The Secret Product Your Customers Want

How?  They know their audience – really well.

Does Your Newsletter Grab Scientists’ Attention? Here’s One that Does

by Lara Marlin Hull

Hi everyone. This is my second post on How To Sell To Scientists and it seems I will be a regular feature around here. Thanks for reading!

As a former scientist and marketing newcomer, I always have my ears open for things that catch scientists’ attention.

A while back, a scientist friend of mine gave me an animated description of an article in Science Company Newsletter featuring a mug (?)... I hadn’t heard of a Tervis tumbler but was fascinated by two things –
1. A scientist going on about marketing materials.

2. That it happened to be a statistical software company making the magic happen.

The company’s name is StatEase.

What’s your goal in 2011? A trick to make it happen.

by Rusty Bishop, PhD.

2011 is already flying by. Hopefully, you are out there selling products to scientists that will make their lives better and research stronger.

Like most companies, here at Red Funnel, we made laundry list of resolutions and business goals. This year, I plan on actually following through using a method that has worked like a champ for me in 2010, the all-mighty Post-It Note.

The Sales Bible

On the recommendation of good friend I recently read the The Sales Bible by Jeffrey Gitomer. I must say it is an impressive read and, I highly recommend it. Gitomer is little over the top with his bravado and “you’re terrible at selling” comments, but his techniques are highly tested and proven, if you can get over the bravado.

I highly recommend the chapters on Overcoming Objections and Networking! Extremely useful for us “sales folks”. In fact, if you travel for sales, the AudioBook Version is great for planes and driving with your iPad or iPod.

The Most Important Thing I Learned This Year

by Rusty Bishop

Looking back, the most important thing I learned this year is to apply the 80/20 rule to everything.

If you aren’t familiar with it, the 80/20 rule states that 20% of inputs drive 80% of the outputs. To me thats a little esoteric and too scientific to apply to life and business though.

Here are some other ways to look at the 80/20 rule that make a lot more sense that I pulled directly from The 4hr Work Week by Tim Ferris -

• 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort and time
• 80% of the company profits come from 20% of the products and customers

The converse of course is that 80% of your effort and time only results in 20% of the good stuff (sales, leads, happiness, ideas).

Take a second and let that sink in please.

Once I internalized it, it hit me that I was wasting 80% of my effort. Gut punch.

Are you a turn-off? Fatal blunders killing your customer relationships

Please welcome Guest Blogger, Lara Marlin Hull. Lara spent many years in the lab at Amylin Pharmaceuticals as a “bench monkey” and brings a fresh scientific voice to improving sales to scientists. We love her take on scientist relationships. Feel free to ask her a few questions.
Enjoy! – Rusty and Mark

by Lara Marlin Hull

Your customer relationships are your goldmine.  Once you get to move your scientist from Lead to Prospect, you’ve gotten your foot officially in the door – not easy in the life sciences industry.

As a former bench monkey figuring out all the sales and marketing magic that happens on the other side of the lab door, I still marvel at the power behind the idea (bear with me) of each scientist /prospective customer also representing this lab, this building, this campus - for years – way more valuable than a mere sale!

All the more reason to keep the relationship alive.  I’ll share some examples of customer relationship flops I have either experienced or heard about around the centrifuge.  They definitely don’t represent the typical scenario – but they help to illustrate my point that these situations wouldn’t have to end in misery.

Guiding Question

From what I’ve seen, “Is this good for my customer relationship?” could be an easy way to decide if tactics are going to be effective.

In any case, some of these missteps would put anyone in the doghouse  so don’t let them happen to you.

1.  Unfulfilled Promises

If there is one lot you can be realistic with, its scientists.  It’s nice for us to talk about you getting us a lower price than the current vendor, but if you can’t make that happen (or even have an inkling that you can’t), don’t say it, and really don’t promise it!   Imagine running a painstakingly long series of assays to compare media because New Vendor promised cheaper prices than Old Vendor.  After months of work, you find that New Vendor’s quote is, in fact, more than Old Vendor – !

