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David Ormesher, the CEO of CGLife, and I had a conversation about communicating science broadly to the public and within the scientific community. David went immediately to the power of storytelling in making science approachable. He highlighted the hero’s journey, the narrative arc used in literature and film, as a powerful tool to engage various audiences, whether they are scientists, physicians, patients, or the general public.
That narrative of the hero’s journey applies to patients and caregivers as well as scientist looking for breakthroughs. Not only can it help demystify science but it can also create emotional connections that make complex scientific concepts more relatable and engaging for the general public.
I think it’s important for society to understand and appreciate the work of scientists as well as understand how science is done especially when the details might not seem immediately relevant to them. By highlighting the human element and the persistence required in scientific exploration, we can help the public understand that scientists are ordinary people with an extraordinary commitment to solving complex problems. This can shift the public perception from seeing science as something inaccessible to recognizing it as a collective effort aimed at improving lives as well as simply appreciating the universe we live in.
What does this mean for life science marketers? David gave us a complete primer on the journey of a new medical product from inception to market launch. I was roughly aware of the roles various teams play in bringing a new drug to market. He covered the spectrum and filled in the details for me. Market insight, brand development, and market shaping involves understanding the needs of both physicians and patients, conducting extensive research, and building awareness through unbranded communications. As has come up several times over the years on this podcast, the importance of early engagement with healthcare professionals and patients before a product is approved can not be overstated. It helps ensure that by the time a drug is approved, there is demand and a well-informed audience.
It's that ability to personalize content that is also key. And this is where not only the agencies of the future that we need to help shepherd these products from clinical development through approval, launch and growth, they need to understand the science. They also need to understand that digital component of targeting, segmentation, (and) personalization.
Data and analytics play a critical role in this process. By capturing and analyzing data from the early stages, companies can refine their marketing strategies, personalize content, and measure the effectiveness of their campaigns. This data-driven approach ensures that the communication is relevant and impactful, reaching the right audience with the right message at the right time.
One aspect I found particularly interesting was the preparation for day zero – the day the FDA approves a new drug. David described having all the marketing materials ready, including a “day one” website and direct email marketing. At the same time, a launch team needs to be prepared to very quickly make any changes required for labeling, etc. when the approval comes along.
Finally, we touched on the challenges of educating physicians about the latest medical advancements. For a doctor who completed medical school 20 years ago, and has been seeing patients all day every day, keeping up to date is near impossible. Highly targeted communications including bite-sized, relevant, and easily accessible content, such as short video interviews and 3D animations can help physicians keep up with the latest developments.
As marketers, there is plenty of work to be done to keep both the public and people in the healthcare sector educated on the value of the science being done, ultimately helping patients find the treatments they need.
Your deepest insights are your best branding. I’d love to help you share them. Chat with me about custom content for your life science brand. Or visit my website.
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By now, I imagine most of you have interacted with ChatGPT in some way. You can use it to summarize a document, brainstorm a campaign or plan a vacation away from technology. The capabilities are mind-boggling and the BS (if you detect it) is amusing. All that aside, how can you use an internal vertical GPT to serve your customers?
I spoke to Ian Birkby, CEO of AZONetwork about Azthena, the internal vertical GPT they built as an AI assistant deployed on their various websites to help users find relevant news and product information. If you are not familiar with AZONetwork, Chat GPT describes them like this:
The AZoNetwork is a company that specializes in digital marketing and content solutions within the science, healthcare, and technology sectors. They provide a range of services aimed at connecting scientific, medical, and technology communities globally. These services include content creation, marketing strategies, and communication solutions designed to disseminate knowledge and promote products through various online platforms. AZoNetwork operates several websites that publish articles, news, and resources relevant to professionals in these fields, helping them to stay informed about the latest developments and technologies.
As a media and marketing company, AZONetwork has a lot of content, over a million assets, by Ian’s estimate. This is the content was used to train Azthena to to answer users queries.
The value of this type of GPT is that the data it has been trained on has been reviewed and vetted by humans in the course of publication over many years. The same can’t be said for everything one finds on the internet, some of which ends up in the answers to your ChatGPT queries, not to mention outright hallucinations.
General LLMs, if I'm going to exaggerate, are a mile wide and a few inches deep. We're trying to be, you know, maybe 12 inches wide, but three foot deep… - Ian Birkby
Azthena took nine months to build. That was impressive to me given that includes putting some structure around all of their content.
The quality of the output should enhance the customer experience by providing specific answers to queries along with relevant references.
If you find this helpful, it kind of makes sense to subscribe, doesn’t it?
Ian and I discussed what this will mean for companies, buyers and human creativity broadly.
External GPTs trained on the same broad collections of data may all end up homogenized. How will you differentiate your company to be a source of unique and valuable (essential) information? Building your own specialized GPT is one possible answer.
We agreed that the buyer’s journey will change. Once people adapt to the new approach (this will take some time but too much), they’ll expect to find answers and recommended next steps regarding what to look for or look at along the way to a purchase. No more clicking through multiple links hoping to find the best information. As I write that last sentence, I’m stunned at how quickly we are spoiled by new technologies. I’m old enough to remember mailing away to get a catalog or brochure from one vendor! If you are a marketer, you should be thinking about what comes next.
In reaction to this change, big information providers e.g. The Guardian, etc. are blocking crawlers from sucking up their information. Models built on search might also change. Will we have to pay for things that were free for the last 20 years?
Finally, I asked Ian about the future of human creativity.
…emotional intelligence… that's definitely an area where, you know, the human has still got a role I think, in that, very pure form of creativity… seeing what nobody else has seen before and thinking something different. You know, that I still think there's mileage in, in humans having a role to play there. However, there's probably 80 percent of the drudgery-related tasks that we all face that are going to end up sitting on the desk of AI.
But for those routine tasks, the efficiencies will be too attractive to pass up. The next question is where is the line that makes a task routine?
Your deepest insights are your best branding. I’d love to help you share them. Chat with me about custom content for your life science brand. Or visit my website.
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Susanna Harris is the Director of Community at Breakout Ventures. She is also the Founder of PhD Balance, a collaborative community empowering graduate students to build their personal and professional resilience and the 2023 recipient of the SAMPS Young Person of the Year Award.
This episode is a little different. For the last couple of years, I have interviewed the winner of that SAMPS award on this podcast. Susanna has been a guest before and although we’ve chatted a few times since and both live in the Bay Area, we had never met face to face. Susanna mentioned hiking in one of our calls so I thought this would be an opportunity try something new. I suggested we meet up for a hike and record some stuff along the way. Thank you Susanna for being game for one more experiment.
