example of that as well is people that don't want to foul. So they don't mention price, and they'll go through like four or five meetings and not mentioning the price of their product in the hope that they can convince somebody that is so good that they'll spend anything.

Right.

Then you get five hours worth of meetings down the line, you tell them the price and like, whoa, we ain't got budget for that. And it's dead. And you've spent all of these hours. But if you'd have found that out in the first meeting, you spend your time on the customers that do have the cash. Right. So this is sort of.

Nick brings up a really good point in that a lot of your job is not just qualifying people, but also disqualifying people. And I think Harrison might cover this up later. But you need to focus on the people that are actual real customers and not tire kickers or people that just aren't a good fit for you. You need to find a way of just getting. What is it like getting rid of the chaff as quickly as possible so you can focus on the real active.

Opportunities, the people that you can help the most. Yeah, exactly. And I think that's like, the mindset we want to have here is like, our job is to go and solve people's problems. And if it just so happens that our product or solution can do that, great. So some of the keys to prospecting we talk about, a lot of these are ready, but we just got to be at home, which is you have to have the right attitude, mindset. You just have to do it and you have to suck it up and you have to make it happen. The more you do it, the less of a nuisance it's going to be. You have to create your magnetic messaging. And so we actually have a course for this in succession. But magnetic messaging is about attracting your ideal customers and repelling the people that you don't want to be working with. So you have to create this sort of messaging that, that attracts those ideal customers. And then you use that across multiple channels, which would be the phone, email, LinkedIn, in person events, you know, even direct mail as an example. So you have to take that message and figure out how to use it across all of these channels. Because different people have different ways they like to communicate. So if you only focus on one channel, that might not be how that person likes to communicate. So you need to diversify your communication channels as well.

I think that I have a quick story that I found out this week about magnetic messaging and the difference it can have just to show a point. So I had one rep who reached out to some customers four times, five times, and in the end he got a response. And that response was, this isn't relevant to us. And his message was pretty weak. It was just trying to get a meeting. And then we changed all of the messaging and sent it out from a different account. And after one message the response was, this is great, we should talk. It was the same customer, the same company, it was just a different message. And that's how much of an impact the right message for the right person on the right channel can have.

