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.

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.