ABCO - Always Be Closing Online

ABCO: Always Be Closing Online. Its the age old advice you hear in sales your whole career.  The same applies to your website design as well.

Your website is your store front. The individual product pages are your sales staff.  I'm not suggesting you place a big ol' BUY NOW button on every product page, but it should be really damn obvious how to buy the product when a scientist is ready to buy.  Nothing is more frustrating than having to search for the button.

Notice how Bio-Rad places the ordering call to action buttons directly next the two product sizes and how the green 'Add to Cart' button stands out.

I encourage you to take a look at your website today no matter your position in the company and think about how the product pages are closing sales for you.  Tiny increases in online sales produce large increases in revenue due to the realized costs of sales staff both in person and call centers. 

How to find scientists discussing specific products

The internet provides an opportunity never before imagined to target scientists working on specific experiments and procedures that need your product.

Today, I will show you how to find those scientists online and how to target them for low cost/high ROI with laser-like focus.

Let's say you are the product manager for Shimadzu's new Biospec Nano that directly competes with the wildly popular Nanodrop, now owned by Mega-Corporation ThermoFisher. You are tasked with the job of taking market share from the Nanodrop.

Of course, you should do all the obvious things like advertise in Science, list it on Biocompare, and haul the machine around to ASCB and AACR with a team of trained sales professionals to talk to scientists. Thats great, but Nanodrop is right there with you with the full marketing might of a $10 billion dollar company behind them.  In my opinion, you will lose that battle.  Nanodrop was first to market and scientists love it making the BiospecNano a vitamin (nice to have) and not a pain pill (required).

How do I know scientists love the NanoDrop?  I did a sentiment search (for more on this click here).

In this case, I searched for the Nanodrop on ScientistSolutions.com, an online discussion forum. Discussion forums are a very different Social Media Animal than quick conversation websites like Facebook or Twitter or opinion sites like ScienceBlogs and Nature Networks.  You'll have take my word on it today, but look for a comparison article soon.

Here's what I found - The word Nanodrop is mentioned in 40 different discussion threads.  One thread went on for 3 pages with at least 100 scientists from all over the world raving about the Nanodrop.

Actual Quotes -

"The Nanodrop works great, it saves a lot of time and reagents. " - Shareef, United States 


"...At its price point (~$8,000) and ease of use (no consumables), there is nothing out there that compares."  - Ivan, United States 


If you think outside the box, this is a perfect place to begin a low cost/high ROI assault on Nanodrop if you are Shimadzu. 


Your game plan is simple  - Steal all this free press for the Biospec Nano.


How?


ScientistSolutions.com sells "keywords" (its in their media packet, which for some reason you have to call to get, thats dumb). So, every time the word Nanodrop appears on this site it could be a link to the Shimadzu version of the product and not the "real Nanodrop" owned by ThermoFisher.  


Yesterday, I called them up and asked to "buy" the word Nanodrop.  $100 a month.  That's laughably cheap!  They even agreed to tag the word for a month to show me how many clicks it gets.  Even if I only get 10 clicks that result in one sale, that's still cheap.  $100 to cockblock ThermoFisher AND make a sale of a $8000 instrument per month, that is low cost/high ROI!

Next, repeat the process described above on the other major life science discussion forums.

Here's a short list. There are thousands of scientists discussing untold numbers of products on these three sites alone.

MolecularStation.com
BioTechniques.com
Protocol-online.org 

Of course if you work for Nanodrop, you may want to play defense by securing the word and advertising space for yourself.

Full Disclosure - The author of this blog is a former employee of ScientistSolutions.com and has financial interest in the company.  He doesn't think this changes a single thing in the blog above since he gives three other scientific discussion boards to call as well. Yes, he had a blast calling his former company and acting like he wanted to buy something. No they didn't catch on! 

Invitrogen Head of Sales on How to Sell to Scientists

How To Sell To Scientists is happy to welcome Mark Walker former Director of Sales at Invitrogen and VP of G&S Discovery to our team.  


Mark will be bringing you a lifetime of experience in selling to scientists in every facet of the business from academia to biotech to forensics specialists. 


