Monthly Archives: May 2013

The Life Science Innovators Dilemma: Converting Skeptics to Evangelists

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By: Andrew Johnson, Ph.D.

Model holding a light bulb

Investing in the tools and resources that will be required for an effective missionary selling campaign will help your customers see the light!

Having a truly innovative, disruptive technology or service is both a blessing and a burden.  A blessing in that you can ‘own the market’ for a period of time if you successfully launch and grow your business.   (This is the good side of being first to market).  The burden is that achieving a successful launch and growing sales effort will often face entrenched skeptical attitudes and outright hostility from the very people you hope to reach with your new offering (The downside of being first to market).

Why does customer resistance exist with innovative and disruptive offerings?
If you have a truly new offering, much of the resistance can come from a lack of understanding of the positive impact that your products and services will have for them. Some may even feel threatened by the new offering if it would seem to decrease their own power or influence particularly when it allows lower skilled workers to produce equivalent or better results once restricted to this individual by their having a ‘hard won’ skill or talent.  This means that your company will need to expend some time and resources to develop an education component to its Sales & Marketing efforts.  This will help transform skeptical leads into satisfied customers.  This is often referred to as missionary selling (and marketing).

“A missionary type of sales job involves convincing someone who has never used a product to buy it. Selling financial planning or life insurance and other financial products typifies the missionary sales job. The metaphor of a missionary involves educating someone about an idea or concept and convincing them to have faith in that concept.” (Answers.com)

What’s an innovator to do?
The rewards of being first to market with a disruptive technology can be significant in financial terms to say the least.  Being aware of some of the resistance that you might face even early in the game will allow you to craft a launch and Sales & Marketing strategy that will be able to handle the additional education burdens that this opportunity presents.  Eventually the burdens of missionary selling will decrease as your customer base grows and evangelizes your innovation.

Tips for Successful Commercialization of Disruptive Life Science Offerings:

  • Use beta evaluation to refine customer segmentation and value proposition. This is where you will learn who you will initially target and get a heads up on what will be the most compelling value proposition for them. (See ‘Beta Testing Checklist Your Competition Doesn’t Want You to Have’)
  • Prepare a Scientific Road Show to connect with scientists through their research.  You have some great science.  Why not leverage that to connect with other scientists through their research.  The questions and conversations that will come from this effort are invaluable for tweaking your ‘go to market’ strategy (See ‘Taking Your Show on the Road: Using Your Science to Boost Sales’)
  • Create demos that highlight impact rather than features.  Nothing is more powerful than a compelling demo to confront skepticism. (See ‘The Technical Demonstration: 3 Tips to Insure Success’)
  • Use a Key Opinion Leader (KOL) plan to help smooth your launch.  Key Opinion Leaders can be a strong force for reinforcing the value of your innovation to the field.  (See ‘The Key to Key Opinion Leaders’)
  • Invest time and resources to creating scientific content that will be compelling to your future customers.  Consider starting an application focused blog, write white papers and present at industry conferences in the scientific forums. (See ‘Where Does the Science Belong in the Life Science Startup?’)

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Women as Corporate and Entrepreneurial Leaders

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Lions

The business world can be an unforgiving jungle, but women handle it as well as men, and then some.

By:  Michael Kaiser

If you watch nature programs on TV, you have come across at least one dedicated to those Big Cats, the lions and you quickly realize that it is the lioness that looks after and commands the pride. At best, the male serves as a mix of bodyguard, concierge and gigolo. It is the lioness who does all the hunting and caring of her cubs. It is a constant challenge that forces the lioness to erect a fortress of rigorous discipline, alertness and battle preparation. This zoological example serves as an analogy for the vicissitudes and triumphs experienced by women in the business world.

In this second decade of the 21st century no longer can the male gender come up with comments bordering on blatant business misogyny such as “They are emotional”, temperamental”, “They are watching over their family, how can they run the business”, “They will get pregnant”, “They have their period and are impossible to deal with”, “They are capricious”, etc. As if those descriptions were not enough, along came the 2006 movie “The Devil Wears Prada” starring Meryl Streep as the epitome of a ruthless and cynical fashion entrepreneur.