Yeah, it's a great example. But yeah, the other kind of things that one thing that's really cool about prospecting is it allows you to use your creativity. So if you can come up with new creative ways to stand out from all the other noise that exists, uh, it's a really good, it's a really good avenue to do that and allows you to showcase your creativity to get in touch with somebody. All right, let's keep rolling. Okay, so discovery. Now discovery, in my opinion, is the absolute most important part of any sales process. So we talked about qualification and disqualification. Well, a lot of that is found out during discovery. So discovery is once you get that person on the phone. And so here's the definition I like of discovery, which is the process of uncovering problems and needs that if not solved, have a negative impact on the prospect's business. And discovery happens throughout the sales process and isn't a one time activity. So I'll break this down a little bit where we talk about discoveries being the uncovering of problems and needs that if not solved, have a negative impact on the prospect's business. So this means we have to ask great questions, understand what's going on within our prospects business and what's going on in their world. And then we have to uncover problems, meaning, you know, something that's not going well and there's probably some sort of impact that they don't solve that problem it'll have on their business. And I specifically want to talk about business because that's how you're going to get. That's how you're going to get budget. If you're solving something that's really ticky, tacky and technical, unless it's low price, you know, where somebody can just buy it to solve their one little problem that they have, it's going to be really difficult to get budget for something like that. So you have to align to a high priority and urgent business problem that comes up. And then when you do that, that's how you're going to be able to unlock budget and people actually spend money to solve that particular problem. And then the second half here is discovery happens throughout the sales process. Meaning if you only are doing discovery in the first conversation, you're missing out on an opportunity to continue discovery as a like process. As in like asking these questions to uncover more information. You're missing those opportunities later on when you're doing your presentations, your evaluations, demos, things like that, or if you're talking to multiple people within the account, you're going to want to continuously do discovery throughout the whole process. So why is discovery so important? Well, it uncovers the insights and pain points that affect the prospect and their business. It sets the tone for the whole sales process. Right? It's that first step. It's always that first step. Right? It's going to happen elsewhere, but it's always that first step. And so it sets the tone for the whole sales process. If you do great discovery, you have a better chance of winning the deal later on. If you do really crappy discovery, you'll end up with bad opportunities that will likely ghost you and not respond to you at some point in time throughout the opportunity. And anybody here who has been in sales has absolutely gotten ghosted. You're a liar if you haven't been ghosted. So it will happen. But there are ways that you can prevent it from happening. Deep discovery is going to help defeat the status quo bias. So we talk a lot about this within succession and it's a big deal when it comes to winning opportunities is the status quo bias is essentially a bias that says, I want to stay the way things are because I don't want to change, I don't like change. Um, it's easier for me to keep doing what I've always done. And actually 60% of deals are lost to, you know, not like the status quo bias, meaning like they're deciding not to do anything, they're deciding not to make a change. The other thing that's really nice with Discovery is it's going to help you identify champions. So champions are people that we're going to sell for you on your behalf when you can't be in the room. So if you. If you've ever been on the buying side of a situation where like, I really want to buy a product, I really want this, and if you're kind of that champion, so you say, I'm going to go, and I'm going to go sell this internally to go get my team fired up about this product so that they buy it. That's kind of what a champion does. So when a sales rep can't always be in every single internal meeting, that's going to decide the fate of whether or not they purchase your product or service. And so if you have a great champion, they'll do that on your behalf. And then lastly, great discovery allows you to understand their motivations to put you in control of the deal. So if you really understand what motivates them and you understand their timetables and what they're trying to achieve, you now can take control of the sales process and help guide them through the buying decision on their end to where they can hit those objectives. All right, so some of the mistakes that we see with Discovery is. Is. I think the most common one is probably the. Actually, the first three are probably equally common, which is the show up and throw up. You show up and all you do is just present your. Your product, your service, your capabilities, and you're not really asking any probing or questions to understand what's going on in their world first. And so this is like your typical, hey, I've got my catalog. I go walk into the room, I open it up, and I'm going to say, which one do you want? Right? Like, that's not. That's not the way to actually go and sell the pain. And pitch is the other sort of most common one that we see, which is right. As soon as you understand the problem that somebody has, right, the pain point that they have, you jump into the solution and tell them how you can solve it for them. The problem with this is just because somebody has a problem doesn't mean that it's worth solving right now or it's worth paying money to solve. So first off, you have to understand, is this problem actually worth solving? How much of a priority is it? And then you also have to Understand the root cause of why that problem is happening. Because if you don't understand what the root cause of a problem is, you can't actually apply the right solution to it. So the example would be say your car breaks down on the side of the road. If all of a sudden you just start trying to like fix your car, this is pointless. Or you haven't understood like why it broke down in the first place. It could be that you ran out of gas, it could be that your radiator went out. There's all sorts of different reasons your car could break down. And so you have to figure out what is the root cause of the problem and then you can figure out what the solution is. Another couple issues that come up around pre call planning. So just kind of jumping into the call without a plan of action and then also not getting a micro commitment, meaning a next step on the the calendar every time in sales is like probably one of the most important things you could do in sales is always have a next step, a schedule next step on the calendar with your prospect or customer with some sort of action that is like worth their time to show up to that meeting. I think a lot of times sometimes the next step is like, oh yeah, we're just following up, we're going to check in on this thing. But that doesn't have any value add to the prospect or customer. So you want to make sure that that next step is something meaningful for them.

So related, I think related to the pain and pitch that you were talking about. Our schooling kind of teaches us if there's a question, you immediately answer it. And that is the issue that you mentioned. Like the moment that there's a problem, you immediately try to address it. But yeah, asking a question to a question to dig into, really what's going on and what the details are is really the, the essence of this process. You really want to drill into exactly what the problem is. Because it's like the, it's like the sequence of whys, right? You have to dig like five whys down before you actually get to the real issue. That's what you have to do here.

The one. I have one tip that I like to share with people if they're doing this, you may be unknowingly, is if somebody tells you about a problem or pain point that they have, just pause for a second and just ask, hey, can you tell me more about that?

Right?

It's something so simple. It's something so simple that you can just do every single time. And it can be Like a reaction or a reflex. So instead of going in and actually just answering the question, you just follow up with, you continue, can you tell me more about that? And then that's going to get them to dig deeper into it. So nice little tip there. So when it comes to the structure of a great discovery call, you always want to set up ahead of time. You want to have a primary and secondary objective. So whatever the next step in your sales process is should be your primary step. So if your next step is always we do a demo of our product, great. So then the, you know, your primary objective is to get a demo scheduled on the calendar. However, that won't always be the case. So you want to have a fallback objective that says, hey, if I can't get a demo, well, maybe what we need to do is set up a secondary conversation with additional stakeholders. So always come prepared with a primary and secondary objective and along those lines, have questions prepared ahead of time. So do your research on the company and do the research on the person and have a few questions prepared that you're ready to use for that for that person. The third one here is you want to build rapport and actually then set the agenda. So when you join a call, please don't talk about the weather unless you're British. Apparently everybody in Britain just wants to talk about the weather.

