Life Science Sales – First Day on the Job Advice From a Veteran

by Mark Herb

If you’re new to life science sales AND don’t have a technical background – Wow!  Congrats!

At last, you’ve ditched in the lab bench, the cell culture hood, and that annoying timer that beeps at the wrong times (except when you set it to go off in the middle of a boring meeting to help you escape – admit it, we’ve all done it!).

You’ve made the leap.  You’re finally in life science sales.  Now what…?

Much like me, you probably came to technical sales heavy on the “technical” and light on the “sales”.

Not to worry.   “Been there, done that” and we’re here to help.

Sure sounds simple, but there’s more to it than proclaiming, “We’ve got great products…so how many can I put you down for?”

Let’s begin your journey selling to scientists.

Life Science Sales – Are you ready to make the leap?

Being new to anything, there is always the dreaded learning curve that most wish they could skip.   In the following series, I’ll try to offer newly-minted life science sales reps pearls of wisdom that can help make this transition smooth and less painful.

Caution!  All this may seem obvious but trust me, not everyone gets it yet.  With any advice, take what you need, toss what you don’t but remember as sales professionals selling to scientists, you’ve got to be on your game and ready for anything.

Use these tips if they can help:

Be trainable!

Most newbies to sales will be shipped off to some form of sales training.  Go with it and embrace it.  Remember, everyone develops their own selling style over time but right now you don’t have a “selling style” so using formal selling instruction and skills help get you up and running.  There’s time to polish the message but build a foundation first.

I thought I was ready to sell…let’s face it, how tough could it really be…?  Turns out formal sales training was one of the best things for me.

Organize, organize!

If your lab bench was featured in an issue of Martha Stewart Living, chances are you’ve got the neat and tidy thing licked.  If, on the other hand, you had trouble even locating your lab space at times, get it together and tighten up your game.

A home office is probably in the cards so make sure you’ve got dedicated space for business.  Clean, neat, and equipped for action.  Remember this space must be fully functional and properly set up to be effective.  You’ll need to stay organized and on top of things as you’ll probably be multitasking more than ever before!

For example, I would advise against sending a sensitive email quote to the wrong customer or getting one lab confused with another and having the incorrect products shipped there…I’m not saying it was me…ok, it was me.

Get your “tech” on!

When things get tough, the tough go for comfort – we’re all human.

Early in the transition to sales, use your technical background to help ease the sting.  Continue to develop the business acumen to manage the territory but don’t fear sticking close to your comfort zone at first.

Many won’t agree with this approach but it worked for me and others I know.

Initially, you do what works for you (and hey, most scientists like to talk about their work – like the one that told me to dispense with the introductions – it was time to talk about HIM – I guess he was eager to share…).

Talking “tech” can build rapport and confidence with customers.

Next time, we’ll chat about other things that appear to be common sense yet somehow slip through the cracks when selling to scientists…see you next round.  I welcome your experiences and comments below.

Secret Scientist Meeting Found – Lead Generation Gold Mine for Reps

by Rusty Bishop

Dear Life Science Sales Reps and Managers Here’s a Secret

If I were to tell you about a place you could go once per week for 1 hr to generate new leads, meet PIs, meet post-docs, learn how scientists are using your products, and develop a better friend base at your accounts…

would you go, sales reps?

What if I told you this 1hr meeting is happening on every scientific campus in the world…

would you skip it for a coffee break?

Further, the person leading the 1 hr meeting is virtually guaranteed to be working in Pharma or be an influencer at their next academic science post.

Would that help your sales?

Finally and most important, this meeting is 100% OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

Yep, it’s called a thesis defense. They happen all the time at your accounts and they are open to the public.

Science Sales Gold Mine

On Monday I had the privilege of going to the thesis defense of an old friend. As I listened to Chris talk about his 6 years of academic torture, it dawned on me that thesis defenses are an absolute gold mine for a local life science rep.