He has supervised large sales teams in the life science sales and helped Invitrogen along their meteoric rise. With G&S Discovery, Mark has incredible knowledge of marketing and selling to researchers and large research organizations. Most recently, he created and developed an online data service (NaviGRANT) that aggregated and presented life science grant information to help companies understand what their research customers are working on and employ more appropriate messaging. 


For a first glimpse at what Mark brings to the table please read his recent article about training your sales force on your website.


Welcome to the team Mark!

How to find scientists discussing your company online

Are you ready to engage scientists online, but need to know where to find them? Do you want to know what scientists are saying about your company/product/service/congress?

In short your livelihood depends on it!

So how to find it?

Besides the obvious Google Search (time-consuming & unproductive) you need to focus your search on websites and applications where scientists are actually communicating.

Lets quickly test two common social media/online outlets by searching for "Santa Cruz Biotechnology" a large antibody supplier for the life sciences.

Twitter - I searched Santa Cruz Biotechnology returned 0, Santa Cruz = 1000s unrelated, and Santa Cruz antibodies = 0. Not very telling, except that Santa Cruz needs a twitter page.

ScienceBlogs.com - I searched Santa Cruz Biotechnology got nothing.

I searched Santa Cruz = Motherload!

Actual quote from a user comments

Positive - "This antibody was from SantaCruz. It has served me well..."

Not so positive.

"Dude- Santa Cruz antibodies are enough to turn an entire f**king carebear teaparty into a republican national convention. "

"Reading this sh*t, I'm now even more frightened than before about what's in that Santa Cruz vial."

"...all antibodies have an element of crapshoot about them, but SC's are crappier, or shootier, than others."

and yikes! "Ah, SantaCrap"

Need I go on?

Dr. BrownDawg

Does Your Sales Team Know How to Use Your Website?

Let’s see a show of hands for how many companies have trained their sales representatives how to use their own companies’ website recently. C’mon, keep them up. Ok, there are a few but not many. Marketers are focused on developing, testing and tweaking their online presence and performance to satisfy their customers and attract prospective customers. There is no argument there but there might be a missed opportunity.

Your sales force is dealing with customer issues every day in the field and on the phone, answering questions about purchased products and potential product solutions. If your site is your digital face to customers, then the sales force is your eyes and ears and mouths. They need to work together or you run the risk of reproducing a badly dubbed Godzilla movie where the mouth doesn’t match the words.

Sales representatives are valuable and expensive interpreters of customer needs and translators of company offerings. You want them utilizing any tool at their disposal to help make your customers successful and close sales. So why don’t they know how to easily find a product on your website? Do they know how to download a product manual? Can they get a customer to an ordering page?

In sales management, I witnessed the sales force struggling with each of these issues, while in front of the customer. As you can imagine, it does not enhance their competence or your company’s reputation in the customer’s eyes. Stumbling through page clicks with the customer watching over their shoulder can be frustrating and produce comments like, "Why did they change this. Now its confusing?", "I don’t know why they have it this way," or "It's so hard to find things on this site." Ouch.

Instead imagine responses being something like, "Here, let me show you how to find that product on our site, its super easy" or "You will love this new tool we just added that lets you do xxxx." When you solve one researcher’s issue, there is a good chance you have gained an advocate for your site in that lab.

More time for training usually means less field time so its critical to make sure it’s worth it. Can you speed up the sales cycle by helping researchers find your products faster, easily understand how they can solve their problem and how to order them? When your sales team knows how to appropriately utilize the web presence to help them build relationships and close sales, that is a payoff.

Here are some basic tasks your sales team should know.

How To:

• Search for a product via partial product name, full name, and catalog number

• Search for a list of products related to an area of research (PCR polymerase, RNAi)

• Find and download a specific product manual.

• Find a product and order it. Set up a test account and have them go through the process.

• Use the site’s scientific resources and tools and they can help research customers.

• Contact a live resource if they cant answer a customer question.

There are many ways to educate your sales force, whether face-to-face or digitally. The key is to create a way for them to practice these tasks and to monitor their performance. They not only will be more comfortable but you might be able to identify some site navigation issues, without paying for an expensive consultant.