We had a free-flowing conversation covering our inspirations in science, science communication, marketing, career paths, longevity, mental health, and more. AI, psychedelics and The Andromeda Strain all came up as well. Give it a listen to find out the context.
I typically focus these episodes around a theme and try to point toward a specific takeaway. While there is a thread to the topics we discussed, the takeaway for me this time was simply about the value of conversation. I trust that the listeners to this podcast will learn something about each of us and may be prompted to think about something they heard from a new perspective.
As a listener, you don’t have to be part of a conversation to benefit from it. That’s the magic of this medium. You can listen in as if you were there. Taking that beyond podcasts, consider the value of people listening to your team members, executives and subject matter experts in their natural, unscripted style. Podcast listeners report (and I can verify this both as a host and a listener) that they feel like they know the people they hear from regularly. There is a level of know, like, and trust that is hard to replicate except face-to-face.
Finally, one never knows where having a conversation will lead in the long run. I don’t even remember how Susanna and I connected initially. Yet here we were, 3 years later, hiking the hills, sharing our experiences in science and creating unique content along the way. If we get a chance to help one another out in the future, that would be icing on the cake. It all started with a conversation.
Mentioned in this episode:
Books: Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson
The End of the World is Just The Beginning by Peter Zeihan
Movie: The Andromeda Strain (also a book by Michael Crichton)
Your deepest insights are your best branding. I’d love to help you share them. Chat with me about custom content for your life science brand. Or visit my website.
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Jeffrey Kiplinger is the co-founder and partner at Selling Science, a consulting firm dedicated to helping life science, contract research, and tools companies boost revenue by building and optimizing their scientific sales teams. He is also the author of the book "Expert to Entrepreneur."
Jeff shared his personal journey from obtaining a PhD in organic chemistry in the late '80s to his corporate experience with Pfizer. He highlighted the frustrations he faced being siloed in his role and the desire to take his expertise on the road.
I appreciate his perspective on the disconnect many scientists face when building businesses. I guess I would say, your expertise is the product, but it is not the business. I’m still chewing on that one as I think there is a lot to be learned from that. Jeff emphasized the importance of viewing the business as an entity itself, separate from the scientific expertise it offers, and focusing on growing the business side.
Personally, I find marketing easy (talking about what I do). But sales is hard (asking for money). We talked about that and how to find the right people for your offering, stressing the need to identify the ideal customer and tailor marketing efforts to address their specific problems.
What is, what do you do that's provided real value for your customers in the past? And the easiest way to find that out is to ask them. And that's also something that we're terrified of doing.
I asked him about a quote from Brian Tracy. “Sales is just a transfer of enthusiasm.” When you believe in what you have, you can have a conversation and talk about why you are enthusiastic. But first you need to find out if the person in front of you has a problem you can solve.
If you find this helpful, it kind of makes sense to subscribe, doesn’t it?
Thanks for spending some time here, either way.
The conversation also touched on hiring experienced salespeople, both within and outside the scientific domain, and the critical factor of finding the perfect customer. Jeff outlined the significance of defining an ideal customer profile, which guides marketing efforts and ensures a more focused and effective approach. Does the salespersons skills and experience match what you are trying to do? Do they have the right mix of science and sales expertise? For example, selling from a catalog is different from selling a solution comprising components from a catalog.
If you're buying somebody's expertise in your science and they can't sell, that's a wasted investment. If you're buying somebody's network and their network isn't your ideal customer base, that's a waste.
…I guess what I see is when people hire experienced sales reps or senior people who've already got field experience, very frequently they're not looking at whether that person is a match for what you're trying to achieve. They might be a match for your company, they might be a match in terms of the revenue they've produced in the past, but are you really checking them against what the company is trying to do?
If you are on the road to selling your hard-earned scientific expertise, you should definitely give this episode a listen.
Your deepest insights are your best branding. I’d love to help you share them. Chat with me about custom content for your life science brand. Or visit my website.
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Note: For this episode, I asked ChatGPT to write a summary based on the transcript of our conversation. I enjoy doing these interviews and consider myself a decent writer. However, it takes a lot of time each week to write a summary that I find minimally satisfying and acceptable. You deserve better and I can put my efforts to better use elsewhere or upgrading the whole experience here. I did lightly edit this to make it sound as if I could have written it. This is my second attempt following some feedback from a respected colleague (you know who you are). I’m beginning to see how my own style differs from ChatGPT, even if what it produces is perfectly readable, but somewhat less memorable. Let me know what you think in the comments.
Miranda Lipton is a talented freelance writer, photographer, and multimedia storyteller. In this episode we talked about earned media from a freelancer's perspective, focusing on how companies can collaborate with freelancers to get their stories published in widely read publications. Our discussion centered around Miranda's recent success in securing a feature in Fast Company about cultivated meat from fish. Our conversation should be enlightening for both freelancers and the companies that work with them.
Miranda's Journey into Freelance Writing
Miranda journey into freelance writing began in high school, and continued at the local town newspaper, a path that eventually led her to major in journalism at Ohio State University. Her desire to explore different facets of storytelling, including writing and photography, drove her to the freelance world.
The Genesis of the Lab-Grown Fish Story
Miranda's fascination with food sustainability and innovation in the past few years led her to investigate the idea lab-grown fish. The idea for the article emerged from a deep dive into the world of lab-grown meat, a concept that had been around for nearly a decade. Miranda recognized a gap in coverage, particularly in the realm of lab-grown fish, which was an emerging and innovative field. This, combined with her passion for food sustainability, created the perfect recipe (ChatGPT made a pun!) for a compelling story. She did her research and interviewed folks at relevant companies, eventually leading to the publication of her story in Fast Company.
The Art of Pitching to Publications
I was curious about the pitch process. How did she get an articled idea accepted at Fast Company? She utilizes a consistent pitch outline, typically comprising two to three paragraphs that encapsulate the essence of the story. Miranda stressed the importance of familiarity with the publication's focus. In her case, she had been an avid reader of Fast Company for years, allowing her to confidently identify the magazine as an ideal platform for her lab-grown fish story. .
Navigating Interviews with Companies
While pitching to publications can be challenging, arranging interviews is more straightforward. Companies are generally eager to discuss their work. Her process involves reaching out to individuals at relevant companies, often beginning with CEOs or co-founders identified through LinkedIn. Of course, it’s important to gather a diverse range of perspectives to provide a well-rounded view of the subject.