The Sales Question that Engages Scientists and Qualifies Leads in Less than a Minute

by Rusty Bishop

Those who read this blog regularly know I am student of sales and marketing with 17 years of experience in the lab.   I question, I observe, I test, and I report my findings to you to help you sell better, because I believe you have the products to make scientists’ lives easier and better.

Last week I spent 4 straight days in the Exhibit Hall of the Neuroscience 2010 Meeting here in San Diego.

It was and is a golden opportunity to crush your numbers and generate hot leads.  Where else in the world do you have the chance to meet 35,000 potential customers?

35,000 potential sales and repeat sales!                          

Case Study – Conversions increase 5X for Assay Depot

This article is short case study about our successful project with AssayDepot.com which engaged Red Funnel to help diagnose and improve their website last spring. Working with their team has been a extremely enjoyable experience for Mark and I, we wish them continued success.

Case Study

Service: Full website and Analytics analysis using Red Funnel’s science SEO service.

Results: 5-fold increase in quote and info requests for Assay Depot’s clients.

Background: Assay Depot.com provides direct access to expert advice about scientific assays and contract research services (CROs) via their open web marketplace to scientists in Big Pharma, Biotech, and Academic research. The site is focused on 5 target assay and service areas- Biology, Chemistry, DMPK, Toxicology, and Pharmacology with several thousand webpages covering individual services. The business depends on scientists requesting information and quotes for research services through Assay Depot’s referral engine and expert scientific staff.

Assay Depot engaged Red Funnel improve the conversion rate of the quote request process.

The Engagement: Red Funnel identified the key causes of page abandonment based on traffic movement to the most popular assays and services using Google Analytics, science-based SEO, and User Interface (UI) testing.

We worked with the team at Assay Depot to improve these areas by adding Scientist-targeted SEO content and improving the UI to lead visitors to the assays they were seeking. Over the course of the improvments, we saw:

• Decreased Bounce Rate (10%)
• Increased Time on site (> 1min)
• Increased traffic to relevant assay pages
• 5-fold increase in conversions

The bottom line: Assay Depot is now capturing more traffic and converting more visitors; resulting in more quotes for their customers in the CRO and Life Science Service business from scientists in Pharma and Academia.

Conversation with Pharma Purchasing Reveals the Power of Repeat Customers

Conversation with Pharma Purchasing Reveals the Power of Repeat Customers

by Rusty Bishop

Last week I had the opportunity to talk with head of purchasing at a major Pharmaceutical Company in San Francisco. What I learned is having a major impact on your long term success.

I asked her about her interactions with the scientists in her firm, and we discussed the inherit difficulties of her job. She talked passionately about her problems getting scientists to switch to the products she worked so hard to get discounted for her company.

She even gave an example of one group practically rebelling against company directives to keep a more expensive product in their division. For her, it’s was a major point of frustration and embarrassment with management, but one she accepted as part of scientists’ “idiosyncrasies”.

Based on my own 17 years in the lab, I can tell you that once you provide me with a product that works in my experiment I will rarely switch to competitive product. Protocols for these experiments are typed, printed, and passed down in labs for years. For example, my lab has used Qiagen Hot Start Taq Polymerase since 1998. I visited the lab a few weeks back and saw a post-doc still using it. That’s 13 years of loyally purchasing $1,000.00 worth of kits every other week.

Furthermore, scientists carry the protocols onto their next position in academia or Pharma/Biotech.

Thus, the power of one single sale to a scientist is worth thousands of dollars in repeat buys over the long haul if the experiment works. Scientists are immensely loyal to the products they know and will defend them despite all evidence to the contrary.

The question is what are you doing to get that sale?

