[Webinar] Why Scientific Sales? - Part 1 of 3

Hello everyone and thank you for joining this first of three webinars that is being co hosted by Science to Sales in Succession. My name is Anees Vahendesh Sati, I'm with Science to Sales. I'm the founder and head coach and this first webinar is going to be about why scientific sales. So essentially everything that you didn't know about what scientific sales is, what it actually is and all those, all those good bits. So I'll pass it off now to Harrison and Nick from Succession to introduce themselves.

Everyone, I am, I'm Harrison, co founder of Succession. Succession is really a skill development platform for developing your life science sales skills. So really specifically around the life sciences. And so we thought this would be a really fun partnership to put together with Anise here for not only helping show people why sales, why we love sales, you know, having made the transition a lot of us and you know, really Ben, highlighting what are the things that you need to do once you're in sales to be successful and so we'll talk a lot about that in the next couple webinars.

Hey, I'm Nick, the other co founder for Succession because obviously being co there needs to be two of us and I, I actually worked in the Lab for around 16, 17 years for large farmer, small, small biotech as well, getting relatively senior running labs before I accidentally fell into sales. Happy to tell that story another time but then loved it. And now co founder of Succession after moving up the chain of sales into sort of a VP position.

Wonderful, thank you Harrison and Nick for the introductions. I'll very quickly mention Science to Sales. So we're a career coaching platform. So we help scientists get into sales and BD through one on one coaching. So that's something that we're hoping to further disseminate here, helping you guys understand what sales and BD is within the sciences. So without further ado, well one more housekeeping thing. So please if you do have any questions during the presentation, drop them in the chat as you as you see fit. We will be covering most likely some of those questions as we go through the presentation. So at the end if there are questions we haven't covered, we will then address them at the end of the presentation. Cool. Okay, so let's get into it. So really quick, agenda wise we're going to cover a few topics. So first off is going to be what is sales and bd? Why it's something that is important even within the, within the sciences. We'll also talk about some assumptions that you might have about what sales and business development is and what it actually is, especially in the scientific realm, who can be successful in sales. The spoiler here is everyone, with some caveats, which we'll get into at that slide. Some reasons that you really should consider a sales and business development career, especially if you're a scientist, some of the skills at a very high level, what you'll need to succeed in this new career path. And really the flip side, why, why you might not consider why sales might not be the best fit for you, because it's always good to consider that as well. And lastly, at a high level, which we'll get into in later webinars, how to figure out if sales is really something for you. Okay, so we'll start off with a quote because every good presentation starts off with quoting someone famous. So Estee Lauder, founder of one of, I think, the second biggest cosmetic company in the world, valued at billions of dollars. And this is what she said. And this really distills the essence of what sales and BD is. We're not selling things to people that they don't need and that we don't believe in. Especially within the sciences. We're looking to believe in what we're selling as a product or service. That it really helps people and companies to do specific things. And that belief is what drives everything you do. So, Harrison and Nick, anything you want to add on to this big thing.

That we're highlighting here is that there's pills isn't something that you do to somebody.

It is.

You need to understand the current problems or challenges that somebody has. And it's more about how do you really align with somebody's goals and objectives to then determine if. If your solution might be a fit for them? It's not. I think that one of the things we'll talk about here is it's not this really pushy thing that people think it is and they feel like they're being pushed into sales or being pushed to buy something. It's actually the opposite. What you want to do is you want to try and pull people towards you by understanding their business, their goals and their objectives.

Wonderful.

Yeah.

Nick, anything to add?

Yeah, I think if you've ever been in that experience where you feel like you're being sold hard to, that's because they were doing it wrong. So that's a bad sales experience.

Exactly.

For sure. Yeah. Great additions, guys. Okay, so definitions, what is sales and bd? So if you look at the textbook in this case, indeed, you know, a career in sales and business Development ultimately comes down to presenting and selling products and services to people, in this case to businesses. Ultimately your north stars to drive revenue. You are the front lines to bring in the money that keeps the lights on and helps keep the engine running. That is whatever company you're working for. And we can break this down into sales and business development. So sales is sort of transactional in a way. So you're selling a good or service to customers, but it kind of stops there. There might be some after service support that your company provides, but really it's just about getting that product or service to the people that need it. Whereas business development is a little bit more complicated. It is sales, but you also have these much deeper extended partnerships which may deal with collaborations, with mergers and acquisitions, with just broader strategies that kind of bring your two organizations together so they're related. But there are some nuances here. Harrison and Nick, anything you'd want to add here?

I think on the sales side it's really about again understanding what's going on for that other individual, that prospect or customer, and determining is your product or service the right fit for them. I think on the BD side it's, hey, our company is trying to move into like new, like new market X or Y, whatever it is. And so we're going to go partner with this other company and try and use the combined efforts of our two companies to better, you know, set ourselves up for success in that new market. So it's, it's different in the sense of. Well, I guess the other caveat that I put on this is sometimes they call the exact same thing. So sometimes you'll see business development actually is a sales role. You'll never see sales really as a BD role, I don't think. But you will see business development roles as sales roles, meaning that your job is really just to go and sell that product. So I think the important thing when you're looking at any new job that you might want to get into is don't just look at the title that says it's sales or business development. Or you might see account manager or account executive. These sort of titles you see all the time is to actually look at what are the responsibilities. It's about driving partnerships with other companies. That's going to be more of like a true BD role. If it's more about selling, having a quota and selling that product or service, it's going to be more of a sales role.

