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.

How to engage and connect with scientists at trade shows

The Secret Product Your Customers Want

How?  They know their audience – really well.

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.

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!                          

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!

EMD’s Got a Cool New iPad App

EMD’s Got a Cool New iPad App

by Rusty Bishop

There’s no secret about it, I love the iPad. Those that have seen me at life science trade shows in San Diego always want to check it out. I’m seeing more and more reps out there using it as a sales tool with interactive PDFs, web links, and CRM systems like SalesForce.

I was pretty jazzed to see that EMD Chemicals has new app for the Periodic Table of Elements available for free in the iTunes store. The app gets very solid reviews from users and students, so I decided to have a look.

Overall, the interface is very slick with a cool looking Periodic Table on a black background. Tapping any element will pop-up a large version with text-book type information like atomic radius, melting point, and boiling point. Further, each element contains a history complete with the discoverer! Pretty slick!

Love the interface on EMD's iPad Application

The app is intuitive and simple, yet deep enough that you can really drill down into details about a specific element.

Features

The app has a number of great features that are accessible from the tiny little M button on the top left.

Looking down the list you will see Classification, Atomic Properties, State at Room Temperature, Property Ranking, and Discovery. Tapping these allows you to learn about the elements that fit a given parameter by highlighting them in the big old table of elements.

Want to know what elements were discovered before Christ was born? 11 (How do they know that?)

How about elements that are gases at zero degrees Celcius? 11

I could geek out on this alone for hours.

How this App Sells to Scientists

The app is surprisingly unbranded, but that’s cool too. It says, “We just made for you school children of the world, when you grow up and become chemists you will think of EMD.” Love it!

There is some product ordering information buried deep within the individual elements that will lead you to the ordering page on the EMD-Merck Website. I’m sure that pleases the execs at EMD, but I doubt that it’s used very often. However, I did find some interesting detection kits that I didn’t know about. I hope they are tracking iPad links in their analytics program!

Summary

All in all, the EMD Periodic Table App is a great use of the iPad and I’m certain it will downloaded by a lot of students and chemists. Great job, EMD!

Red Funnel is hard at work on our first iPad app. Launching soon, FatStax is a sales productivity tool for the life sciences built by sales people for sales people. We hope you love it!

Digging into Scientists and Social Media

The Language of Science for Marketers and Sales – Part 2

by Rusty Bishop

Last week, I explained how you can use online tools to carefully dissect what products scientists are searching for online and determine the exact phrases they are using. If you haven’t read the post, have a look now. I’ll be right here waiting on you with part 2.

Discover what scientists want by speaking the language

Now that we are armed with the knowledge that the majority of Google searchers call a pcr machine a “Thermal Cycler” and we have developed a nice list of popular secondary search terms (real time, troubleshooting, gradient, multiplex), it’s time to get into some real conversations.

Here’s what you are listening for:

Social Media

1. What type of content are scientists seeking (protocols, specs, technical resources, reviews)?
2. What is the context of the conversation about my products? experiments vs purchase decisions
3. What is the general sentiment about my products? positive? negative?
4. Where is the conversation happening? Facebook? Twitter? Discussion Boards?

Armed with this information, marketers can make informed decisions about the type of content that needs to be created and where to place the messages outside of your website. For example, maybe your audience would value a scientific publication review of your key products for your blog and Facebook page.

The 5 Minute Exercise! – Part 2

So let’s take the above guidelines and see what we can learn in 5 minutes.

1. Open up your favorite Social Media Search Tool. Don’t have one? Try ours for free. It searches many sites that scientists visit online to talk to one another. (Shameless self-promotion). Other examples might include Facebook, Twitter, etc. I don’t normally find many scientists discussing products on those popular sites however.
2. Enter your product terms, with modifiers from your secondary search terms. I’m entering  - “thermal cycler real time”.
3. Scan the results and click on those that seem interesting.  The objective is to gather sentiment and learn how scientists are talking about your products.
4. Content – I see words like –  ”protocol“, “demo“, “shopping“, “program“.
5. Context – The conversation seems to be around both purchase decisions (Ebay) and experiments (degenerate primers).
6. Sentiment-  That PCR machine from Perkin Elmer is actually a really good deal.” Why is it a good deal? What do these scientists like about the product?
7. Where – Science Blogs, Biotechniques, Protocol Online.
8. Finally, take a look at the Pay Per Click ads Google is serving up. Who is competing for the same terms as your product?  What terms are they adding to their PPC campaigns?  Look at the landing pages for each of the ads.

Did you grab your .co yet?

Time to grab your .co extension

by Rusty Bishop

July 20th marked the public release of a new web extension for businesses, the .co.

No, thats not a typo its .co not .com.

If you are an established company building a microsite or a new CRO that doesn’t want to use some crazy acronym now is the time to act.

For example as of this writing, Westernblot.co is still available for $30!

To put it in perspective there are 9 million websites registered with .com extensions and as of this morning there are only 330,000 .co extensions.

More reasons to get a .co

1. Prevent competitors from pulling traffic from you by registering your business name.

2. More doors equals more opportunities.  Add a new portal to your website.  How about invitrogenantibodies.co with a 301 redirect to the Invitrogen antibody page?  The possibilities for SEO and Search presentation are endless!

The price is small!

Happy selling.

Rusty is passionate about sellingtoscientists.co! Get his advice regularly by Twitter here. Also, become a fan.