Here are a few ideas that can help, picked up from talking to successful sales reps in the last month:

• Be proactive at upcoming Conferences and Tradeshows  - get those Pharma scientists talking.
• Know every product in your catalog – you never know what a scientist needs.
• Join professional scientists networks online and in your area.  Not one in your area?  Then start one!

How to Sell More Products and Services to Pharmaceutical Scientists – Assay Depot’s Marketplace.

How to Sell More Products and Services to Pharmaceutical Scientists – Assay Depot’s Marketplace

by Rusty Bishop, PhD

One question we consistently get here at Red Funnel is, “How do we reach more scientists in Pharma/Biotech?”

It seems every sales representative or marketer we meet wants to penetrate that marketplace. And for good reason, there’s a lot of money there.

Big obstacles for marketers and sales reps are that the doors to labs are most definitely locked, emails are filtered, information restricted, and when they do order products, its often through complicated systems with major gatekeepers. So what to do?

There are companies that provide channels into specific marketplaces that you can use to your advantage. Similar to deciding whether to use a distributor to sell your products or not, do you spend your time and effort to penetrate a market yourself or do you work with other companies that have had more success in that effort? Finding complementary businesses or non-competitors that already have that channel is a great way of jumpstarting your efforts.

For the pharma market, enter Assay Depot.com.

What is Assay Depot?

Assay Depot is a marketplace for research services (assaydepot.com) that uniquely enables you to communicate directly with thousands of global research vendors to ask technical questions, create custom services, get price quotes and place orders  through their public website. The site is broken down into 5 main stores:

I bet your products fit in one of these categories!

• Biology – from antibody conjugation to anti-microbial screening
• Chemistry – from compound libraries to API synthesis
• DMPK – from Caco 2 cells to rat PK/PD studies
• Pharmacology – pretty much any animal disease model you can think of
• Toxicology – from Comet Assays to In vivo Tox studies

Within each category are 1000′s of individual assays, services, and research materials for sale. Each one has its own description accompanied by a list of companies offering the product or service. The site also provides easy links in which to contact the company or request information from Assay Depot’s team of experts.

That’s right. I said easy links to companies. (Links equal good stuff for search engine optimization.)

The Ask an Expert feature on each page is one of my favorite parts of the site. All a scientist has to do is request information on a particular assay or service and the experts at Assay Depot will seek out companies to do the work for them. What I wouldn’t have given for that when I was in the lab.

According to Kevin Lustig, Founder and CEO, “Assay Depot gets hundreds of requests per month with most of them coming from pharmaceutical companies.” (emphasis is mine)

They pass along quotes and have contact information for these scientists to get their experiments done by companies just like yours. For example, you can read about the $80,000 antibody order from a mid-sized pharma.

Of course, you will never see this posted on the site because the Pharma scientists generally are restricted from posting research-related questions on the internet.

The Inside Scoop

Here’s an insider tip – Assay Depot has done a superb job of building SEO into their site to specifically target Pharma, Biotech, and CRO scientists. (Full disclosure, Assay Depot is a client – I admit that we helped them a little.)

Red Funnel spent the last 6 months buried deep inside the web analytics of Assay Depot. One of the things that jumped out to us was all the visits from domains like pfizer.com, gsk.com, and novartis.com. Yep, scientists at Pharma companies were discovering assays and services at Assay Depot.com. In fact, they were spending a lot of time on the site investigating the range of services.

Why? Because it saves them time and money. It’s much easier to search a single site then the entire web, the information about services is organized so you can scan and compare, and it’s simple to make a quote requests that are forwarded to multiple CROs.

For more information on how to get involved with Assay Depot, visit their BackOffice Website.

Red Funnel digs the Assay Depot and benefits from giving you the inside scoop.  It’s hard to find those pesky pharma scientists who buy online!

Follow the Red Funnel on Twitter or subscribe to our newsletter for more.

Selling to a Scientist with an iPad’s Help – Rusty’s Story

Update: We have spent the last 6 months working in the field and observing Sales Reps using the iPad as a Sale Tool.

