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.

How to engage and connect with scientists at trade shows

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 – !

Every Page of Your Website is Your Face

Every Page of Your Website is Your Face

by Rusty Bishop

I previously wrote about how your website is like your face. It was a good article, but the statement was a little naive.

Now that we’ve reviewed over 30 websites with our QuickCheck Service, I’d like to modify that statement to more accurately reflect reality.

Every page of your website is your face

That’s right every page.

Think about the time you went to highly regarded restaurant with beautiful architecture, modern signs, and great food only to see tablecloths with food stains and frayed cloth napkins.  What did you remember?

The food stained cloth!

Why? Because it showed the restaurant didn’t care enough to clean the tablecloths or buy fresh ones. People notice when things are a bit out of place or don’t fit the picture. Its an intuitive response.

When you told your friends about the restaraunt, I bet you said, ” The food was great, but the tablecloths were dirty.”

Every page of your website speaks about how much your company cares in the same way.

In the modern web of Google, Bing, and Yahoo search, any page of your site can be directly landed on from the outside by a visitor looking for something they typed into the search bar. You need to be ready. From About Us, to Products, to Company Calendars, to Company News – the pages need to say,  ”Our service/product is the best and we love our customers. We want customers to love doing business with our company.”

Life science companies selling to scientists are a business-to-business dynamic. As such, the expectations are even higher for your products and website. A product purchase is an investment that has a direct impact on the success of a scientist’s research. Buying the wrong one from the wrong company can costs months of scientist’s life.

The reality is that most companies spend thousands of dollars on graphic design for their homepage, then neglect to update their calendar or their blog.  In fact, I’ve now seen 2 companies that haven’t updated their calendar of events since 2008! Its the dirty table cloth issue!

Scientists are just like everyone else.

We suffer the same biases as all humans.  Just like the dirty table cloth, no amount of product “data” makes up for the fact your site search engine doesn’t work properly and visitors can’t find your products easily.

We don’t remember your great graphics, your carefully crafted content, your sales offers.  Nope just that we couldn’t find your products on your website.  Case closed, Im moving on to a competitor’s site and products.

What you can do about it

Its time to take action. If your company’s website is getting complaints, take action yourself today.

Try one of these today:
1. Update your site with the right information. Whether it’s the latest trade show information, press releases or new product manuals, update them.

2. Solicit feedback from your customers about your site. Send them to your boss or post them by the water cooler late at night if you need to be anonymous.
 If your company won’t read them, send them to me and I will post them here anonymously for you. The internet gets the word out faster than you can imagine.

3. Get ideas – what consumer sites and business sites do you like? Pinpoint why you like them. Easy, fun, colorful, find-ability, clever, creative?
Take action and become indispensable! Your job depends on it.

A Great Branding Opportunity with Science Mag!

Science branding through careful banner design

by Rusty Bishop

This morning I was reading an article on Science Magazine’s website.  A friend sent the article to me by email, but when I clicked through I thought I was on ThermoFisher’s website.

Take a look at the screen shot.

This is a great banner ad from Thermo!

They placed the large Thermo Title exactly above the Science Header. Thermo catches the eye not Science. The black background of Thermo’s title really jumps out compared to the subtle colors of Science’s site.

If you’re designing a banner ad for Science Magazine’s website, you couldn’t find a better template. You don’t need a crazy flash banner to get the attention of websurfers on journal sites, just thoughtful design!

Our next few articles will focus on banner ads on scientific journal websites. If you’d like our scientists to have a look at your banner please enter the URL in the comments below or drop us a line.

What’s a Search Presentation Snippet and Why it’s Important for your Site

Google Is Your Homepage – Part 2 -”The Snippet Text”

by Rusty Bishop,PhD

Search Presentation is the way your relevant page links appear to searchers in Organic Search results. In normal person speak, those are all the links that Google serves up in “blue, black, and green” when you search, not the ads that you never click.

In the Google-driven internet, it is critical that your Search Presentation contains appealing, information-rich text to attract visitors to your site.

I recently wrote about the three parts of the Search Presentation. Let’s quickly review based on the example below.

1. Page Title

2.Snippet

3. URL (web address)

Importance of the Snippets – Think Abstract

Studies show that many searchers rapidly scan snippets looking for key information (Google actually published 1 sec as the average time) about the relevancy of your offering.

The snippet is a great place to capture visitors with targeted key phrases and information that explains exactly what the visitor can expect to find when they choose your webpage.

In science terms, consider it the Abstract of your product or service page. For those not familiar, take a look at any scientific manuscript, the Abstracts are the first content you see.

Like any good Abstract, the snippet should contain easily readable text that entices the searcher to click through to your site.

Most companies we see in our QuickChecks fail to capitalize on the snippet opportunity. So let’s fix it!

Where does the Search Snippet Come From?

Snippets mostly come from two places on your webpage.

1. The meta description – in your site’s code, but only seen in Search Presentation

2. The page content – in your site’s content, can be shown in Search Presentation

In both cases, the text is copied by a search spider and indexed along with the page.