Yeah, yeah, I've, I've seen with business development I typically see that with Higher ticket items. So if you're dealing with products that are in the millions of dollars, they're typically not going to be called sales, they'll typically be business development because the, the deal cycles are just on the order of like years. Same thing with services like really expensive cdmo contract development, manufacturing as well as CRO contract research organizations. Those roles would be typified under business development because they're, you know, multimillion dollar contracts, they take years to deliver. It's not as complicated as selling nuts and bolts. Nick, anything to add? I kind of jumped in there.

No, I think it's just what Harrison said. Look, if you are looking to make this move, make sure you check the job description. Because not only with the BD and the sales thing, sometimes the title can seem like you're a very, very senior person, like director, where actually that could mean you're just a rep depending on the company. So yeah, so it's a little bit fluid when you look at the title versus the spec.

Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of nuance here and it does get confusing, unfortunately. So at almost a philosophical level, like why do we even need sales, right? Like E commerce is a big thing. Why can't we just throw up a webpage and then have people go in and like add to shopping cart, which it works for some things, even in the sciences. But ultimately there's a few things that we're hoping to do especially with complicated products. So the first one is to influence and acquire customers. So especially with complicated scientific and technical products, it's very difficult to present all the nuances and all the use cases just from white papers or a webpage. Right. It's important for us to get in front of the customer and to have these deep conversations, these discovery calls where we understand exactly where they're coming from, what their problem is and understanding how or if a fit, if there is a fit with our product and service to their exact, to their exact issue. The other thing is differentiating. So this really comes out in the prospecting and outbound prospecting and direct sales roles where you're going out there and you're informing the customers about your product or service and you're showing how you're better than the status quo. You're better than what's already out there and you're better than what they might already be doing. Right? And this, the caveat here is still, you're still looking for that fit. But if that fit is there, you need to be able to differentiate your product or service effectively. In order to really close that sale. And the last thing which kind of creeps into market research is meeting your customer where they are and understanding where they're coming from. Right? You're the first line of defense when it comes to one on one interactions. You're having talks with these customers potentially weekly, monthly, and you know exactly the things that they're struggling with, the things that they might want from your product or service that isn't there. And you can take this information and bring that back to your marketing team, to your product development team to help iterate and make your product or service even better. So, Harrison, Nick, anything to add here?

Yeah, I was going to say one of the big things too is just like not everybody knows what they want or what they need or they may think they want something, but it might not be what they actually need. You know, obviously there's a lot of ways that you can go out and you can do research and try and determine what the best tool or solution might be. But in a lot of cases, assuming that they're good sales reps, right, they understand the market in the industry really well or particularly even like the technical side of things really well. And so if you can leverage them, they have that conversation with customers like dozens of times, hundreds of times, right? They have more experience in this realm and so you can leverage them for their insights. And so that's what we want to provide as sales reps is are those insights where, hey, I've talked to, you know, let's say we were selling crispr services. I've talked to a thousand people that are literally doing crispr. And most people on the buying side might only deal with that once or twice a year. And so that sort of level of knowledge and expertise is what's, is what we're really trying to build from a sales perspective is to help people make better decisions. And I think that's important to think about for a sales mindset.

Awesome. Nick.

Yeah, I think mostly it's been said, I think it's a product can't tell you what it can do for you, right? You can't position it in your life. So even if you think about something as simple as a car, right, if you didn't know what it was and someone tried to sell it to you, you'd look at it and go, it's got four wheels and a steering wheel and this, that and the other. Whereas if they, they tell you it can get you from A to B in X amount of time, whereas you're currently getting the Bus and you. Takes you this. And sometimes you're late for work, you're going to get a promotion if you get there quicker. You know all of these things, that's positioning it to your problems. That's what a sales team needs to do. They need to understand the customer as well as the product. Whereas not just a web page for everybody.

Yeah.

Or if you have three daughters that you have to, you know, get around and take them around places. Right. Yeah, exactly. Different needs for the car.

Exactly.

I think Nick needs caffeine as well. Not just, not just a car for that. Stay awake and then there you go. I think. And I'm sure that we'll cover this in webinar too. What Nick mentioned there is super important, is that as a sales rep, you're not just listing off the features and service and saying this is why our product is awesome for X, Y and Z. That's not going to work. You need to live in the customer's world and understand what the value is that that product or service is driving. What problem or pain is it solving. What end state what like dream future is your product or service going to provide for them? And that's really important when you're, when you're in these interactions, you're trying to paint that ideal future for that customer.

Yeah, I think it's important because there are some products that actually don't need a sales team and that's because they do that on their own. They're in a particular niche where they don't need to be positioned. It's very obvious what they're for is very embedded. And then that's just about price and commoditization like. So it's important to just understand the distinction.

Yes. Yeah, for sure. All right, this next one we're gonna tackle in to some myths and what we actually. What sales and BD actually is. Harrison, would you like to take this one away?