Our clients come from a variety of industries including Life Science, Medical, Food and Beverage, and Insurance. What have we learned? A lot!

To read about our observations check out these articles:

Selling to a Scientist with an iPad’s Help
Rusty Finally Sells to a Scientist

by Rusty Bishop

Last week I attended a BioTech Calendar vendor show in Los Angeles to visit two awesome life science sales representatives. For the last two months, they participated in the beta test program for our sales productivity app, FatStax for the iPad. They invited me to watch them in action.

My plan was to observe them in their job and to help them use the iPads and our app.

Guess again!

They ended up teaching me how to use FatStax, the app we created and developed. In the process, I got to sell a product to a scientist in person.

Two Reps – Two Styles.

(Names have been changed to protect the innocent)

When I arrived at the vendor show, I found Company X and Company Y’s booths were side-by-side. This gave me the perfect chance to observe both representatives selling their products to scientists. The two of them had been using our FatStax iPad app loaded with their respective product catalogs for the last few weeks.

It was instantly clear that both had developed a unique method for using the iPad to sell their products with FatStax.

The Attractor.

Sara set up her iPad display on the table, facing the customers. Her company’s logo filled the screen, instantly catching the scientists’ eyes. She asked them if they had one. Typically, they would ask her if the company was giving it away at the show, at which point she would say, “No, but I can use it to find products for research. What do you work on?”

This initiated a conversation and led to her looking up a specific product and showing it to the customer on the iPad. Frequently, the interested scientist asked for more information, which she emailed them from FatStax before they left the table.

My favorite moment of the day was when she looked back at me and said, “Did you see that one? He checked his email on his iPhone, and showed me the product email that I just sent. Too cool.”

Too cool indeed.

The Self-Seller.

Mary took a completely different approach. Her product catalog is much larger with around 5,000 SKUs, so there’s no way she could know everything she has for sale. Further, her company releases 5 – 10 new products per week.

Her tactic was to keep the iPad in her hand with the FatStax catalog open. Scientists approached the table and started leafing through brochures. Typically, she asked them what they worked on or if they were looking for specific reagents. Once they gave her that information, she handed them the iPad and showed them how to browse and search for products.

This browsing often led to the scientists discovering products that were useful for their research. One scientist enthusiastically jumped from product to product engaging the representative in a deep conversation about their application in his research project.

Many of them were emailing themselves product information – typing their contact information into the app’s email screen and tapping the send button.

I was floored. I never would have thought to simply hand the iPad to the buyer so they could search directly.

My turn.

Near the end of the day, I got chance to help with a customer. One of the reps was slammed with 5 customers at once and asked if I could jump in and help. I had her company’s product catalog on my iPad also, so I stepped up and asked a waiting scientist what she worked on.

She replied, “Immunology.” in heavily European accent.

I asked, “Are you looking for any particular reagent?”

She said, “No.” head down in a dry mono tone. Uh-oh, I was blowing it.

I asked, “What in particular do you do with Immunology?”

She said, “Cytokines.” in the same monotone.

So I typed “cytokine” into the FatStax search bar and handed her the iPad showing a list of the cytokine-related products. She didn’t even hesitate. She was tapping around, punching out to the website product page, asking questions about the app, about the products. I knew little about the products, but I am scientist, so together we found 2 products that she needed…

…and she emailed herself the information from my app. Just like I had seen all day.

After 10 months of writing incessantly about selling to scientists online, I finally got the chance to sell to a scientist face-to-face and scientist-to-scientist! I was stoked.

What I Learned.

The iPad can be a super-interactive business tool in the hands of an experienced field sales representative. It allows you to initiate a meaningful conversation and engage the customer in a discussion about their issues and quickly find the products that can help them.

It really is that simple.

(FatStax for iPad is currently available on the App Store. We developed this tool to help sales professionals in all industries access their product information at their fingertips to speed up the sales cycle and provide better customer service.)