Ideally, your site would be so intuitive that customers and sales force both would be able to find what they needed fast and easy. In the meantime, help your sales force figure out how to leverage your website. Your customers will thank you.

Mark Walker

Putting My Money Where My Mouth Is - Custom Site Search

Two days ago I wrote about how your website is your face. In the article, I mentioned that you can create a Google Custom Search Engine for free to help your customers find products on your websites.

Today I'm putting my money where my mouth is. The company I called out was Roche, a company who's products I use and respect. So this morning I built them a Custom Search Engine (CSE) to find products on their website. The link is here - Roche Product Engine.

Here's the process

1. Log In to Google Account
   
2. Find and open CSE Creator
   
3. Fill out form
   
4. Find the product domain URL for Roche products in separate window
   
5. Paste URL into CSE window, read format tips, re-format URL to search entire domain roche-applied-science.com/*
6. Accept Terms and Decide on Standard vs Business Terms (we pay you vs you pay us)
7. Test Search Engine with product Im looking for this morning -
   

Search - "LightCycler FastStart DNA MasterPLUS SYBR Green I"

I get 35 or so hits only on Roche's site. Most of the results are in pdfs? That's frustrating! I want to order a product. Maybe that's why I can't find anything on Roche's website!
(Note: that in its exuberance Google will index anything on your site including handwritten Post-it notes on your desktop - kidding)

Ok how to fix that.... easy exclude pdf from the search by telling google to stop. You do this by adding a minus sign (-) infront of any term you want to exclude.

so... Search... LightCycler FastStart DNA MasterPLUS SYBR Green I -pdf

Bam! the first link is exactly the page for the product I want to buy

I encourage you to try it yourself. Click here to try my Roche Product Engine

I will try and make a video of this process later today. There are tons of options for customization, removing the ads, etc. That is another blog....



Bonus Cooking Tip of the Day - Wrap celery in aluminum foil in the fridge and it will keep for months! Who knew!

Your website is your face

"Your website is terrible, I mean I spent 30 min trying to find a product I know you sell, but couldn't.  I ended up buying it from Sigma instead. You guys need to do something about that, seriously!"

This is an exact quote that I overheard at vendor show at the University of California-San Diego last week (I immediately wrote it down.) The lady was visibly upset, but genuinely trying to help.  The rep was apologetic and sympathetic and back peddling.  He too thought their website sucked and even said he had complained about it repeatedly.  Clearly it wasn't the first time he had heard this complaint.

Never forget - Your website is your face!  People are more concerned about their face than any part of their body.  Its the first thing you see of someone else.  You can tell their mood, their hygienic habits, whether they are lying or not. We spend billions on products to make our faces better. 

Your website is your company's face. Its the first thing scientists see.

The culprit in the above transction - Roche.  I spent a few minutes navigating their site this weekend, and she is right, its a nightmare.  Its hard for me to believe that a company as large as Roche can't figure out how to produce a decent website.

In all seriousness, $50-100K likely buys them the best website money can buy. 

$25k and its functional. 

Google Site Search is free (plus a $100 for a programmer to install it on their website). 

Yes that was FREE! Never try to out google Google, why bother you have more important things to do like sell kits and antibodies and $500,000 Mass Spectrometers.


Sales staff - Its time to take action.  Complaining will not get you heard in a company as large as Roche, but action will. If your company's website is getting complaints, take action yourself today.    Remember money will always get the attention of the bean counters. If you aren't making your numbers point out that online sales and your crappy website are the cause. 

Do one of these today -

1. Find a great programmer, find an AB tester, find a user interface expert, find an SEO expert. Solicit their ideas and send a memo to your superiors (with four bullet points).  Email me or comment if you need some direction on this. Rehearse these bullet points and have them ready for the chance encounter with someone in your company that can make the change.

2. Solicit letters from your best customers (not PIs, they dont buy your product remember). Send them to your boss or post them by the water cooler late at night if you are scared to be seen.  If your company won't read them, send them to me and I will post them here anonymously for you. The internet gets the word out faster than you can imagine.

Take action and become indispensable! Your job depends on it.  

(yes, I know I took indispensable from Seth Godin)