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Feedback and Challenges
I asked her if she had gotten any feedback. While direct feedback from readers is not common, she occasionally receives emails from individuals who have read her articles. The overarching response to her articles on topics like lab-grown and 3D-printed food often revolves around skepticism and the novelty of the subjects. Many readers express interest in these innovations as well as uncertainty about trying them. The unfamiliarity of concepts such as 3D-printed food explains their hesitation. She thinks that as research in these fields progresses, more people will embrace these innovations. I have similar feelings of hesitation. I did an episode several years ago on the SDBN podcast.
Guidance for Companies Seeking Media Coverage
For companies without extensive PR resources, it is still possible to secure media coverage. Miranda recommended using platforms like Muck Rack to connect with journalists directly. The key is to reach out to journalists who cover topics relevant to the company's work. Tailored and timely pitches can catch a journalist's attention and pave the way for a mutually beneficial collaboration.
Collaborating with Freelancers
To get the writer’s attention and interest, you need a story with a clear angle and a sense of timeliness. Timeliness is one of the most critical factors. A story needs to be relevant in the current moment or have enduring relevance. Other elements, such as impact, prominence, proximity, and oddity, can also contribute to making a story compelling and newsworthy.
Understanding the freelance writer's perspective and the dynamics of storytelling can be instrumental in building successful media relationships and getting your stories into the limelight.
Your deepest insights are your best branding. I’d love to help you share them. Chat with me about custom content for your life science brand. Or visit my website.
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All of us in the life sciences are in the business of making the world healthier. The instruments and reagents we sell and the technologies and therapies that result save lives.
A scientist (after a lot of research) will look at a disease or problem and say, “I think I can find a way to fix that.”
Can we, as an industry, look at trade shows like a scientist would, and ask, “How can we do this better and stick to our mission of making the world at least less sick if not healthier?”
If you’ve been with me for a while, you know I have a love-hate relationship with trade shows. When I was a MarCom director, events were by far the biggest part of my budget. I imagined all the other awesome campaigns I could execute with that money. And then there is the waste. The stuff that ends up in the hotel trash before you get back on the plane and the shipping of huge amounts of equipment all over the world.
On the other hand, if a lot of customers are going to be in one place at the same time… it makes sense to take your offering to them. And human connection is important.
I know it’s important because this episode came out of my trip to ADLM, the event formerly known as AACC.
Stuart Warrington is the CEO of Envoke. They create virtual demos to make your instruments accessible at more events and present a consistent story across the customer journey. More on that below.
Stuart is a filmmaker. He has been created videos for the likes of Thermo and Bio-Rad. Videos used to have a longer useful lifespan. Then his customers wanted new content at a faster pace that was more engaging. Stuart suggested video games.
“No. That’s not it.”
“How about a virtual demo?
“Yes!”
It turns out those are basically the same thing just packaged differently. (They are both virtual experiences that tell a story with the user as the hero.) Stories are the key here. (The crowd cheers.)
People need to tell their own story, right? And sales and training and all that is about that. It's like, how can I communicate the message of what this thing does in the most accurate possible way? And you need to give people freedom to craft that story. And that's why we do things the way we do them.
We make this story block library and it's loads of little clips. And in each clip tells its own individual message. And then your user, your sales rep, your engineer, your trainer can take from that library and craft this story. It might be about a really specific bit of qPCR on the qPCR devices in the platform. And you know your customer only really cares about that. So we give you the opportunity to just pull those bits in and tell a story that is about your product with your product rather than PowerPoint presentations and brochures and videos and things like that. It just takes that to a slightly higher level and it also then starts saving you loads of money on shipping. Right?
The result is that consistent experience for the user from the web to sales to training to maintenance and service. We talked about training people the same way pilots train. On a simulation. They can make mistakes without breaking an expensive piece of kit.
Not subscribed yet? It would mean a lot to me.
Thanks for spending some time here, either way.
In addition to the contribution to sustainability without shipping products, the ability to customize a story improves the sales process.
So one of our customers built a storyline for the event from the story block library. So they built something that was like, this is what we want to talk about. This is the story we're telling here. But then what it also did was they put on a QR code, so that you scan the QR code as your customer, and what you do is, you walk away with a different storyline that's specific for you, that's just about the thing that you were talking to him about.
It's all come from the same place, we've just pitched it slightly differently. So it's all come from that story block library, we've just created specific storylines for different environments. And one of those environments is, “I need something a little bit better to take away and show to my boss.” And they take, they scan the QR code, they get their demo, and it's just for them, it's tailored for them, and they walk away and they show their boss, and it's a path to sales, right?
This sounds better than walking away with a PDF or printed literature that the boss has no interest in reading.
What is the path to this magical virtual future? For now, Stuart thinks companies will continue to send at least some products to events. The change comes from the bottom up where they no longer send instruments to smaller shows or remote locations.
At some point, customers and salespeople see the benefit of this approach and hopefully, we all get more creative about how to use our space at larger events. Instead of bringing one instrument or a few, companies could present their entire catalog or larger configured solutions.
This is only one way that we can improve the trade show experience and get a better return on investment. In an upcoming episode, we talk a little bit about the interactions that happen in the booth and how they can be improved as well.
Your deepest insights are your best branding. I’d love to help you share them. Chat with me about custom content for your life science brand. Or visit my website.
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I traveled to Disneyland Orange County for AACC ADLM back in July to connect with a few folks and walk the floors of the exhibit hall. I was on my way out when Derek Hamre from Launchworks CDMO stood up at his table and got my attention with the best elevator pitch I have ever heard. And that landed him a spot on my podcast. I’ll share what it was at the end of this post.*
Imagine this scenario. You’re in an academic lab or small biotech and you’ve developed a diagnostic test for a molecule or a disease. How do you go about commercializing your test?
Do you need to get a bunch of regulatory approvals? What else do you need to think about? After all, you’re in a small research lab stepping into a whole new world. It turns out there are people who do this for a living and can help you plan out your strategy.
Launchworks is a CDMO for molecular diagnostics. Services range from commercialization strategy and supply chain management through to fulfillment. A company might come to them with a locked down bill of materials and work instructions for kitting tens to hundreds of thousands of units at a time, or maybe they are early in the process and need help thinking through strategy from the beginning.
…one of the reasons that we are pretty present at ADLM, AACC is the RUO kits. Those that are taking an idea from the R&D space and bringing it to the market and that commercialization process is a big, you know, lift for a lot of companies, even if they're bigger. Um, but especially for smaller companies when they have 5, 10 workers that have never gone through the commercialization process.
Beyond that, what level of regulatory approval do they want? In some cases, a kit might be sold as RUO (Research Use Only), but a customer’s customer might want to take it further:
And a lot of our customers, so we won't make those claims, obviously, our customers will go through the FDA filings or whatever, um, but some of our customers will just not want to go through the FDA process, so they'll make their kit RUO and then maybe one of their customers will buy the kit and then go through the FDA or 510K, PMA process… …so allowing another customer or their companies that they're working with to go through that process on their behalf might be the pathway for them.