Yeah, sure. Yeah, I can run with this one. So what do people really what do people think Sale? Oh, there we go. What do people think sales is? Well, a lot of times people think it's selling to people, when in reality it's your helping people instead of pushing people to buy products that they don't need. We want to understand their problems and then hopefully maybe provide a solution that can help them. It's not about convincing people to do something. It's about providing expert recommendations. Right. So those thousands of conversations that you had, those insights that you have into the market, it's about providing those recommendations to your customer. There is talking and presenting in sales, but in reality, really what sales is about is about asking great questions. So while yes, you do need to talk and present, it's not the main point of the job. The job isn't to jump on a call, throw up your slide deck, and go through 50 slides, even though that's kind of what we're doing here. It's more about how do you ask great questions to understand the world that your prospect or customer is dealing with? A lot of people think sales can be annoying and aggressive. It absolutely can be when done incorrectly. And so we don't want to be those types of salespeople. We don't want to foster those types of salespeople. And so what you really want to do is you want to be consultative and guiding, meaning you want to consult with your prospects and customers and then guide them to help make the right decision. A lot of people think it's about trying to get people to buy your product, when in reality, it's just helping them make the right decision for what they need to do. And that's really what a lot of it is, is helping people buy. A lot of the times people. Customers don't actually know how to purchase a product or service because they haven't done it. So if you're talking about, say, $100,000 piece of equipment, that takes a lot of people to get involved to purchase that particular product a lot of times. And so sometimes it's about helping them make the right decision and help them guide them through the buying process.

Boom.

Yeah. And we asked a couple of stories for people to share. Some stories. You know, you guys can read this if you want, but just a couple of stories from people we asked on LinkedIn. They gave us their response about some of the ways that they have. You really enjoyed the transition from the lab into sales. You know, I think one of the.

Main kind of.

Threads between each of these is that you get access to more. Like you get access to a broader range of scientific topics, if that makes sense. Right. If you're in the lab and you're kind of working, you're doing your thing, you're solely focused on that task, on that project, on that piece of science. Whereas when you enter into the sales world, you get to talk to hundreds of people doing all sorts of different things, and so you actually get more ingrained into different types of science that are taking place. You know, we talked to this guy the other day who had. He's got a Ph.D. plant biology and did all this work in what was it, Nick?

Extremophiles.

Extremophiles, yes. And then he's now talking to a lot of people working in human biology. I haven't talked about human biology in years.

Like.

Yeah, so it's like these types of things come up again. It's kind of reinvigorated in, you know, the sciences just by being in a sales role. So it's not something where you're stepping out of science altogether. Like you're still heavily involved in it. And especially if you go between different companies over your career, you're going to learn a lot of different technologies and a lot of different skills as well.

And in that particular example, there was a massive translate transferable skill of. He was an expert in sequencing because he had to sequence the extreme evolves in these environments and then went and worked for a sequencing company.

Right.

So he had all of this knowledge that he could transfer among these groups of people.

Yep, exactly.

All right, back to you, back to me. Okay, so who can succeed in sales? A big question that I'm sure all of you are just, just anticipating the answer to. And the answer is everyone. Right. With some caveats. And really the caveats here aren't technical skills, aren't, you know, things you can learn. In a way, it's, it comes down to mindset and what motivates you. So the big thing is what everyone with the right motivation can succeed in sales. And I think this is something that the people on this call probably intimately understand, especially if you've gone through, gotten a PhD because you didn't go into a PhD for money. You went into it because you had an insatiable curiosity about a subject. You had a personal drive, especially if you're in a medical or life science field, to advance human medicine and help people ultimately. And that's really the motivation that you need to bring into sales. And bd sure, the money's great, you can make a lot, but you're going to have bad days, you're going to have times where things are not going great and that is not going to push you through those, those hard times. It's going to be the motivation to really provide a valuable service. And this also ties into the rest of them. So self confidence, obviously you need to believe in yourself. You need to understand that it's all a process and that you have the right skill set and determination to get through any difficulties you face within your sales career. This relates to grit as well. You're not going to easily give up. You might have people slamming the phone on you when you call, you might have prospects that are late in the sales cycle and end up ditching. You know, the economy changes, the company situation changes, but you're still willing to. To show up and to keep trying. The last one relates to everything here is that you have a growth mindset, right? You're willing to learn to expand your skill set. And this is something that you're already going to be doing if you're shifting from a scientific career into sales and bd, because going into it, you're probably going to know nothing or next to nothing about how to be a sales rep or how to be a business development rep. And so you're going to have to learn everything. And you're going to have to continuously learn as you improve your skills and as you up as you get promotions and head into more complicated roles in different product areas.

I would also add to that is like, everybody here already has a growth mindset. The fact that you registered for this event and, and the fact that you have shown up means that you are interested in either taking another step in your career, learning something new. And so I want to applaud everybody just for that alone.

Yeah.

And I would add to that to say that with managing sales teams and working in many great sales teams, even in the best sales teams, it's always the case that the best reps are the ones with a growth mindset. It's the ones taking additional courses. It's the ones asking for review what I'm doing, like, check on me from everybody around them. They're the ones that smash the 100 Club and are enjoying it, but also getting the money. So the growth mindset leads you somewhere as well.

Yeah, yeah. And this, this, the, the stuff we're talking about here, especially on this slide, is not necessarily exclusive to sales and bd like you can. If you have a growth mindset in any career path, you're going to go far because you're willing to improve. You're willing to take in criticism and feedback and incorporate that into becoming a better version of you, you know, in your professional and your personal life. Cool. Okay, this one I'd like to hand off to Harrison.