Here are my actual notes from his defense

1. Support your best clients and meet new ones.
2. There are 7 PIs- one is a National Academy member another is world renowned for the discovery of the link between cholesterol and heart disease!
3. 62 Scientists in attendance (5 relatives)
4. Learn about what frustrates scientists and creates sales questions that lead to your products.
5. Social Media (Twitter, LinkedIn) potential contacts are everywhere.
6. Learn about how scientists are using your products.
7. He’s going to work at a huge Pharma company! Winner!

Here is a running list of scientific assays and reagents mentioned (bold added for multiple mentions)

Ifa, staining, microscopes, hplc, tissue staining,
Pngasef, antibodies, western blots, mice, histology, flow cytometry,
endothelial markers, cells, tumor models, knockout mice,
biotinylation, culture, seras human, elisas, recombinant proteins,
complement systems induction, immunizations, diets for mice, metabolic
cages, fplc

Sell any of those? I bet you do.

All that in a 1hr thesis defense. In my mind it’s a rep’s dream come true.

The Sales Rep Approach

1. I suggest attending a few of these and listening first. Take a lot of notes.

2. If you know the scientist who is defending their thesis, BRING A GIFT. Amazon gift cards are great (so is booze, but you gotta know the scientist.)

3. Attend the after party, but do not under any circumstances talk work or try to sell something. That comes later.

4. Bring business cards. Pass them out if asked only.

5. Make friends. The party will be stuffed with people that buy your products from PIs to purchasing to post-docs. Once again don’t try to sell them. Be interested in their research. Remember their names. Next time you walk through the lab things will go much smoother.

Next time you’re on campus

Keep your eye out for fliers that say “Thesis Defense.”  I bet there is at least one at the campus you visited today!

Good luck out there and as always leave us any comments or suggestions for new blogs.

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.

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!

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.)

Launching FatStax for iPad

Today is the culmination of about 4 months worth of work for us at Red Funnel. We launched a new iPad app for sales productivity called FatStax. It got approved last night and is sitting on the App Store. We are excited and think it can make a real difference for many sales teams.

Briefly, we created a service that puts company product information easily and quickly onto the iPad so that sales forces can find their products at a tap and then send product details to the buyer, without having to use the website or carry a laptop. There are full details at our new website, www.FatStax.com.

Why?

Frankly, we saw a need and an opportunity for us to create a product that would be useful to a lot of sales forces. When you have selling responsibility for lots of products, it’s not easy to keep track of what’s new, changed, or frankly, everything that is in your catalog. We see examples of potential buyers asking reps in this industry if they have a specific product and then the mad scramble to find it before they leave begins. Sales reps should have that information at their fingertips. At least that’s what we think.

As we talk to our friends and family about what we are doing, they constantly come up with new industries where FatStax can be useful. Even though we started in life sciences, we are learning about other markets where sales people need to have a better way of finding their own products and sending the information immediately to buyers.

Breakout

We’ve been pretty quiet about the project online primarily because we wanted to be sure it worked well (it does). But we have been sharing the app with individual reps for weeks. We have several beta testers that have been using it with some terrific feedback and ideas that made the final product even better.

The whole process of developing a business app for a relatively new mobile device has been rewarding and frustrating at the same time. We plan to write about our experiences in the coming weeks. We are keeping a running list of what we would do again and what we would try not to repeat.

What’s Next?

We enjoy working with clients on their business issues and particularly on their websites. We don’t intend to stop doing that. There is a huge sense of satisfaction when you contribute in helping another business succeed. We intend on continuing to write about issues in the life sciences market place, largely due to all the great feedback we have received.

We also think that mobile devices will radically change the way business and sales works. Having the most relevant information at your fingertips, in front of customers, has the potential for vastly increasing productivity and the value of a sales force. We have a passion for that and want to be a part of that change. Look for us to write about our experiences and thoughts about this industry, too.

If you have an iPad, download FatStax for free and use it with the sample database we included. Let us know what you think here or on the comments section on iTunes.