Regardless of the regulatory path chosen, Derek described the four main areas where a CDMO can help get a product to market.
* Risk mitigation
* Commercialization strategy
* Manufacturing process
* Supply chain
You’d like to avoid surprises in any of those areas. Taking supply chain, for example, it would be important to know if a supplier might be closing shop in the near future. Will you be able to maintain quality as you scale up?
I asked Derek about the logistics of assembling and shipping hundreds of thousands of units from different vendors. Everything is done in-house. Mixing buffers, putting kits in bags, labeling and shipping. Launchworks has about a 30,000 to 40,000 square foot facility in Beverly, Massachusetts.
Prior to this I knew that there were CDMOs for pharma, but not for diagnostics. ADLM was an eye opener in terms of the world of clinical chemistry. And this isn’t the only episode I recorded as a result of that visit. More in a couple weeks.
*I don’t remember his exact words, but it was along the lines of “We’re helping visitors to ADLM become vendors at ADLM.”
Your deepest insights are your best branding. I’d love to help you share them. Chat with me about custom content for your life science brand. Or visit my website.
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Jamie Gier is the Chief Marketing Officer at Dexcare, responsible for establishing the company as a category leader in modernizing the way consumers discover, access, and choose their healthcare services – from digital search to booking an appointment.
We enjoyed a wide-ranging discussion about marketing beginning with selling high-value products with long sales cycles and multiple decision makers. You’ve heard it before, but no one wants to be sold to. That’s the expressway to the delete button. Jamie emphasized building relationships and educating, showing customers how their lives could be better.
At Dexcare, her team learns a lot from early adopters about why they chose their product and continue to use it. Ask as many questions as you can, just like we talked about last week… We don’t know what we don’t know.
Jamie and her team are taking advantage of thought leadership in a big way.
We happen to spend a big portion of our media budget on LinkedIn, for example, that happens to be the channel where a lot of our buyers are, and there's a lot of thought leadership.
And so if anything, we've really focused our paid media on a single channel and we want to get really, really good at that. And so that's where we're placing a lot of our investments, but it's one of many. We know as soon as we capture their attention, a relationship begins. And that's where we have to start developing even higher levels of trust and rapport beyond just what they see with us in a digital way….we spend a lot of time with our clients simply promoting their own thought leadership on these topics.
That's number one. Two, we do spend time on building content that is education- rich.
Measurement is important and of course. I asked her how she makes the case for the tactics that are harder to measure. Observation and paying attention. When you land a large deal because someone heard about you on a podcast, that’s a pretty good sign.
Not subscribed yet? Can we fix that?
Thanks for spending some time here, either way.
Jamie thinks that because of the emphasis on measurement, marketers have moved away from creativity. That took us on a little side trip to talk about Jimmy Buffett, who died right before this interview, and storytelling. I had written a piece for LinkedIn (not posted) about the impact JB had on my career. (DM me for details).
Besides writing fun songs about pirates and exotic places, Jimmy’s clever use of language to make emotional connections set him apart. Jamie said:
The thing about Jimmy Buffett is he brought you into his world, or he went into yours. And that was the power of the words he used in his songs.
With one top-10 hit (not even close to his best song) Jimmy Buffett built a business empire around his collection of memorable characters and events. We should try to do the same.
What advice does Jamie have for marketers just getting started?
* Join communities where you can learn. (I recommend SAMPS) and
* Don’t be intimidated by people with advanced degrees. They may know a lot in a technical field that took years of study. And you know (and love) marketing! Learn what you can from them, but also show them how you can help them with what you know. Science doesn’t get sold without storytelling.
Your deepest insights are your best branding. I’d love to help you share them. Chat with me about custom content for your life science brand. Or visit my website.
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Julie Garlikov is Chief Commercial officer at Sherlock Biosciences where they are developing over-the-counter diagnostics to put answers in the hands of consumers and empower them to make better health decisions.
Sherlock is developing two platforms - a disposable test and a reusable reader for home diagnostics. You can listen to the podcast for some details on the science. Let’s focus here on VOC in design.
Consumer-centric design for me is really all about embodying the methods of design thinking. Which is really making sure that you have a deep understanding and empathy for the user that you're designing for. And that you're solving a problem that they really have, and that you're doing it in a way that fits into their lifestyle or their needs.
This approach involves lots of research, qualitative and quantitative surveys, prototyping and ethnography.
Ethnography is more than observing how they use the product under development. One can learn from understanding how they use any product. Even the buying process is investigated. How do they shop for groceries?
When it comes to the product itself, do they understand the instructions for use?
More good stuff coming in future episodes. Don’t miss it.
Thanks for being here.
If you are developing a diagnostic for sexual wellness, you need to know not just the population dynamics of STIs but also people’s attitudes and beliefs around their sex lives. How do you reach people based on what you know about their behaviors? The results can be surprising.
… one thing that I uncovered in this attitudes and usage study that we did with almost 1300 people, young people in the U.S. was a group I'm calling, it's like a segment of the population, I would call frisky-riskies.
So frisky-riskies is a group that skews a little more male than female and they're a group that's engaging in behavior where they have more frequent casual partners, and they're not often using protection, and they know that they're not using protection, and they know that puts them at risk.
So, what's interesting is that they actually test more than other people because they use testing as a way to mitigate the things they're doing that they know are causing risk for them.
The ability to do home testing for all kinds of indications can certainly reduce the spread of infectious diseases and help move us forward to thinking about prevention and general wellness. In the case of STIs which can be asymptomatic in women, there are implications for fertility as well.
As I think about our conversation, it struck me that we all have an opportunity to make products that will improve people’s lives in some way. But what can we do to make the biggest impact possible with the products we make or the services we offer?
It seems like asking questions and observing the behaviors of our ideal customers offers a big return on a little extra effort.
I just realized last week’s episode reached a similar conclusion about how the early work in any project seems to have an outsized impact. It’s like painting a house. The quality of the outcome is all in the preparation.
Your deepest insights are your best branding. I’d love to help you share them. Chat with me about custom content for your life science brand. Or visit my website.
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Cheri Walker and her colleagues started Rhinostics in the middle of the pandemic in response to the massive increase in testing volume required to keep faculty and students at Harvard safe from Covid. That’s a story in itself. The principals never met in person for the first nine months!
We had all of our calls virtually. It was all done telephonically, I mean in Zoom. I basically started the company out of my guest bedroom because we didn't need space for the first year. We now have a facility which you can see behind me and we have, you know, all the normal things that you would have as a company grows and expands.