Yeah, sure. Let's do it. All right. Why should you go into sales? I think one, we touched on this a little bit, but you actually get a broader access to a number of different topics, and I think that that is actually really, really interesting. So if you want to know more about everything that's going on, sales, sales is a great way to do that. If you want to make more money, you know, it doesn't, it shouldn't, it shouldn't necessarily be your number one motivation or motivating factor. But you do make great money in sales. And so if you're good, it is performance driven to this point is like if you want to be compensated for your performance, sales is the perfect job for that. I think in a lot of other roles, a lot of other industries, your individual performance doesn't directly correlate with your compensation. So like if you do really, really well, doesn't mean you're always going to get paid more. But in sales that is absolutely how it works.

I think that just to add on to that one point, it's also so black and white. I've worked and run lads in IT in labs and there's a lot of KPIs that are very what I'd call soft. Hard to prove they're wishy washy. In cells, it's brute is brilliantly black and white and awfully black and white. You don't hit your number. Doesn't matter anything else you did, you do hit your number, you're a legend. That's. This is how binary it could be. But that, that's brilliant and it gives you flexibility as well because you aren't your output metric. Not input metric with cells.

Yeah, exactly. And, and I, I want to, when I talk about being competitive here, this doesn't always mean being competitive with other people. It could also be being competitive with yourself and again, wanting to improve and wanting to get better, wanting to make sure that you're hitting your number right. You have a goal, a quota, certain number of units that you have to sell, a certain dollar value that you have to sell. So being competitive with yourself and pushing yourself to hit that is a really important skill to have in sales. And then I think there's the last one on this slide. But if you generally want to help people, you will, you will succeed. You know, if, if you're, if you're going to be pushy and you're just going to try push and push and push and push to get people to buy things right now for, for the short term, it might be helpful in the short run, but in sales you actually are going to be more successful and you're going to make more money by thinking long term and building better relationships with your customers. 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.

So the skills, the skills you'll need to make the bills, so to speak, what you'll need to succeed in sales and bd. So the one, the one big one is active listening. It's as we talked about earlier on the slide, comparing things we thought sales was and what it actually is. It's not all about talking, presenting. You need to be a very active and engaged listener. You need to really understand where the other side is coming from and kind of picking up on the nuances of their language, like what is almost listening or reading in between the lines when it comes to these conversations. The other part is empathy, right? This is understanding where the other side is coming from, understanding their situation. This really helps to contextualize and really walk a mile in someone's shoes. And when you really understand where they're coming from and this helps if you were in their shoes before, as a scientist, you can figure out exactly how to position your solution to match the problem they're facing. And you might even understand at a deeper level other issues that they're facing because you used to be there, because you understand them. Related to that other slide again that covered the myths of sales, asking great questions is really important. This helps to dig in deeply into what is being said because the customer or the client might say one thing and they might have a question, but that's not really what they're asking, right? There might be deeper levels that you need to get to and this involves really digging into those pointed and directed questions to understand where they're really coming from. This comes with, with time in the industry, with market knowledge, as we had mentioned previously, especially in scientific business to business sales, you're looked upon as a expert of your product in the market. And if you're able to provide these sort of holistic strategic advice advices for the customer in their specific situation, this engenders more trust in you as a, as a source of information, as someone that knows what they're talking about, and then you're just trusted more when it comes to the point of deciding on a product or service to choose.

I think the other piece, the other piece there too is you also have context from Your time in the lab that you should leverage in your conversation. So you might have used certain techniques or certain products or services, whatever it might be, and you should, you should absolutely share that. One thing that Nick used to do still probably does pretty well, but is he had really heavy cell culture background. And so when selling crisper services, he's able to leverage his cell culture background to help people with things that are adjacent to the current product or service that, that he's selling. And so I think that's, that's something that everybody here, you know, has some sort of ability that is some sort of like knowledge that is potentially adjacent to the product that they're selling and they can use that to help them sell.

Yeah, and I think it goes back to the wanting to help the customer point as well. The, to the extent where I've been in a meeting where after a few minutes we realized there's nothing this person can buy from me and there's nothing I can sell to them. So like, at that point you can stand up and walk out if you want it. However, we spent 45 minutes troubleshooting their sensory neuron protocol. Great things. However, this person now works at gsk and if I phone them and ask for an intro, I've built that relationship. So it's kind of that long term view Harrison was talking about and helping people. And, and this is really what Sal is actually about.

For sure. And so this, we say that technical skill is something you'll need, and this relates back to the context. But the big thing is that it's not, it's not exactly necessary in as much as the direct skill you have could be an asset for an upcoming sales role. But there's also these transferable skills, these tangential skills that you can use that you can move from, you know, one area that you did your degree in, or you have a scientific background and then move into a different area of sales and bd. As scientists, we're really good at learning, we're really good at contextualizing and integrating knowledge. And this is where this last point point really comes in. All righty.

Even I've been into a meeting, it's been really lucky. Once or twice I've walked into a meeting, a customer's educated me in something that I didn't know. And then an hour or two hours later you walk into another meeting and it comes up again and you're like, great, I can now help this person with information I've literally carried I might as well put in my bag and walks across the corridor. I've carried it with me and shared it, but just being that conduit between people is valuable and being able to understand.