How dare you?

It's very important. That's what you said. You taught me that one.

It's true.

But yeah, you want to build rapport. You want to start to understand the communication preferences of the person you talk to. Some people are going to be very friendly and open and that will allow you to also then be very friendly and open. Some people want to just get down to business. And so, you know, if you start to try and build this rapport front, you'll get to understand how they like to communicate so that you can match their communication style.

What's really nice is some building rapport is something I've got a bit of a geek out of, like learning the psychology and I learned something that combines the two things you've said about follow up questions and building rapport is apparently just asked in a second question shows an interest in a person and they release more dopamine because of it and they link that to you because you asked a question and they're more likely to build rapport quicker. So there you go.

So both in one more questions the better. Thanks for listening to the podcast. It would mean the world to us if you could help spread the word by Sharing it with someone you know. 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, community for peer to peer networking and learning, and live workshops delivered twice a month. You can get access to all of this as an individual for just $79 a month or up. Level your entire team with customized learning paths built for each individual rep. Come join us at Succession Bio. And then the other thing that you need to do in your discovery calls, we talked about this a little bit, hinted at it, I guess, but you have to not only identify the problem, you also have to identify the root cause of the problem. So why is that problem persisting? And then also tie it back to, most importantly, the business impact. And on the business impact side, there's both a negative impact where if this doesn't get solved, right, that's the negative consequences of the problem not being solved. But then there's also the positive impact of if we do solve this, what are the gains that we're going to get? And so it's important to understand both of those as you're in your discovery conversations. The other one here is about actively seeking objections. So after you've kind of understood all what's going on, you've kind of gone through your solution pitch and everything. After, after you've understood the business impact and all the good stuff that you do in discovery, you also then want to seek out objections. Meaning you want to find out why this person will or will not buy on that call. Like what, what sort of objections do they have? Do they think pricing is going to be too much? Do they think they won't be able to get this approved internally? Or there may be technical objections that they might have. So you really want to understand all of the different objections that could come up on that first conversation. So that way you can address them proactively instead of reactively. Because if you wait for objections to come up late in the deal, it will stall your opportunities. Yeah, and he's talked about this too. Don't waste time on bad deals. So if you're going through discovery, just if it's not a fit, you know, let them know that it's not fit and move on. Okay. Right. We don't want to waste their time and you don't want them to waste your time. There's only a certain amount of time that we have in a day as reps. And so if we're wasting our time following up on bad deals, you know, that's that's not a good use of effort. And then touched on this already. But make sure you schedule those next steps with the wihm, which is the what's in it for me? So in this case, it's what's in it for them to actually show up to those next steps.

One thing about not wasting time I would advocate, and I think it's gone over here a bit, but just to be clear, is a lot of reps, especially in science, we all carry a bag full of data and a lot of reps will enter the room and pull up a slide deck and present for 30 minutes. And then the other people are normally quite polite, especially if you're British, will sit there and listen and at the end of it go like, well, none of this is relevant, but thanks for coming in. And you've wasted 30 minutes. Where have you started with a question? You'd have got that out of the way. And 30 minutes is conservative because you could do that through free calls. Right?

Yeah, Adding. Adding on to that, Nick. I've. I've seen that happen even at big companies. I won't name the one, but, you know, you'll have a rep sit there and go through like 40 slides and like, not even ask a question. Right. You should not be. The slide deck is. Yeah, the slide deck. The slide deck is not a rubric. You should not be going through slide by slide. You should be having a conversation, getting to that root cause and those questions and then using the slides to kind of continue the conversation. Jump around, figure it out, don't go. If you're going in order, there's something wrong.

Yeah. And we'll actually, we'll actually talk about in this section right here, around present. There you go. How to use slides, too.

No one wants to be pitch slapped.

Nobody wants to be pitch slapped. That's great.

Do not pitch slap me, please.