Make sure you listen to get the details on that.
But those workflows I mentioned…
Remember the nasopharyngeal swabs that ticked your brain? No one likes those and processing those samples in that format is cumbersome.
Harvard developed a new type of polypropylene swab with an active end that interacts with a decapping robot. By developing and manufacturing this new type of nasal swab (no more brain tickling) Rhinostics was able to create:
* A better patient experience with a more comfortable, DIY swab.
* A smoother automated workflow with faster turnaround and
* Potentially reduce turnover of medtechs in the lab
I think that's been the flip side of starting a company in the pandemic is just the supply chains and labor and all those issues. And then when you actually talk about the problem that we're solving and the real pain point that exists in laboratories today. Not only are there the cost structures and things like that, it's just finding med techs and people to work in the lab.
And a lot of them got burned out. There was a small number before the pandemic, but a lot of them got burned out. And med tech now is making anywhere from 125, with 20, 000 signing bonuses. And, you know, retention turnover in the labs is something in the 25 to 30, 35%. So, it's a real issue, um, facing most of the laboratories right now.
The automated workflow removes the manual step of decapping swabs before analysis. Barcoding ties the sample to the patient through an app on their phone and allows for better sample tracking. Both of those make for a better experience for the user and the med tech.
You’re subscribed, right? I have several interesting episodes in the can already. Don’t miss ‘em.
Thanks for being here.
The insight here is that rethinking workflows and a small, unsexy device can have a huge impact on lab productivity, patient health and worker satisfaction. No medtech went to school thinking they would be uncapping tubes all day, rather than looking after equipment and solving problems.
I asked Cheri where sample collection is going in the future. There is definitely a move toward home testing. The pandemic proved that it can be done accurately. There is currently an epidemic of STIs (sexually transmitted infections) for which the option of buying a kit off the shelf at the pharmacy would seem to be a way to discreetly get individuals to seek treatment if necessary while maintaining some privacy.
Cheri also mentioned, for example, having a teenager on Accutane where blood lipids needed to be tested on a regular basis.
You could send our little VERIstic® blood collection device, do a finger prick, send them home with ten of them, and then they can just do it and send it back. They don't have to drag their teenager back to the clinic to stay and wait for a blood draw and keep them out of school…
…it's interesting because everyone, it's not just home health and kit providers that are interested, like the whole hospital health system is trying to figure out how can we use these tools to actually have better health care for people that's more convenient, but still just as accurate and maybe get more compliance.
More powerful analysis on the back end of testing is great, but across life science, I wonder if the real opportunities to make an impact are at the front end of how we do things.
Your deepest insights are your best branding. I’d love to help you share them. Chat with me about custom content for your life science brand. Or visit my website.
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Hiring people is difficult, expensive and risky. It’s a skill in itself for which most of us get very little practice. I talked to Ken Schmitt about how hiring has changed and a few things to think about when filling a role on your team. Fun fact: Ken got his first job at a staffing agency by answering an ad in a newspaper!
Ken’s agency specializes in placing marketing and salespeople. I asked him about skills that drive hiring decisions:
…marketing especially needs to have that experience and understand the language of sales as well to be truly effective on the marketing side and be able to understand the broader business, not just marketing… is the center of the universe, but marketing is much less of a linear role, if you will, or a stop along the way. And it's much more circular.
You know, it used to be that marketing did this, this, and this, and then stopped, handed it off to sales, and now sales took it from there. But now it's again, a much more circular kind of collaboration and relationship. And so whenever we're talking to candidates about the senior level marketing searches that we're doing, we're asking them, tell us about your experience collaborating with sales.
How a candidate collaborates with sales is important. There are plenty of good marketers without it, but I’d say actual sales experience would be even better. Looking back at my own experience, it’s stunning how little marketing (marcom at least) was connected to sales in the life science companies where I worked. We could spend a few episodes on that…
When hiring, Ken recommends looking at your team as a whole. What skills do you already have and what gaps are you looking to fill? Are there people from outside the industry who can bring new ideas and new skills to the effort?
We discussed whether and when a college degree is necessary. This is an evolution I find fascinating. I think a fair amount about whether and how much we discount or overvalue our degrees based on many factors including how long ago we attended college or specific classes we took but no longer see how they might have been relevant.
I’ve known great marketers with no science background and we put scientists into marketing roles with no marketing background all the time. I’d love to see your comments about what you think is necessary and or optimal.
I have several interesting episodes in the can already. Don’t miss ‘em.
Thanks for being here.
My favorite part of the conversation was about employer branding. As a content marketer, this speaks to me. Every company has a brand in the eyes of its customers. There is also a brand in the eyes of its employees and potential hires.
Let’s look at it like a marketing funnel. At the top there is what your company does, but also what it stands for. What is the culture like? Does the actual culture reflect the aspirational statements or taglines one often hears?
At the middle of the funnel are job descriptions - another candidate for a full episode. My sense is that many employers aren’t thinking about whether a job description might turn away qualified candidates based on the way it’s written. I often see descriptions that seem to say, “Don’t be like the last person who had this job…” Hmmm. Something to think about.
I understand the description needs to be accurate. Can it be inspiring at the same time? I’d like to think so. Given that the job description is one of the first impressions for new hires, it’s a significant part of your brand. Why not show it to someone outside of your company and ask them what kind of impression it makes?
Of course, the bottom of the funnel is the interview and even the onboarding experience. From personal experience, I’d say these things matter a lot. A small investment of time and effort upfront will pay off many times in the long run.
Your deepest insights are your best branding. I’d love to help you share them. Chat with me about custom content for your life science brand. Or visit my website.
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It will come as no surprise that I have talked to a number of people in marketing and sales recently. (That’s literally half of my job.) Sometimes, those conversations all seem to point in the same direction. This month is one of those times.
The theme that has arisen spontaneously is how potential customers become customers. And the assumptions we make around that.
The assumptions are that:
* Potential customers know who we are.
* We have the product or service they need.
* Our product is demonstrably better (on some criteria) and will win the day.
We also assume that we know why our customers buy, and even that they would know, if we asked them, what got them on the path to purchase our product or service.
Some of the things I heard:
* Most people who could buy from us are not in-market at any given time. How do we get into their consideration set when the time comes?
* Our customers are only interested in specifications. Stories shared on social media have little value. (I disagree.)
* A very large, new customer found out about us through a podcast (dark social, I heartily endorse).
* Many companies have no process for leads (contacts?) to be systematically converted to sales. - I suspect many of you feel better about your efforts now, huh?
* Someone needs to set the frame to have a productive conversation. (Thank you Brian Morgan.)