Exactly. Awesome. Love it when that happens. Like universal synergy universe hums. Okay, this is more of a preview for Webinar three. We're going to dive deeper into the actual nuts and bolts of how to get these sales and BD roles from a scientific background. But these are transferable skills that you probably have from either grad school, a postdoc, or your scientific experience in industry. Right. You've figured out how to learn different things and contextualize them. You have an amazing attention to detail. You're a creative and innovative person. You can problem solve. You've probably dealt with a project or two and managed multiple projects at one time. And you've had to work as a. Work as part of a team and potentially some collaborations. All of these, if presented the right way, are great transferable skills to show that you would do well in sales and bd. It's not the entire picture, but it's. Sorry.

You're also potentially the target customer. Right. Which is if you've actually done the thing. The example we gave earlier of somebody using sequencing technology in their job and now going to sell it, it's like they were the customers. Talk about empathy. Right? It's like, I know what I used to be, now I can have that conversation too.

Yeah, yeah. It's a really key way to find those roles that are a good fit for you. And that's part of understanding where you fit in as a sales or BD rep is looking at your previous experience with instrumentation, with techniques, and then seeing how that maps with the current industry, what's available, and just target companies. Yeah. Okay, so the next one, I think this one I'll pass off to you, Harrison.

Yeah. So what you don't need to do is you don't need to be that guy to be good at sales. You don't need to be the typical sleazy car salesman. You don't have to be aggressive. You don't have to be a smooth talker. You definitely don't have to be an extrovert. And I think being attractive is stylish is not necessary as well. It can help, but I think it matters. And yes, we talked about technical expertise and experience. Um, you don't have to have direct technical experience. You can have adjacent experience, but, you know, it really does. It does help if you do have it. But the big one I want to touch on here is an extrovert I think this is the biggest, I think myth of sales is that you don't need to be an extrovert to be good at sales. I've seen a lot of really good introverted people that are great at sales and I think one thing that gives them that power is that I think a lot of introverts are, are a little bit quieter. They sit back, they listen, they take in, they soak in the information and then they use that information to ask really great questions. And again like that is really powerful in sales. You don't have to be, you know, the person at the party that's going up and talking to every single person that's there. You know, you can. Especially nowadays, a lot of these roles are being done from home. So there's nothing wrong with being an introvert and being highly successful in sales.

I think it's really important and it was a learning for me because I'm actually an extrovert myself. So when I became a manager and I was hiring people, I thought that was part of my key to doing well when I was selling and was convinced to hire somebody who was very introverted. I even struggled in conversation because they spoke too slow for me. Like, you know, very introverted, very slow paced kind of person. And turned out to be the percentage wise the highest performer in my team for about a year and a half. So I think it's, it's knowing yourself and following your own style is more important than being either an introvert or an extrovert. And this person had that. Yeah.

It's also good to like not even label yourself necessarily with this type of stuff. It's just like, just again, be yourself, like go, you know, do, do what you need to do to go and hit your number. And that's ultimately what sales is about.

Exactly. Nick, you're extroverted. Really never would have got me.

Just, just here and there, you know.

Just here and there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Awesome.

Okay.

All right, so let's, let's do a bit of a reality check in a way. So why you maybe shouldn't do sales, right? So one of them is, and we touched on this when it comes to the, the variable compensation and the performance metrics that you don't like being measured on performance, right. As Nick touched on in some of these scientific roles, some of the performance metrics are a little bit wishy washy, let's say a little bit soft. But with sales and BD it's very, especially with sales, it's very cut and dry. It's like did you hit your numbers? Yes or no. And if you did, here's the math to, to get the payout that you deserve. Right? Yeah.

If you, sorry. If you don't want your, like if you don't want your, if you want slide under the radar and you don't want your performance to be public knowledge, you, sales is still, is probably not the, the right role because a lot of the times performance is, you know, put up on a dashboard, there's competitive dashboards to show like leaderboards of who's winning or not winning is the wrong term but who's performing the best, best to plan, et cetera. And, and as well when it comes to performance management from like a leadership perspective, you know, just in full transparency, uh, you know, the leadership team will stack rank the team based on your performance to plan and make decisions based on that. So if, if performance measurement is not something that you're comfortable with, like just I'll warn you now, you shouldn't do it. It's not going to be worth it. However, if you're, if you're, if you're unsure, like you should absolutely give it a try because I, I wasn't sure about this at the beginning, but I love it. I think being able to tie yourself directly to your results and you get to own your results and you get paid handsomely for that and if you go above your number, you typically get like additional accelerators. So I really do believe that it's something that you should, that you really should think about before making the decision to go into sales.

Yeah, just add on to that. I likewise didn't think that it'd be something I would be happy to be judged by, but actually turned out to love it too because like I said, the fact that it's output driven, the level of flexibility you're given in your actual role is quite large. Normally. He's normally one of the most flexible jobs because they're typically looking at what your output is monthly and quarterly, not where you are and when that is being achieved. So you get quite a lot of flexibility. The one thing I will say is it's not as brutal as it can sound when you say you're metric driven. So last year 2023 was particularly bad for sales performance and that will be taken into account and you'll be looked across the board and if everyone's not performing well or it's a particular territory, these things get looked at and discussed. But what starts the conversation is definitely the performance to plan.