All right. Solution presentation. So this is the process of demonstrating or walking someone through your offering. That is my very concise definition of solution presentation. It could be an actual demo of the instrument that you're using. It could be, maybe. Or it could even be just walking through the process of how your service works. As an example, if you sell a service, it's hard to demo a service, but you might have a walkthrough or a presentation about how your service actually works in the different phases and stages along the way. That's where I'm getting at here for solution presentation. Trying to fit both of those in. Or if you're selling software, it could just be an actual demo of like, hey, I'm going to pull up my screen and show you, Click around and show you how this stuff works. All right, so some of the mistakes we see with solution presentations is they're presenting with no discovery. So this is the show up and throw up. You just pull up your deck and you start going, we don't want to do that. You start talking about just all of your capabilities. Right. Meaning every single one. Most capabilities are not differentiated. We'll talk about that here in a sec. So it's important to focus on the right capabilities that matter to this person. Not talking about every single one of your capabilities, an effective use of slides, and then just absolutely dropping too much information in the presentation that isn't relevant to the person that you're talking to. And then also typically when people end up in presentation mode, they stop asking questions and so they stop doing discovery. We're actually. While you're presenting, your solution is an incredible time to continue doing discovery. And we'll show you a couple tips on how to do that here. Oh, and the last one, infuse customer stories into your presentation as well. So, hey, a customer used us in this particular way. Like, how does that resonate with you? Those sorts of things. All right, so differentiated capabilities. So this Venn diagram here is just an overlap of customer needs. What the competition can do. Competition being not only direct competition of people that you're like, might sell a very similar product or service, but also like an alternative approach. So somebody might do something in house that's also competition. And then you have you and your capabilities. If you look at the middle section there, where this is an overlap, customer needs it, competition can do it, and you can do it. These are commoditized features, commoditized value. The problem with this is a lot of people talk about these things. This is like your ISO certification lab. This is your high quality control tests that you run. But it's the same stuff that everybody does. You know, if. Oh, yeah, we have scientific support on staff.

Right.

Everybody has that. So these are the sort of capabilities that, like, everybody has that if you talk about them, it's fine, but it's not differentiated. It's not going to stand out from. From the competition at all.

White glove service provider says nothing and everyone says it.

Yep. And then you have. Where the differentiated value comes in is understanding where you alone overlap with a unique need that the customer has.

So it's not to say that the commoditized value, that's not something you should completely Ignore like you still need to mention those. They'll still have to come up in some way to make sure that you do hit the basic checkpoints. But where you really have to spend most of your time after you've checked off the boxes of commoditized value is the differentiated value.

Yeah, I might even flip that and say, actually you want to talk about the commoditized value at the end. It's like, yeah, we do all that stuff. Talk about the stuff that matters to you and why we're having this conversation today. Another thing that you're going to want to do when you're talking about your features is you want to turn those into outcomes. So if you, you could tell somebody about a feature that you have, you can even tell them about the benefit of that feature. But it's the outcome, the thing that they're going to actually be able to do in the future because of that feature. That's what you need to be talking about. Do a quick example here. I used to work at a company called Synthego and we had a number of different products or services related to CRISPR. One of the features that we had was this 200 point optimization. We would run 200 point transaction optimization around a particular cell line to understand what the best conditions were for editing that cell. And so what that enabled is we could get high editing efficiency across multiple cell types. But again, like, that's like, fine, what does that mean to the customer? Right. It's still a benefit, but it doesn't really help them do anything. So if you turn that into the outcome is now you can actually conduct your research in more biologically relevant cell types. So because we have the ability to edit all these other different types of cells, you now have the ability to use cells you might not have had access to before that are more biologically relevant to your research. So I won't go through all of these. You can look at them here. But that's an example and it's an exercise that you can do is to take your features and turn them into outcomes that customers drive. And that's what you can use in your conversation when you're talking through your presentation or doing your demo. All right. Use of slides. So you do want to use slides to share data. So we talk about, obviously scientists love data. So if you're talking about something and you're showing a feature, a benefit or an outcome somebody can get, then you can pull up the slide to show the data around that you can use slides to showcase customer stories. So if you have a customer story on a slide. It's a great way, great use of that slide. You can use it to provide a framework or like a visual for something. So if you have like a process slide that you use, you want to walk somebody through, you know, your, your service or your process for doing something. It's a great way to use slides. Yeah. To enhance the discussion with a visual. Same sort of idea there. So this is what you want to use slides for. You don't want to use slides to walk through your 40 slide presentation. You want to be able to pick and choose the best slides and pull up one or two of them when you need it based on the conversation you're having. And then lastly, you're going to want to ask emotional questions throughout your presentation when you're talking about your product or service. And this is where I mentioned continuously doing some discovery. So instead of asking, do you have any questions? Or what do you think? Which is what people will typically say when they show something, hey, what do you think of this? Or it's like, hey, do you have any questions about what I just showed you? Instead of doing that, because everybody always says no, or they say, that's fine. Instead of that, ask, how could you use this capability to solve the problem that we talked about? You're specifically asking them to visualize their future state of them using this differentiated capability and having a positive outcome. You can see the difference in the way you ask this question. Now, granted, you also have to know what the problem is that they had up front. Right? And that's where you do a little discovery there. But then now this question is going to unlock even more insights that you can use later throughout the sales process. Another example would be, imagine you use this feature. What would that help you solve? So it's more specific than asking, do you have any questions? Or what do you think? So sort of get them into the feeling of these emotions, of these positive emotions, of seeing themselves actually working with and using your product or service.