That all leads me to corporate communications. Given all of the ambiguities, even after mapping out customer journeys and measuring every possible interaction, we need to start the conversation somewhere. And the earlier the better.
There is no way every potential customer, investor, etc. knows who you are, why you exist or what you do. Assuming otherwise is leaving money on the table. As is assuming that your specifications can overcome whatever rationale the customer already has in their mind at that very late stage in the buying process.
What are you leaving on the table by not subscribing? Insights? Connections? Fascinating conversations?
Thanks for being here.
Ryan Flinn is a corporate communications expert who knows what makes an interesting story. As a former Bloomberg reporter, his performance was measured on the ability to gather eyeballs.
The fact that people make decisions based on emotion is well established. Those emotional engagements can happen very early with good corporate communications. It happens by sharing memorable stories about how people use your products and services. For example, you could explain who designed them along with why and how.
Or show how the founder’s hobbies relate to the company. Ryan explained that Bloomberg had reporters covering large companies on a daily basis.
I had to find articles that they didn't deem important enough to cover for like a news beat, but that I could kind of twist into an interesting angle. So, like for one, I did a profile on Autodesk, the CAD software company because I found this angle of the CEO… He has the woodworking shop in Berkeley, and he carves tables and chairs and, you know, it's the analog to the digital version of what the software does.
…looking beyond just again, the bullet points of what makes a product interesting or important to consumers. What is the angle that will help the reporter write a story about it or somebody going, “Wow, what a cool example. I wanna learn more about that”?
Ryan shared his insights on what makes an interesting story, how they can create a competitive advantage and how to build relationships with reporters that can lead to earned media opportunities.
As I reflect on this episode and my recent conversations (you’ll hear from more of those folks soon), I think of how assumptions about our audience get in the way of our marketing at one stage or another. We need to do well at every stage. And just because we can’t measure something doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.
What activities grab a person’s interest? If that person isn’t a potential customer, what might make them share it with someone else who could be?
Is our content memorable enough to get us into the consideration set when the customer has a need? Have we made an emotional connection that provides an advantage? Will we deliver a story and an experience that makes the customer confident in choosing our solution?
Marketing is kind of like hosting a cocktail party. It’s a conversation we are having simultaneously with a lot of people joining in over a long period of time. We are continuously inviting new people to that conversation while at the same time introducing some of them to our dear friends in sales.
Your deepest insights are your best branding. I’d love to help you share them. Chat with me about custom content for your life science brand. Or visit my website.
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If you are a founder of a biotech or life science startup, you don’t want to miss this episode. If you’re not, you may still find it fascinating. I talked to Sal Buscemi about family offices and what kinds of assets they invest in.
Until recently, I didn’t know what a family office was. These are people or families with at least 100 million dollars of investible assets. They represent a unique source of funding for startups. They have different goals and timelines than a typical VC firm. As a result, you’ll need to take a different approach to communicating with them.
The takeaway here is the same as always for good marketing. Know your customer, and what they value. Craft your message/offer around that.
When you have that much money to invest, you certainly want a return but you also want to make an impact. And let your friends know about it. They are looking for statement-class assets. These are assets that are a conversation starter anywhere you go. Successful people want to be associated with successful people from other industries. Example: Be the first to show up with a million dollars and have a Nobel Prize winner join your family for lunch.
As I mention in the podcast, no one will shed a tear for the folks who have millions to invest to make more money. But there is a psychological burden on the 2nd and third generations. How do you demonstrate your own value, your skills, etc in the shadow of inherited wealth? Sal points out the scene in Ford vs Ferrari where Enzo Ferrari insults Henry Ford Jr by reminding him that he is not Henry Ford. He’s Henry Ford the 2nd.
So the question for them becomes, “What’s the best way I can make an impact?”
You can make an impact here by subscribing to the podcast wherever you listen and to my newsletter.
Thanks very much! You did subscribe, didn’t you?
Sal stressed the importance of relationships. Patience is your friend. No “quant-splaining.”
People today, if you were to do some research, they don't trust facts and figures anymore. They trust the stories, and that's really what it is. And they want to make sure that if they're sitting in front of someone, that person's gonna make the best decisions as a steward of their wealth and capital to go into it. Because at the end of the day, and everybody listening to this as a founder should really, really figure this out. Nobody is going to part with their life savings unless they give you their time first. And that's so important to remember.
And here’s a bonus, I think especially for life science and biotech companies. Some of these investors are looking at longer time horizons than a VC firm.
If you look at anything on LinkedIn or maybe on bloomberg.com, you'll see that, there is a bias right now where a lot of these families are going in and they're getting the same terms that, you know, any other fund would get, but they don't want to be alongside the fund because they don't wanna have someone that doesn't have at least a 10-year horizon with this. And I can tell you there's some families that say, Sal, don't even talk to us unless it fits our 40-year plan.
Finally, Sal noted the importance of media, going on podcasts! and having an online presence that your investors can point to that, again, make them look good. I have some ideas around that. See below and be sure to listen to the full episode.
Your deepest insights are your best branding. I’d love to help you share them. Chat with me about custom content for your life science brand. Or visit my website.
Free Book: Calling the Capital
Sal’s Firm: Harlem River Navy
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Steve Harvey and his business partner managed to raise enough money to rent some lab space in Cambridge (UK) to get started on an idea they had for synthesizing template-free DNA.
The Start
They invited an investor to meet them at the lab where they sat on the garden furniture Steve brought with him because they had nothing else.
TL;DR They got more money. Camena Bioscience was getting started.
That was the first hurdle. There were more. Competitors had similar ideas around the IP. And evolution had a different idea, altogether.
Synthesizing DNA without a template means providing an enzyme with modified nucleotide bases so that only one can be added to the DNA chain at a time. After addition, a blocking group is removed, allowing the next base in the sequence to be added. That’s the only way to end up with the gene you intend to make.
The problem is that most enzymes are very good at what they do. In this case, the enzyme, terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase, naturally prefers unmodified nucleotides (evolution). If there are any of those contaminating the mix, the enzyme will add a string of them even before you can spell “DNA”. The end result is likely a lot of DNA of the wrong sequence.
The Pivot
Steve decided it was time to take a different approach. (If you meet a founder who has never had to pivot, congratulate them.) It’s a hard thing to do after investing time and money and being (partially) successful.
The new approach seems to have worked out. Camena published a couple of application notes and they were picked up by Nature Biotechnology for a story about DNA synthesis technologies.
Now they were getting customers but awareness was still a challenge.
I had a couple of people that came to me and said, “We've looked at your website. We, don't really know what you do.” Okay. And so I decided that we need to get some kind of numerical value on brand awareness.