Yeah. So this kind of also leads into the next one, which is you aren't at least a little bit competitive because you need to have this competitive spirit in order to hit those numbers. You're going to have to work pretty hard, you're going to be measured against your peers and you'll probably measuring against yourself like your previous quarter or previous year's performance. So having this competitive mindset and drive is super critical to, to achieving, to, to achieving in sales and bd. The next one is I think, a given. You, you don't like going out of your comfort zone, this probably isn't for you. First comfort zone you're going to get at, you're going to have to get out of is you're no longer a scientist, you're now a sales or business development professional. And the second comfort zone is now you got a. At least in entry level roles, you're going to have to master the cold call, which is, you know, people say cold calling is dead, but it's not like it's still probably one of the best ways to get business. And you're going to have to pick up the phone and actually call people, which to some of us is terrifying. And it still is. But that's just one of the things that you might have to do to get out of your comfort zone. Harrison. Nick, anything to add here about comfort zones?

Yeah, I mean, you hit the nail on the head. I mean, cold calling is like the, I would say extreme example of comfort zone. You have to get out of it because it is, it's not something easy for anybody to just kind of naturally do. It takes skill, it takes practice, it takes repetitions. But the best way to think about it is that you have a product or service that helps people and you've specifically identified a person that you want to contact that you think you can help. And so technically you're doing them a disservice by not calling them, by not interrupting their day to figure out how you can help them. And so I think if you have that sort of mentality, it can be really beneficial in sales.

Yeah, this is where the mental gymnastics comes in handy, right. To just reframe, to reframe that, that benefit that you're providing to people. And that's the other thing I'll add in what Harrison said. When you're cold calling people or you're cold emailing or getting in touch with people on an outbound basis, you're not just opening up LinkedIn and hitting up the first person you see, right? You're qualifying these people you're finding someone that you think from, reasonably, from your research is a good fit for your product or service, that will have a tangible benefit from your product or service. And now you're reaching out to either confirm or deny that. Basically. Right? Disqualification. That's something we'll probably get into in webinar too. Disqualification is probably more important than qualification of prospects in a way because you don't want to waste your time with people that ultimately aren't a use for. Aren't a good use case for your product or service.

I think the reframing is a smart way of doing it. But the other thing to think about is that this is definitely. If you want an analogy, think about jumping out of a plane with a parachute on. Like, the person who goes up to do that first time is gonna be sweating. They're going to be like feeling really uncomfortable. The guy that's jumping with them that does it five times a day probably doesn't even have any butterflies because he's conditioned into doing this and he's. It's normal. So you just have to bite the bullet and start doing it and buy it. But by the third time someone slammed the phone down on you and referred to you as not very polite names, you'll be fine with it.

Yeah, we used to have a Slack channel for all of our. All the best replies that we would get. So instead of having it be a negative thing when you got rude responses, we kind of turned it into more of a game and then we'd all laugh and have good jokes about it. So just part of the role.

There's some, I think there's like a few really good Instagram accounts that just post really, really mean, cold, outbound replies from people. So you probably won't get that in scientific sales and bd. We're a little more professional, but it's a. It's a flavor of what you. You might see.

Yeah, I would say, I would say about comfort zone, though. Everyone refers to cold calling as being the extreme. I think there is one worse. But actually most people don't do it well enough so they never even experience it. Is it a conference and there's a group of people you don't know and you have to go and interject yourself into that conversation in person and try and have a conversation with these people because they could be prospects and you don't even know. You'll go to a conference and you'll watch. You watch. Many reps don't even bother to do it. But the good ones do they'll just wander in with a beer and start chatting. I think that one's even slightly more painful.

Yeah, that is face to face. Yeah, that one. Yeah, that's a good one. Good point.

You eventually get to the point like me, you've done it so long that you'll happily walk on a stage and interrupt the presentation to have a conversation.

Well, that's just because you like attention.

This is true.

So this is where the extroversion and. Or the free conference alcohol might help, right? Not saying you need it, but that's. That might be conducive to business partnerships anyway, so. And I think this point we've kind of covered repeatedly is that if you don't like change, right, sales is probably not for you. The transition is going to be a change. Learning new things is a change. I think if you're already here and you're curious, you probably don't fit into this category. You're probably okay with change and learning new things. So just keep that in mind. If you don't like change, you're probably not doing sales. And the last one, almost like a platitude in a way. But it's true. If you're not willing to work hard, right, Your performance is measured. You got to put in the hours, you got to put in the calls and the prospecting and everything and the follow ups. If you're not willing to put in all that time and effort, you're not going to succeed. And depending on what you're selling, right. The sales cycles and the times in which you're busy and you actually have to put in, the hours might shift. Like there's one in one of my previous roles, one of the business development directors, he had weeks or months where he was working like 60 hours, 60 hours a week because of just busy season. But then there were other times where things kind of just mellowed out. Right. Maybe 20 hours a week, 30 hours a week. But that depends. And it's just you need to balance and be willing to put in the sprints when, when necessary. Really?

Yep.

Cool. Okay.

Just as a general comment about those things that if everyone's on this call and you've joined this thinking, sals, I think SALS is for me. And then we've gone through everything and.

There'S going to be.