This just to point out from these two slides together, a mistake that lots of people make because we're in scientific cells. People think data sells the product. People buy emotionally, but scientists just want to confirm it with data. So we still buy through emotion and we still need emotion, emotive questions and the problem to be discussed. But you may need to confirm it with data because they won't believe you. However, don't ignore the emotional part or it's really hard to close the deal.

Here's the, the tagline for that data Tells and stories sell. There you go. Keep that in the back of your mind. Keep that mantra going.

You need the American for the taglines, not the British.

All right, so now we are into deal management. So we've gone through, we've got discovery, we've shown them our presentation. Now what the heck, we got to get this deal to close. All right, so how do we do it? So deal management is the process of managing a qualified opportunity to close. Again, we don't want to be working bad opportunities. So specifically, talk about qualified, real quick. Definition on qualified, I should say, is a qualified opportunity is something that meets the specific criteria needed to actually make the purchase of your product or service. All right, so some of the mistakes we see with deal management is they don't multithread. So multi threading is the process of interacting with multiple people on not only the prospect side, but even on your side. So you bringing in your FAS or your technical specialist, they might have multiple influencers or decision makers on their side as well. You want to make sure you're having multiple conversations with these people so you can create a quorum around the deal that you're trying to ultimately close. A lot of people don't actually put together a real business case that has any merit. So we'll talk about that. No champion, no deal. So if you don't have a champion, you don't have somebody that's willing to sell for you internally in their company when you can't be in the room. It's very unlikely that you're actually going to win that deal. So you need to build a champion to go and sell for you. If you don't sell the next step, meaning there's not a reason for them to actually show up to that next meeting, they're not going to show up for it, and they're going to ghost you and go dark and you won't hear from them for a long time again. So sell that next step. A lot of people are reactive when it comes to legal or procurement issues they want. They kind of just hope that legal or procurement stuff won't come up in their opportunity. And then it always bites you in the ass on the, you know, in the 11th hour, right when you're about to get the deal done. And they're like, hey, we actually need to get an MSA signed. So now it's going to take 2, 3, 4, 5 weeks to go back and forth with legal to get this done before we can actually move this deal forward.

Every deal just that I've managed to close in the last hour of the last quarter. When we needed it closed or seen people close is because they've managed legal early. All of the ones that fall into next quarter or jam tomorrow. As someone referred to it as me. To me well before is because they did not control the legal process internally and externally.

Yep.

I was gonna say, like, when. When Harrison's talking about legal, it's not just their legal, it's also your legal right. Because they're the lawyers on your team, are there to ultimately protect the ass of the company. And you need to work with them hand in hand to make sure that everything's above board and that they're. They're cool with things, because if they're not, they will hold things up, you will get in fights and you will ultimately lose. So you need to be friendly with your legal as well as the other side's legal.

Yep, 100. And you need to proactively address it so that way it doesn't bite you later. Yeah.

Make friends with legal and the people that run the canteen. Then you're fed well and your deals get across the line. Day one of new job.

There you go.

Easy.

And then the other piece here is they just fail to overcome indecision. So indecision is similar to status quo bias, where people just like, struggle to actually make a decision, even after they've already decided that they want to move forward. So I'll talk about that here in a sec. So, quick, quick question.

What's multi threading? Not sure if we addressed that.