I announced the team, “We're gonna run some brand awareness surveys. We'll put it out via LinkedIn and Twitter as well. We'll understand, you know, do people really know what we do?”
And I put it out and I was quite excited about doing this. And then I think it was two weeks later, we'd had five responses. And I think one of the responses was from a family member. So, so it didn't go very well.
But Steve wasn’t deterred. He tried again with the offer of a $25 Amazon gift card.
I think it was within a week we had 2000 responses. So it was, the whole thing was really funny. But what came out of that was that, it was roughly kind of 75% of people that responded to the survey had only heard of us in the last six months, and we'd been going for nearly like six years!
Hey, that’s progress.
The Story
Steve decided to post regularly on LinkedIn about his journey, which is how I found him. He did a great job of posting a little bit of the story each day, (like Charles Dickens!) and teasing what was to come.
His followers have grown significantly and no doubt more people know about Camena Bio as a result.
In my own experience, authentic personal stories get the most traction. People are interested in people. Products are useful. People are fascinating. You may not think you are, but I’ve interviewed hundreds of people across several podcasts for myself and my clients. Only one was an absolute dud that left me with nothing to publish.
Find your channel. It might be LinkedIn, your blog, a podcast, someone else’s podcast or that thing that was Twitter yesterday, but is apparently “X” today.
Schedule a 15-minute chat with Chris about turning conversations into content for your life science company.
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Before becoming the CEO of Diaago, a distributor of labware for life science, Jackson Hyde spent some time managing a staffing agency, placing day labor with companies filling short-term needs. That gave him an appreciation of flexibility and an understanding of the diverse needs of employers but also employees.
As the founder of Diaago, Jackson’s management approach emphasizes the importance of understanding the whole person and their individual requirements in the workplace.
I think that the first thing we have to look at is how, how diverse any workplace is, especially when you're dealing with a manufacturing type of facility. You know, you have people that make the product. You have people that design the product. You have people that sell the product or market it in whatever way.
So there's a lot of different processes happening and it's different people and different backgrounds that are gonna fulfill all of that. So at the end of the day, to be successful, you need to get the most out of people. And I think one of the ways that is underutilized, is taking a look at the whole person in that process. And seeing not only how they all fit together, of course, that's a whole other conversation. But looking at what each person needs to get out of their work.
He challenges the concept of work-life balance, suggesting that work is an integral part of our lives and should be meaningful and fulfilling.
It might be interesting to talk about the idea of a work-life balance for a second. It is an idea that could use some reflection. Right now, we're in an interesting place, kind of post-pandemic.
You know, people have gotten used to one way of working. We're pushing people back towards another way, depending on your take on it, but I think what’s outdated about that concept is that it never really existed to begin with. It's almost, counterintuitive to think about it because there are very few jobs or careers where you can come in in the morning and leave in the evening and never think about your work.
We're all gonna think about it no matter what we do. It is a part of our life. So the idea of the work-life balance that has been thrown out to us is, okay, you need to separate work and life. And, it's two separate things. But it's really not, it's a part of what defines us. It's part of what completes our human experience.
It's finding worthwhile and, and meaningful work.
On the other side of that, he recognizes the privilege associated with following one's passion. Not everyone has that opportunity. It’s the responsibility of leaders to bring passion and purpose to employees' work.
We can bring some passion to their work. We can bring in the outside influences to show them what makes their work important.
For example, on the manufacturing side, being able to tell people, “When the products leave our warehouse, they're going to a facility that's researching cancer and you're a part of that.”
Schedule a 15-minute chat with Chris about turning conversations into content for your life science company.
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If you don’t know SAMPS, you’ve been missing out. It’s the only association for Sales And Marketing Professionals serving the Sciences. I’ve been a member since 2014 and it has been a huge boost for me in terms of networking with and learning from like-minded professionals in our business.
Live events are back and the European meeting takes place right after ESHG, June 12 (cocktails and appetizers) and 13 (full agenda), this year focused on the use of AI for sales and marketing. And as always, there will be a panel of customers (PIs post-docs, procurement…) who will be happy to tell you why your email didn’t work or your website is hard to navigate and whose site they go to for good information. You don’t want to miss that, do you?
In this episode, I talked to Laura Haldane from SciLeads and Paul Avery from BioStrata as a teaser for the event. Paul has been geeking out on all of the latest AI tools and can tell you what’s useful and what to look out for.
Laura says she’s not a social media influencer, but casually dropped that she has 15,000 followers on LinkedIn. (I want to know her secret!) There will be a session on the use of social media for marketing and how AI fits into that workflow.
Sign up at the link below. I wish I were going to be there to see the sunset at 10:02 pm but maybe I’ll catch you in Boston in December.
SAMPS Europe 2023 - Agenda and Registration
SAMPS North America 2023
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I’m a big fan of The Prof G Podcast. Scott Galloway is a thoughtful guy and I’ve learned a lot from him. One of his common phrases is “It’s hard to read the label from inside the bottle.”
By that, he means, whether looking at ourselves or our business, it’s very helpful to get some outside advice.
This definitely applies to companies pitching to investors. First of all, the story you tell is very important for getting their attention and also for the final valuation. If you think it’s just about science and the data speak for themselves, you’re leaving money on the table.
I talked to Oksana Bovt from Theoria Creative. They help life science companies craft stories for investors. Your science may be exciting and innovative, but that’s not enough. You may have an opportunity to tell a better story that you aren’t even thinking about.
And you don’t have to be first to market to succeed. Oksana shared an example of a company going after the same target as a company that had already been bought. But because the new company approached the problem based on entirely different science, they were able to make the case that they weren’t just a little better, but significantly different.
In terms of the actual presentation, Oksana recommends, never letting the investor fill in the blanks. It’s important to keep their attention and connect all the dots. If they feel like they’ve seen something before, their mind can wander and make assumptions. Don’t let that happen.
Don’t miss an edition of this newsletter either.
And subscribe to the podcast to get the full story. Links at the bottom of the page.
What happens after you successfully raise money? Get ready to start raising again, right away. The fun never stops in biotech. You need to be constantly telling your story, laying out milestones on your website and making noise as you reach them.
Finally, what do you do when things go differently from what you had envisioned for your product or company? First, be assured that you are not the first company nor the hundredth that this has happened to.
When it’s time to pivot, lay out what you’ve learned (both scientifically and commercially) and the vision for what’s next. No investor wants to throw good money after bad. But neither do they want to walk away from a project that still has potential. Finding new opportunities has costs also, so if you can make a case for the pivot, gather your data and tell a new story.
Schedule a 15-minute chat with Chris about turning conversations into content for your life science company.