Some of you think, yep, I was right. Sounds like it's for me and others that might be thinking, well, being that harshly performance measured, being like somebody's maybe they're not quite, quite for me there are probably not the conversation now, but there are very, very good roles that are satellite roles to the sales team that have a lot of the benefits without some of those negatives. If you're more of a person that doesn't want to, like an FAS or a support representative. So, like, just to. Might be something worth thinking about in.

The future.

For sure.

Yeah. So field application scientist and sales specialist. Technical sales specialist. Those are really good roles that will get you client facing, but you might not carry it. You might not have to carry a quota or actually be measured this rigorously. And it's a great way to kind of get your feet wet and to potentially transition into a full sales or BD roll down the road. And we'll, we'll, you know. Yeah, we'll cover those. Okay. How are we doing for time? Okay.

This one.

Harrison, you want to take this one away?

Yeah, so I'll. I'll cruise through this one. So how to figure out if sales is right for you? Like, what are the kind of the next steps that you might want to take to go a little deeper than this conversation? Well, one, we have two webinars coming up, so that'll be helpful. But the other thing that you can do is just reach out to people that are in sales roles today. Like, hey, I'm in the lab. I'm thinking about making the transition. You mind if I ask you some questions about what sales is? Like, just do that. You're going to get to talk to a bunch of people. I imagine almost every single person will take you up on that offer, especially if they have previously been in the lab. And if you're approaching it from a sort of informational perspective as well, just.

To jump in here, People love to talk about themselves. Everyone loves to talk about themselves. So if you're approaching it in a way saying, like, I want to learn from you, I want to learn about your experience, I want to learn about your journey. Nine times out of 10, people are going to be open to that sort of discussion. Yep.

And then I think the other kind of piece here that you can do is you could jump in and start taking some courses and just get an idea for, you know, what's actually required. You're kind of doing this a bit here with these webinars. The other thing is to just jump in and try it, go interview for a role, go get a job and just take the leap and make it happen. I think the other piece of this is that you can always move cross functionally at any time. So I think one thing that people think about is, hey, if I'm moving to sales, I have to stay in sales. Well, a lot of people will actually try out sales and then determine I actually want to go into marketing or maybe I want to be in product. You want to be more on the operational side of things. So you can always move cross functionally at another point in time. The other thing you can do is listen to podcasts. I'm going to plug our podcast here, Sales DNA Podcast. So feel free to, you know, find that, subscribe to that if you want some more insight where we do a bunch of interviews with different sales reps. One other thing here we're going to preview a little bit for the next webinar where we're going to talk more about like what are the actual sort of day in the life, the actual skills that you need to develop. Everything from like prospecting, how you to research new companies. You'll have a bunch of virtual in person meetings. You're going to be managing existing opportunities or deals that you have to sell your product or service. You'll be working with cross functional teams to get experience from marketing, from product, from operations. You'll be doing presentations and demos and as well you'll be attending events. So these are just kind of like some of the skills or, excuse me, some of the activities that you'll be doing on a regular basis.

So a quick question, Harrison, because one popped up in the the chat so I'm going to read it out. Will we cover differences between inside and outside cells? And is this common in life sciences?

So yeah, we don't have, we don't have that specifically here in this presentation, but I mean we can address that right now. I mean I think the biggest, the biggest difference. So yes, it's very common in, in the life sciences to have both of these roles. Field based or inside sales? Field based is typically a lot more travel, especially just depending on the size of your territory. And so if you have a quick definition of a territory, territory is like an area and a set of accounts or companies that you have in your quote unquote, like patch your territory, which is what you can go and sell to. And so a field rep might be responsible for very vast territory where they might have to travel a lot and go and meet these people in person. Whereas certified sales might, they'll probably, maybe they'll go out every once in a while, once a quarter, every, every, you know, maybe a couple times a year max. But they're more in the office, at home and doing a lot More virtual selling environment. So I mean like pluses and minuses on that stuff. Like, it just really depends. I mean, field sales is a ton of fun. You get to go out, you travel, you get to talk to people in person, you get to meet them. You know, inside sales is also a lot of fun because you don't have to like, you don't have to travel, like, if you don't want to. And I think you develop a lot of skills and inside sales that are also transferable into field sales. Whereas I actually think if you start in field sales, you miss out on a lot of skills that you could learn from an inside sales perspective, which is like the tools, the technology, how to work, you know, at a fast pace. Because I think with field sales there's a lot of travel back and forth between sites, so you may get a couple meetings in a given day, whereas as an inside sales rep you could have, you know, infinitely more because you don't have downtime to travel and meet with people. What do you guys, by definition, what do you guys think?

I was going to ask, like, you know, the days of kind of knocking on doors. To me it seems a little outdated in sales and bd, especially in life sciences. Maybe I'm, I'm a little wrong on that. But how would, how would somebody go about an outside sales role? Right? Are you going out and prospecting as part of outside sales? Are you setting up, are you like setting up meetings and setting up opportunities before you're actually going out and getting in touch with people in person?

I mean, you can set up like, let's say you want to target a particular site or a particular university. You could set up meetings for yourself virtually to go book those meetings in person, say, hey, I'm going to be on site, you know, you want to meet. And then while you're there, you have your meetings, you have downtime between them, walk the halls, you've got the posters and publications on the wall. You can go see what people are working on and then you just turn around and go walk into the lab and just like, you know, don't be a jerk, but, you know, potentially try and strike up a conversation. So I think you could do a little bit of both.