When someone enters a search string, Google presents the text usually containing one or more terms from the search in the snippet (see the example above my search terms are in bold in the snippet).

Why is the Snippet Broken or Showing Non-Sense Text?

Google and other engines will give preference to the meta description only when it contains terms entered in the search by the searcher.

Otherwise, Google will show random snippets of text from the page it “thinks” is relevant to the search in an attempt to query this searcher.

The meta description and snippet are limited to 157 characters.

For this reason, you see broken text strings like the above example ending in “…” when the words in a searchers query are contained in different parts of your content or you write meta descriptions longer than 157 characters.

How Do I get Google to Show What I Want?

Remember the job of Search Companies (Google, Bing, Yahoo) is to return the most relevant results to their customer, the searcher.

I like to imagine the Google Organic Results are saying – “Is this what you’re looking for?”

Our job as marketers then is to help search engines associate our products with what our customers might enter into their search query.

For example, if your product is an antibody, an academic scientist might enter western blot or anti-mouse along with a specific protein name.  Those terms can be added into the meta description underlying your product page to grab the attention of the searcher.

I might restate the above as – - By anticipating what terms scientists might search for to find your product you can provide attractive words to entice clicks to your page.

Of course you won’t get them all in 157 characters, so you have to target correctly based on research and market segmentation.

Sounds like work, huh?

It is work, but if you do it correctly you will get more relevant click throughs from Organic Searchers that drives more sales and leads.

Once again-

Remember the job of Search Companies (Google, Bing, Yahoo) is to return the most relevant results to their customer, the searcher.

They want people to keep using their search engine.

The more that people use their search engine, the more money they make.

It’s also how you make money, because Google is Your Homepage!

In our next article, we’ll show you how we work with our clients to write great meta descriptions to attract scientists.

The iPad as a Sales Tool – Sightings at the AACR Meeting

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:

The iPad as a Sales Tool – Sightings at the AACR Meeting

by Mark Walker

Walking around AACR this past week, I saw a couple of companies using iPads to share product information and results with visitors. In one respect, the iPad is just another tool available, and right now, it’s a novelty. But the potential is there to be a game-changer. I am betting that at next year’s meeting, it will be significantly more  common than not.

An instrument company was showing the fruits of their cool imaging machine on the high-resolution iPad screen. The reps held the iPad in a cover that fit in their hand nicely for display to their audience. They quickly located an image example and easily zoomed in to point out their high resolution Western blot bands.

A reagent company was using it to share the educational tools they currently have on their website. With interactive PDF’s created for other channels loaded onto the iPad, they were able to drill down and jump to linked pages when appropriate for the discussion. Taking existing sales tools and adapting them to a different platform is a pretty common way to test new technology.

Ok, so nothing revolutionary yet, but the potential is there. Here are some reasons why I think it will be a key selling tool in this industry:

Multi-Media

Complex subjects become more understandable when you can demonstrate the products or services. The life science tools marketplace launches more technically complex products every month. Helping prospects understand what your product does and how that will solve their problems is critical. With high-resolution color screens, images can be sized without loss of clarity, which is great for images. Video can be very helpful in explaining different aspects of new technology, even if when the rep is not an expert.

Portability

All those nice customer resources and product decision tools you spent time and money on in your website can be in your sales force’s hands. If customers don’t know what kit to buy, then walk them through buyer funnel on the iPad screen. It’s on your website, but it’s really powerful when a rep can incorporate that resource in a product discussion. Hunting for an open computer in a customer lab to use the site is a hurdle that most reps won’t jump. When you have the power of multimedia in your hands in the size of a notebook , it’s going to get used with customers more often.

Ease of Use

Computer tablets have been around for a while, and they haven’t caught on. I think it’s because they ARE computers. With the iPad, moving around the screen is much easier. Zooming in and out are simple finger swips, not pressing a special key combination.

Another writer observed that it’s a single hand device, unlike other tablets. That frees up your other hand for directing a prospect’s attention to the content they are emphasizing. A small detail but critical for effective sales presentations.

Simplicity

Pundits have complained that it is somehow an inferior device because its you can’t run excel or similar programs on it. How about trading off that capability for a simpler product with a lot more reliability. Ever try to get someone to help fix a problem with your laptop when you are working after hours or early in the morning? Maybe less complexity is a good thing.

Interactive

Effective sales presentations involve more than one sense. If you only talk about a product, it’s less effective than showing prospects the product and having them try it. Having interactive materials at your fingertips that can get prospects engaged will multiply the impact of the presentation.

Can companies in this marketplace be successful without using the iPad? Of course!

The visual element is underrated and underutilized in this marketplace with text-heavy websites and product information. The organizations that can figure out how to best illustrate their technically complex products and that captures researcher’s attention and interest are going to be winners. The iPad can be the companion tool helping your sales and technical support groups communicate more effectively.

Sales tips for selling to scientists can be hard to find. Find more by following us on Twitter here. Also, become a fan of Red Funnel Consulting on Facebook today!