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David Enloe is an organizational culture architect. I found him on LinkedIn and had to find out what that was besides damn good personal branding. I’m always interested in company culture, its value, and how it’s established and sustained.
He was hired as the CEO of Societal CDMO in the midst of the pandemic, coming on board without even an onsite visit, to work with people he had never met. His only contact up to that point was the board, none of the executives.
I asked him about how he drives culture through the organization, and about how to merge cultures when bringing two companies together through an acquisition. His answers got me thinking about what culture really means.
If you had asked me before this interview, I would have said that culture is “the way we do things or how we interact with each other.” These things are still true. As David points out in our conversation, it starts with why we do what we do. In this case serving customers and ultimately patients. But what I learned from talking to him is that culture reaches us on a deeper level. Culture is about trust. Whether in a company, a community or a country, it’s the comfort and the freedom that comes from knowing what to expect from the people around you.
I love doing these podcasts for you. (This is episode 181). How about showing some love in return? Please subscribe and share.
Thank you.
How do you measure the value of culture? Start with employee retention. Finding a job that fits your skills might be the easy part. Finding one where you are valued and feel like part of the team is a little more difficult.
Culture also affects productivity and scalability. As a company grows, you can’t scale people along with revenue. The way things are done might have to change. Although most people are resistant to change, David says people just need to know they’ll be supported.
We acquired this smaller company in San Diego, August of ‘21. It was a small, very entrepreneurial company.
Everybody had their finger in every pie at all times…
But when somebody's doing everything there, there can be a sense of loss as they start to let go. And so at the bottom of all of this is the T word, isn't it? Trust. You know, they've gotta trust that, that the other people are not gonna let 'em down. And again, that's something we have to bake into our cultural values.
And so if you’ve ever wondered why “culture eats strategy for breakfast”, you might have a better idea after listening to this episode.
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“Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Sell him the hook, line and rod and get a higher valuation.” - Unknown ;-)
KromaTiD™ is in the business of helping researchers working on cell and gene therapies make sure, for example, that their CRISPR edits are going to the right places and not causing unwanted structural variations. Those cells ultimately go back into patients and safety is a top concern. KromaTiD had been a service business. Customers sent their cells for analysis and KromaTiD sent back a report.
They have transitioned to a product (and service) business, selling kits to allow scientists to do more of their own analyses. I was curious about what this change would look like and what it means for the business in terms of not only processes but also valuation and future opportunities.
Nathan Wood is the CEO of KromaTiD and he was kind enough to share their story with me.
The valuation part is the easiest to understand. A service business is labor intensive, making it difficult to scale efficiently, although easier to get started. The customers in this case are often in a facility with access to the specialized microscopes that are the key piece of equipment for these analyses. Given the right reagents and good instructions, much of this can be done self-serve at a significantly lower cost.
That also means that researchers can afford to screen many more candidates much earlier in their work, which likely means finding better results faster (additional savings).
When assessing value:
…if you think about an exit for an organization like KromaTiD or others, it's much easier for a large strategic company in the marketplace to purchase a company that has grown to over 10 million or higher and has a mixture of services and products because the products can become just a product line for them, if you will, and they don't have to go build that out, and then they can decide how they want to grow the service business.
Lowering the cost of the analysis also opens up the market for academic scientists who likely can’t pay for the more expensive service option.
That all sounds great, but making the switch isn’t easy. You might think, “Hey, pack up the reagents with the protocol and send them out.” To which Nathan might reply, “Send them in what? By whom? And how?” Up to this point, the deliverable was a PDF.
There were no boxes, no containers, no labels. And believe it or not, getting those things right is important. This is the nitty-gritty of a small biotech beyond the sexy science. You need processes for taking orders, filling them, packaging and shipping. Quality systems… The list goes on. That means new employees. And lots of change for the existing staff.
The marketing message and the audience changes as well.
Once it gets going though, things get smoother, including revenue. As a service business, the revenue can be lumpy. A customer may order a report and be silent for a while. With easy-to-use products, they just reorder. Service takes time and is billed on completion. Product is billed on its way out the door. Revenue becomes more predictable which makes it easier to think about where to invest the money that is coming in.
In the end, there is the opportunity to leverage your service business as your R&D. What else can they do for customers that might eventually become a new product line?
If you went to business school, this might be marketing and finance 101 for you. For me, I just enjoy following and sharing the stories of people solving problems. It never gets old.
Nathan on LinkedIn
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Just as scientists are curious about the “how” of the world, Lee Jay Lowenstein was curious about the “why”. That led to his becoming an ordained Orthodox rabbi. He was also a high school teacher and principal before spending some time in a non-profit as a fundraiser. At that point, he must have had some sales skills, but wanted something more.
With no real background in life science other than studying as a pre-med for a short while, he joined a partner and decided to sell laboratory supplies.
I was curious about how that happened. Why life science? And how do you sell supplies to people when you have little idea of what they are doing?
To answer the why part, what stands out to me from our conversation is the respect and admiration he has for the scientists doing research, hoping to benefit humanity. As to how he does it, relationships and curiosity. He never stopped asking questions about how and why a researcher does their work the way they do and how he could help make it easier for them.
I’m more of a marketer than a salesperson (I find sales difficult) but that seems like a pretty good lesson either way. Ask questions. Make the customer’s life easier.
I had been working for another company and just feeling I can do better. I can do better than this. These people deserve better. They deserve to be treated like royalty, and the opportunity presented itself to join hands with a partner and jump in with both feet, and I did.
As I reflect on what it takes to be successful, it seems that there is an advantage to being somewhat ignorant, yet bold. (I have no doubt that discipline and hustle are important as well.) Some call it the curse of knowledge. When we think we know what someone needs (even if we’re right) we miss the opportunity to discover what else they might need that we could help them with.
Lee is never afraid to ask a question and ask again if he needs to. In my experience, when you ask a scientist a question about how or why they do something a particular way, they can’t not answer. Their purpose in life (and how they are paid) is to share what they’ve learned.
…people in the lab are extremely generous with their time and understanding. I learned so much about the business, just sitting and talking to people. Tell me what you do. You know, tell me, why do you do it this way? Why don't you do it that way? And people were more than happy.
I don't think their PIs were happy that they were wasting their time talking to me, but they, you know, they're very generous and they want to wanna share their science.
Today there's fewer and fewer things that people can say that I don't know something about. But honesty and being willing to say, “I don't know”… I've never had a lab manager say, “Well, you're an idiot. Get outta my lab.”
I’ve said it before. Curiosity is a superpower. Combine that with helpfulness and see where it takes you.
Lee Jay on LinkedIn
Stellar Scientific
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