That is definitely not the scenario that we should equate with female entrepreneurs and corporate executives in Western, and more recently, Eastern societies. Time to wake up and get the record straight: women are as strong as men; they are standards of initiative and dedication, intuitive, tactical and strategic leaders, progressive, highly motivated, creative, the list of positive characteristics goes on. And with a good sense of humor, they even bestow positive remarks about their opponents:

“We have ‘arrived.  it means we’re not expending a huge amount of energy battling each other for power, instead we’re having challenging conversations about what we do well and what we need to work on. It’s a fact (I have the research somewhere) that men outperform women in 4 key areas of business. They are better at asking for what they need, for standing out in a crowd, for singing their own praises and speaking up.” Suzy Jacobs in “Can we please change the conversation”.

In a reference quoted for the description of “Female Entrepreneur” we read that:

Studies on women entrepreneurs show that women have to cope with stereotypic attitudes towards women on a daily basis. Business relations as customers, suppliers, banks, etc. constantly remind the entrepreneur that she is different, sometimes in a positive way such as by praising her for being a successful entrepreneur even though being a woman. Employees tend to mix the perceptions of the manager with their images of female role models leading to mixed expectations on the woman manager to be a manager as well as a “mother”. The workload associated with being a small business manager is also not easily combined with taking care of children and a
family. However, even if the revenues are somewhat smaller, women entrepreneurs feel more in control and happier with their situation than if they worked as an employee.

Although many positive changes took place in the 20 years since its authors published their findings, there is still the classical “room-for-improvement” ahead. As an example: early this year the CEO of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer, issued a memo banning the practice of telecommuting for the company’s employees which led to a negative uproar, promptly smothered by a positive retort in her defense from, yes, a male reporter of the Washington Post.

Recent statistics show that women’s level of higher education is on its way of surpassing that of men, which explains the large number of female executives in some of the most complex and demanding scientific sectors. Alas, this has not minimized the obstacles they face due to social mores that still operate under antiquated gender roles; even today, the number of male entrepreneurs exceeds that of women, and that is based more on conventional stereotypes than reality, because women are equally as good as men in starting a company with very few financial resources at hand.

In closing I invite the reader to watch the TEDx video by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, listed below. It is an uplifting paean to the resilience of women in the face of business entry barriers, and how they have become an integral and much needed part of entrepreneurship and corporate leadership, without gender barriers.

References and Additional Reading

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The Successful Life Science Company: Three Tips to Insure You Survive Your Success

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By: Andrew Johnson, Ph.D.

Keeping your expanded team well informed, supported and rewarded will insure the continued growth of your company.

Keeping your expanded team well informed, supported and rewarded will insure the continued growth of your company.

What do you do when things start to go well?  Sounds like an odd question but it is something that every Life Science entrepreneur should consider even in the early days.  It is very easy to lose sight of the intangible contributions of your early team as you start to have some compelling profits and the company is growing.

The early days
When you are just getting started, you will have a small but very passionate, focused and solid team.  (If you don’t have this, you soon will not have a business at all).  You can easily sit around the same table at lunch and share what is going on, your ideas for what should happen next and anything else that concerns the company.  Furthermore, everybody is more than willing to put in the insane hours and total commitment it takes to build your company’s success.

What happens when you start to see success?
You and the team have launched your first product or service and you are beginning to see revenues and maybe even some profits.  At this point you and the early founding team may have added a few more people but it is still possible to squeeze together in the same room.  Whether you realize it or not, the culture of your company is by necessity changing.  With the growth of your company, the way that you communicate and get things done needs to scale as well.  This is where some processes and procedures come into play.  Ad Hoc worked well when it was just three of you.  This cannot work as the team grows.  There needs to be communication between the R&D and Sales & Marketing teams but it would be a waste of time and resources to call all of you sales people in for every R&D meeting and vice versa.

Nurturing the goose that laid the golden egg
At the start, everything was about getting your first product or service to market.  Now that you have successfully launched, you need to grow and expand profitability by boosting sales with your commercial team, reducing costs with your operations team and begin and expand your market reach with ‘follow-on’ products (or services) by launching your next product development effort and/or business development efforts.  You need many more hands to get this all done and so the team will now grow significantly (sometimes doubling and tripling in size).  Many will bemoan the loss of the ‘small company feel’ but if you hope to be successful transforming the company from its startup roots, this  is essential.