Yeah, I think it's more difficult now with security time. Things actually literally walk the corridors. Yeah, but canteens and, and the sort of bistro areas or being around the bioparks, if you know people is pretty good, or go to networking events. So it's still some of that, but a lot of it is contacting people you want to speak to or have spoken to before and saying, hey, I'm in town. Because most people will meet you if you're already in town, especially if you're like me and I've got to go to Boston US from uk. You're only going to be there very infrequently. They'll grab a coffee with you if.

You let them know for sure. Cool. Okay. So the next one. Oh, jumped out a bit. So the next one is a preview for Webinar three where we're going to really dive into strategies for crafting all of your assets and networking and trying to get that first sales and BD role. And this is just a really quick overview as to, let's say a differentiation at least in the life sciences and the and the physical sciences as to what the the kinds of sales and BD roles there are. The big differentiator here is products and services. So products is really instrumentation and consumables and these Typically it's a fixed good, right? It's something you can actually see and touch and quantify. Typically it's a little bit easier to learn because you have a fixed set of specifications and use cases. And this can range all the way from pipette tips, reagent bottles, columns, all the way to super complex instrumentation like aseptic filling equipment or bioreactors. So really within products there's really something something for everyone at every skill level. In sales and bd where services gets a little more complicated because now you're dealing with something intangible, it's quite complicated. If you're talking about manufacturing services, you have to deal with everything from supply chain of raw materials to to process development to GMP manufacturing to quality control to aftermarket support is a lot of pieces you have to consider. And because of that, the deals get big, sometimes multimillion dollar big. And not only that, it's not like a product where you can just ship it and then if it's complicated, you might have some qualification on site, it's done. Whereas with these services it's going to take potentially years to fully render that service. Because now you have to manufacture the drug, you have to do contract research, it can get really hairy and complicated. So for these roles, typically if it's your first role out of sales, and I've seen this happen, is you have to have direct experience with that service and typically PhD plus so example being if you did some cell biology research in your PhD and your postdoc, you might be a good shoo in for a cell and gene therapy CDMO that's offering those services. Nick and Harrison, anything to to add here.

One thing that I would add about the PhD point of it, and this is probably based on the fact that I don't have one, is that if you've got a lot of years of experience, consider that your PhD. So if something says in this sales well you need a PhD, don't self reject yourself because you don't. Because what they're saying by saying you need a PhD is we expect a certain level of knowledge and experience. So make sure you you approach it in that way and that's fine. But I presume most people who are in science do have a PhD, so that's not what in that area. So don't.

Yeah, no for sure. And that's kind of. I guess I skipped over that. But it's like need PhD plus or industry experience. So if you have worked in industry and you have that direct experience with a certain technical area, you can then move into a sales or BD role that covers that specific technical area. So you know, no gatekeeping here. It's just all about understanding that that area. And I think I forgot to mention this on an earlier slide but I did speak with somebody who's like a director of cmc. So chemistry manufacturing controls at a biotech and the best cdmo so contract development and manufacturing organization reps that he interacted with used to be scientists and used to be in industry because these people again had that capacity for empathy. They really understood the process at a granular level about all the GMP manufacturing regulatory requirements. And so they could talk really well about these subjects to a technical expert like this head of cmc. So that's something to keep in mind as well. How are we doing for tau? We're almost at time. Okay, so really quick, here is your future in scientific sales. So in two days time we have a basically sales skills 101 webinar same time 12pm Eastern 6pm Europe time. And this is happening Thursday January 25th and then next week when it comes to looking for that idea role and how to land it, we're going to be covering strategies from everything from your resume to networking to LinkedIn as well as negotiation, just everything in between. And that's going to be next Tuesday, January 30th, same time 12:00pm Eastern 6:00pm Europe. All righty, we have a couple minutes left. Anything we want to add gents?

No, I think this is great. I mean if you guys have questions on any of this stuff, like our contact info is here, I think. Feel free to reach out to any of us. But yeah, if you have other questions, we got a couple minutes left if you want to try and sneak them in.

Last thing. So last thing I'll quickly add is that if you are ready to make that transition to sales BD and you want to get started, feel free to hit me up either by email or on LinkedIn and we can find some time to chat. I have a calendar, 30 minutes, no obligation conversation. Just to understand what some of the ideal roles might be for your experience.

There's my echo that. Yeah, yeah, go with that, do that. But I echo that. You should connect with us all on LinkedIn if you're going to move into this space because your network is king once you do. So start building it now for sure.

Wonderful.

Awesome. Look at that, right on time. That's pretty good. And we got all the questions and.

We, we didn't practice once. I am, I'm impressed. Right on time.

You know anything.

We exemplified being uncomfortable. Right. By not practicing. Yeah, exactly how it goes.

We'll be fine just winging it, but I think it's helpful, I mean, with our experience levels, like, you know, we do this enough times. Yeah, you get used to it. So great.

I've turned up to conferences where people stepped out and been asked to step on stage and you just get used to that kind of crazy last minute stuff, right?

Yeah.

Off the cuff, right? That's what they said.

There's always a deck somewhere you can refer to.

Yeah, exactly.