Yeah, multithreading is essentially just. It could be. It's. It's the way it's you interacting with multiple people, multiple stakeholders on the prospect side of the business and as well then introducing multiple people from your side into conversations. It could be from your side and FAS or technical specialists. And on their side, it could just be, you know, it could be multiple different scientists, different levels within the organization, just different people that might be influencers or decision makers in the process. So it's just bringing a bunch of people together and having many, many conversations with them all. So couple of stats here. So this is from a book called the Jolt Effect. So they analyze. It was like. It's like millions of sales calls or something like that and millions of opportunities. And what they basically found is that 44% of deals end up being lost due to inaction. So basically, customers are staying with the status quo. But of those 56% of them, they actually said that they're going to change. Like they want to move forward and make a change, but then for whatever reason, they're unwilling to commit and make it, make a decision to move forward, forward. So it's pretty groundbreaking stuff here where, you know, even after somebody has told you they want to make a change and they want to do something, you know, still half the time, you know, they don't. They don't actually move forward or make a change or purchase a product or service. And so the three main ways that they talk about indecision or that they identify were valuation problems, lack of information, and outcome uncertainty. So valuation problems are they're worried about choosing the wrong option. So there's like 100 different options that they could choose from. You have five different options. And they're just so worried about like picking, about not picking the right thing. So they just thought, don't make a decision at all. Great example of this. If you ever heard of the cheap cake factory, their menu is like this thick. It's probably like 100 pages, and there's like a thousand different things that you could pick from. And they did a study that says that basically everybody picks the same thing over and over and over because nobody wants to change what they got from the last time because there's too many options to pick from and they don't want to make the wrong decision. So lack of information, they're concerned that they haven't done enough homework. We see this all the time. How many times have you been asked for more data? Can I get more data on this? Can I get more information? You know, how does this work? In my very specific situation, these sorts of questions come up all the time. I think, especially selling to scientists. And it's essentially they just want to make sure that they have all of the information they need. They're doing all of this homework to actually make the right decision. And then lastly, it's outcome uncertainty, which is the fear that they won't get what they pay for. So this could be, maybe it's a risky product or service or it's something that's really expensive. They're just worried that they won't get the ROI on using that of actually making that purchase. ROI being return on investment. So if they spend money with you, they want to see a return on the investment that is more than what they spent. While here, we talk about multi threading a bit. I think we kind of went through this all the way and talked about these different points. So I'll keep going. So when it comes to, you know, building a business case, especially Nowadays a lot of deals are being scrutinized by, you know, CFOs, by other by just being, you know, locked down on budget. And budget's just really tight. And so you need to have a bulletproof business case that shows how you're going to help them get the results that, that they are expecting. So I'm not going to go through this whole thing. But an example of a bulletproof business case is having like an agreed upon problem statement, agreed upon root cause. What's the negative impact of not solving it? What are the solution is that we're going to move forward with. When can they actually expect their results, by what timeline? And what is the risk mitigation plan in place that if we miss one of these deadlines, how are we going to mitigate that risk and what are the potential dependencies that we need to have in place? So lastly, probably one of the most important when it comes to sales is having a growth mindset. And so growth mindset being I'm always going to try and get better, I want to improve my skills, I'm going to get better, I'm going to be working on what I can do to become a better sales rep. And so we talk about skill stacking. I'll give, I have a pretty cool visual that I like about this. But it's essentially the process of combining similar skills into a single portfolio to increase your value. So sales is like the example I like is if you're going to play soccer or football, whatever way you like to call that sport. There are lots of skills involved in playing soccer or football. You don't just go and practice soccer or football. You practice dribbling, you practice passing, you practice shooting, you do during conditioning. So there's all of these sub skills that are involved with getting good at that sport. Same thing with sales, right? There's all of these different skills that we've talked about here that make up becoming a great sales rep. And so you have to work on each of those individual skills to uplevel your entire overarching skill level. So a great way you can do this is with skill assessments, training, coaching. Difference between training and coaching. I think training is something where you're like consuming and learning information from an individual or a person. And then coaching is like more one to one where you're kind of like going back and forth and you're practicing and you're getting feedback in real time. And then peer to peer discussions is another great way to facilitate these skills. If you're talking to people In a similar situation as you, you can bounce ideas around off of each other and these are just all great ways to build these skills. So one of the ways that you can do this is you can one learn a new skill, right? So learn the basics of something new, then go and actually relentlessly apply it. So you have to do it, right? You have to actually try and test that skill. A lot of times what you see is people will learn something and then they try it once and if it doesn't work, they give up on it. And that can't be the right attitude that you have. You have to learn the new skill and you have to continuously try it over and over and then you'll get good at it and then you just take it to the next level and you start to learn the advanced concepts related to that particular skill and then you just keep doing the cycle over.

And over and over.

And so what does that then look like is, you know, this is the concept of skill stacking where you have your width of knowledge, these are all of the skills that you have or that you might need and then you have the depth of knowledge, which is how much you know about that particular thing. And so if we see here our weaknesses are around presentation, discovery and pipeline generation. Well, I'm going to go now and improve these skills. So I go and embark on skill improvement and then all of a sudden I'm better at these skills now. So I'm going to now start working on the other skills that I need to bring up to par. So networking, deal management, territory planning, boom. And now you can see how this cycle continues and you guys can continue stacking on these skills and expand experience over time to where you, you can improve as a rep overall. And if you want to kind of take that next step and actually do that, you know, just come join succession. You scan the code there, it's just succession bio join. We've got a 30 day free trial right now, so come on in, join and yeah, happy to love to have you. That is it. Right up on four minutes remaining. Let's, let's ask questions. What do we got?

Any questions?

Feel free to come off mute if you want to ask questions too.

The harder the question is, the better. The more you can make Harrison feel, the better. It's my mission in life on a daily basis, so if you guys want to support me, it'd be great. Some people don't want to come off mute, so you can type them in the chat as well.