The easier part here is to start to adopt some of the tried and true processes and procedures that are often associated with large established companies (you just need to scale these down to fit your company so that you don’t import a bunch of bureaucracy).  The hard part is maintaining a positive culture.

Keeping it ‘real’ with the new team
Your company works best when everyone’s individual goals and aspirations are well aligned with the company.  In the early days, only those people that shared your passion and vision would have joined as founders.  By definition you are all aligned and that is partly because you will each individually be successful if the company is successful (financially, better reputation, etc.).  Later employees will often not be well aligned as they do not have the same interests and passions as the founders (the link between their personal success and that of the company will usually be weaker).  However, the company will do best when it can utilize all of the talents, intelligence and ideas of everyone on the payroll.  Get this right and you will see a continued positive impact on the bottom line.

Tips for Boosting Innovation as Your Company Grows:

  • Adopt empowering HR policies.  Consider why someone at the bottom of the compensation scale would want to share their good ideas with the company.  Perhaps there is a monetary reward, opportunity for promotion or other benefit that would encourage this and other employees to ‘go the extra mile’.
  • Nurture a culture of respect and fairness.  A company where employees can share their concerns without being afraid of repercussions is critical.  So is taking care to recognize excellence in the company and to reward it frequently.
  • Maintain excellent communication with the troops.  There is confidential stuff for sure (but share as much as is appropriate).  As the company grows, you may wish to have quarterly ‘State of the Company’ meetings (both in-person and remotely with those in the field), a company newsletter and other tactics for sharing how the company is doing on a regular basis.  This will allow everyone to better connect what they are doing as individuals with the ultimate fate of the company (kind of like in the ‘old days’ when the three of you founders plotting over a pizza at lunch).

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Interim Executives: Their Role on Existing and New Business Trends

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By:  Michael Kaiser

rainbow after storm

Interim executives can be the perfect solution to fill leadership gaps as companies weather the storms of commercial demands.

One of the most visible, even dramatic changes in the leadership of companies is the growing number of Interim Executives. Until a few years back, they were considered as transitional appointments to cover C-level executives that either resigned or where fired. Usually it was left to the board of directors to choose the interim replacement until the permanent one was hired. That is no longer the case because those interim executives (herein: interims) navigate from small to large companies, and in some cases may occupy C-level positions for an extended period of time, at the behest of boards and investors.

More often than not, the interims are characterized by having additional skills that their permanent predecessors lacked or did not apply in their tenure, e.g., communication ability, charisma, flexibility and the ability to simultaneously think in tactical and strategic terms. As expected, the appointment of an interim is followed by immediate pressure to add value and benefit, often in very high-change environments. Unlike management consultancy, interims focus on implementation, team working, coaching and mentoring the existing team. It is a critical process best described as the quintessential “hands-on assignment”.

A few weeks ago someone asked me what my role was as an interim and I replied that it was akin to a sort of “corporate Clint Eastwood”, which first elicited a surprised look from my interlocutor, followed by laughter. So much for the fun of it! As noted above, this is a critical process that requires multitasking. The interim’s role demands change, not just filling the spot left by a departing executive or the challenge of a new project, notoriously difficult assignments for both the client and the interim.

The increased need for interims to act as short-term permanent executives or managers (it sounds like an oxymoron, but it is not) even in well established corporations, took off with the onset of the 2008 Great Recession in the U.S. as well as the fragile economy of the European Union represented by the loss of key executive/managerial jobs. Another reason lies in the fact that the crisis was followed by new information technologies and communication tools that significantly accelerate business-to-business interactions such as R&D, implementation and commercialization. Let me make clear that the role of the full-time permanent corporate executive has not been replaced, but what we are witnessing is also the emergence of a new business trend that is here to stay for the foreseeable future, best explained as the “doppelgänger”, i.e., one that works in parallel with C-level personnel and employees.

Nowhere are interims more in demand than with start-ups, small and medium-size companies in areas as different as the life sciences, public relations, software and hardware. Some of the reasons for that surge are: change and/or crisis management, IPOs, mergers and acquisitions, etc. In those scenarios, as well as in other similar or different ones, the interim becomes an integral part of the C-level management and his client’s workforce.

Additional Reading:

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