Or I answered every question that anybody could Ever have and, or, or none of it made any sense. So that's also possible. Yeah.

No, no, no.

Typed in the chat box to start with. It's only football. There is no soccer. This is a ridiculous made up terminal. What personal information should a scientific represent in an introduction? Yeah, so I would say you have to be authentic because if you just come in and like if I wandered into the room and told you everything about me, then it's a bit strange. But in rapport building it's really important to be vulnerable with your information and open because that allows the other person to be. If you've ever been in a conversation with somebody who's really closed off, you notice it straight away and you don't want to share as much and you don't feel connected to that person. So I would say I would generally be in there and it's quite natural. Like if, if suddenly I, I jolt because the dogs run up my legs, like I'll be like, oh, sorry, I've got a puppy. So black Labrador is all over the place. So straight away they now know a little bit more about me and they'll be like, oh, I've got a dog too. But it, it has to be kind of authentic. It can't really be contrived. So I'd say share as much as you're happy to and you'll find it. It actually builds those conversations quicker.

And one thing that is also beneficial is if you have actual experience, like, I don't know, using the prior service in the lab or you have like adjacent technical experience from them being in the lab. That's great stuff to talk about as well.

Yeah, definitely.

It's going to, it's going to help validate the things that you say in your experience. What is a typical ramp up time for a new sales rep in a company, for example? Maybe 1/4. I assume it also depends on the product or service. Yes, it absolutely depends on the product or service. I would say it also depends on product market fit of that product or service. So are you selling a new product into a new market? It might be a lot harder to ramp up. If you have a existing product that has existing demand, it might be a little bit easier to ramp up. So the other piece of this also depends on the training of that company. So how good are they at training you to teach you about not only the product or service but also about who you're selling to, what they care about. So a lot of things can go into it. It also depends on the price point. So if you have an expensive product, it might take longer to close those opportunities or if you have a cheaper product, you might get more transactional wins early on. So it really depends, but I would say anywhere from, from a quarter to three, probably depending on the, the size and complexity of your.

I think something I noticed as well is that ramp is different to different people. So your boss is going to consider you ramped. When you're hitting sales target or doing a good job, you may not consider yourself ramped until you feel fully competent in the position. So it's different to what you mean by that. I, I found that I was hitting target in one position, but it took me a year until I felt I didn't always need a technical specialist or a technical support in that call, you know, because I felt more confident in technology. So I'd say bear in mind that it sells is still a team sport like the multi threading and, and take as many people as you need until you feel that fully ramped.

I like this one here. What are some skills that never ends? Yeah, the ramp never ends. Yeah. What are some skills that a scientist who's in the lab today can develop over time to eventually transition into sales as bd? I think one thing that you could do if you don't do it today is actually get involved in the buying side. So if you have the ability to just raise your hand and say I want to be a part of the evaluation process of new products or services that we might use, highly recommend that because then you're going to understand like how things get purchased and then you'll be better off trying to then sell into the lab as well. And when you, when you actually like, are you probably presenting on a bunch of stuff as well? You know, if you're in the lab presenting on your data, your findings, whatever it might be, and so practice some of these techniques, you're essentially trying to sell your, your like idea to your, you know, your manager or your boss. And so, you know, think of it as a sales process of trying to, to get them to, to agree with whatever idea you're, you're pushing on them.

Yeah, I think if you're a scientist and you're in a commercial company and you can support that commercial team in any way, you'll be really valuable to them and they'll impart more skills on. Then you like help share their skills with you more than you realize. One thing that when you move into the sales role, whether you're in the sales role one week or ten years as soon as you're a salesperson, you have less credibility in that room than the scientist. So your role in that is really important. It doesn't matter Whether you've got 20 years more experience than the scientist who's got the scientist title. It's just something you have to accept. So just try and be in that room and support them and you'll find that you'll learn loads.

All right, so super training recommendation for interviews in bd. How important is coming with an. An imaginary territory plan? Any other recommendations for interview prep? Well, what a great segue. For webinar.

What a great segue.

What a great segue. So Webinar three is going to be all about landing your ideal sales role. So we're going to do this next Tuesday, same time. So everything from interview prep. And he has a lot of really good stuff that he's going to be sharing. Yeah, yeah.

Whole process. Networking, resume, cover letter, all that stuff we're going to be discussing.

But in short. In short, absolutely. You should come prepared. If you can create an imaginary plan, it's just going to show that you put some work in. Especially if you could send it ahead of time and get feedback on it. Like, hey, this is what I'm thinking. You know, this is how I would approach this. Can you give me any feedback on this, you know, before I actually come to talk to the team? Another great way to do that.

I think the one good thing about a sales call is anything you can prepare or anything you. Sorry. Sales role or anything, you can reach out to anybody in the company and get information. No one will see that as a negative because that's what you're gonna have to do in your role. So even if you bring something you try to prepare and it's wrong, you've never been in the sales world before. I don't think it's going to be a negative. The fact that you tried and you went out to get information will be seen as a positive.

Yep. 100. Because you're just doing something that most people won't. I like this question. So off topic, but, yeah, there you go.

I just.

Yeah, but do you use any AI?

This one is. Yeah, I'm not sponsored, but I love this one. It's super great. Gives you a recording as well as notes. So I don't have to type anymore. Yeah, would definitely recommend.

There's lots of tools out there. So one thing that does sometimes come up is sometimes people will be a little bit cagey about having a call being recorded. But you can always Just kick the recorder in that case. But most people also don't care. So if you can record them, because there's nothing better than going back and listening to your calls in order to get better and improve. There's literally nothing that you can do that's going to help you get better at sales is like listening to your call. It's like when you watch game film or something. For anybody that's played sports, you go back, you watch game film to figure out how you can improve and how you can get better. Same thing when it comes to listening to your sales calls.

I think for this one it really depends. Just for the recording, um, at least my experience, I have not had a lot of good reception to people recording the calls. But I think it's just certain biotech and pharma companies you deal with, like even on discovery calls are going to be super cagey like Harrison mentioned. So, you know, ask. But if you, if you can't use it, then yeah, I guess you just have to be a little more self aware and hope that you know what you're doing when it comes to your own, your own development.

So yeah, just to give a contrasting point of view, you're obviously much kinder than me and you bring it up and ask if they mind. I'm more of a seek forgiveness, not permission. So I just leave the call running and no one has ever asked me to stop it.

Yeah, I don't know if that's legal.

I'm not hiding it too. Yeah, they can see it most of the time. Yeah. But it also depends on what state you're in. There's a lot of stuff around it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Up to you guys. I think I'll agree with Nick that yeah, for a lot of things in space sales, especially with prospecting, like you want to ask for forgiveness, not permission. Like that's the whole concept of cold calling somebody. But you know, the recording thing, we'll leave that up to. To debate. To debate.

This Can Be Us Episode four We can just debate that, Just you and.

I. Yeah, that'll be a boring one. I'm gonna skip that one.

No, no, no.

I like this. So from an interviewer's perspective, how do you ascertain the candidate's genuine interest in pursuing a sales career? This is a great question and you have to ask not just surface level questions. You can't say like why do you want to get into sales? You have to then take it a step further and you really have to dig into their why behind it. You can Absolutely. Get tricked. Like, people can do it and it could just be. It could also be that they really want to get into sales. Then they get into sales and they realize like, oh, crap, this isn't for me. Um, that can absolutely happen too. Um, so you can't always get it perfect. But yeah, you just have to ask, you know, deeper, deeper level questions to really figure out what their why is for. Why they actually want to be in sales.

I heard something recently to follow on from that is you're going to always make mistakes. You hire enough people, some of them are not going to be right. And something I heard recently resonated with me, probably because I'm a little bit of a. Probably an egotist myself, is that don't. Don't allow your ego to cloud your judgment because you put a lot of effort into it and you're trying to hire the right person for the role in your team. Often you make a mistake, but you continue to sort of like, try and try and try because you're invested in that process. Whereas actually, if it wasn't a right fit and you made the wrong call, make moves to correct it quicker rather than trying to hold on to things. And I think that was a good piece of advice I heard recently. But do enough due diligence, like Harrison said, to be confident that won't happen.

Yep.

And from the. Just really quick, we're going to end it here. From the interview, the interviewees perspective, make sure that you have really solid reasons for why you want to do sales. Right. This, as we've gone through, there's a lot of steps. This isn't just walk into the room and then sell something. This is difficult. There's a lot of things you have to learn that are new that you haven't been exposed to before as a scientist. So having a really well thought out why that you can convey, you know, in 60 to 90 seconds to somebody is absolutely key to. To presenting your legitimacy within these interviews.

Yeah.

Very good, Nick. Yes. You're not just in it for the.

Show.

I'll be like, my hero is Jordan Belfort, and I just want to make a bunch of cash. That's not gonna fly. Yeah.

Awesome.

Okay. Guess we'll end it here.

Yep. If you guys have any other questions or things you want to follow up on, anything, reach out to us, connect with us on LinkedIn. We're all happy to help.

Yes. This was awesome. On to number three.

Number three, we'll see you.

See you next week.

Sa.