Top commercial companies across life sciences, biotech, med device, and within R&D and manufacturing are increasingly investing into digital transformation.
In this interview, Anthony Cessario from Clari and Franklin Williams, who runs the Commercial Excellence Organization at Thermo Fisher Scientific's Digital Science Solutions Group discusses the value that digital software brings in driving efficiency across instruments, processes, and solutions. Previously, companies solely relied on capital and consumable type sales, but are increasingly adding digital product lines within their offerings.
Cessario and Williams highlight the need for life science organizations to utilize centralized and consolidated platforms and be able to adapt to the shifting landscape of consumerism.
Listen below or read the transcript to learn more.
How should companies be using digital software innovations to drive efficiency and maintain adaptability in their product offerings?
Anthony Cessario:
Franklin WIlliams:
Yeah, thanks for the handoff. Franklin Williams and I run the Commercial Excellence Organization at Thermo Fisher Scientific's Digital Science Solutions Group. Basically, we focus on empowering life science organizations and really anyone who's doing science with the software they need to make sure their lab's QA/QC R&D is running like it should be.
Anthony Cessario:
Super cool. Well, let's start there, Franklin, and actually it'd be really helpful, I know most of the people in the life sciences universe know who Thermo Fisher is at a broad scope, maybe if you could just take a quick minute to just kind of refresh the audience on who Thermo is and then specifically your division's responsibilities within Thermo. That, I think, would be a great place to start.
Franklin WIlliams:
Thermo Fisher as a whole, we have one central mission and it's to enable customers to make the world healthier, cleaner, and safer. We take that very seriously. It's the ethos behind everything we do. So without getting into too much detail, we do a lot of outsourced work. We supply instrumentation services to labs' R&D floors, QA/QC, oil and gas. A pharmaceutical company is anyone who's looking to do anything related to science. Really we take what we do seriously and we want to be the underpinning to anyone doing anything in that arena.
Digital science solutions historically was focused around limb software, ELN software, anything related to streamlining the lab. We've taking that a step further, we want to centralize the lab and make software the piece that binds together all instruments, chemicals, stocking, anything within the laboratory space. So our goal is that if you step into anything that could be seen as the central management of any of those things that I've discussed without saying lab a hundred times, we want you to see us in there. That's really what we want to be and we want to be the thing that can link all of your scientific endeavors together, I'll say.
Anthony Cessario:
Super fascinating. I'm going to circle back here in a minute on the software piece of that because I think it's really interesting. One thing I'd love for you to touch on, Franklin, I think your background is probably a little unique for folks within the life sciences space and so would love you to touch on just a minute, how did you make your way to Thermo? What were you doing before you were at Thermo? We can kind of double-click on that.
Franklin WIlliams:
Yeah. Honestly, my career had nothing to do with life science. I started my career in big tech. I started at Cisco Systems, really big IT infrastructure backend, all that goodness, and got stuck in the whirlwind of 2012 market contraction. Ended up consulting on my own, loved the work, loved what I was doing, and went back into the IT space running sales teams for quite a while. Ultimately, I landed at a consulting agency, helping organizations worldwide from really teeny-tiny five-person startups all the way up to mega organizations, streamlined their sales engines, anything from big things like redoing methodology roll-outs, big change management, all the way down to, hey, what does a good comp plan look like?
Coming over here was really interesting because we took a pivot and my mindset is there is no special flower organization with a super unique sales model. People like to say, "Oh, we're so unique. We do things differently." You really don't. Right? At the end of the day, sales is sales and you build a model based on best practice that can take what you have and bring that to life in the field, and a lot of it is changing mindset. A lot of it's changing operational parameters. A lot of that's redoing process.
But, for me, it's building a process that you underpin with technology so that people are forced to do what you need them to do while believing they're doing what they used to do and high-fiving themselves. My goal is just like any other salesperson, it's making you believe you did this so that it's sticky, but really we've done this and then made it into a world of efficiency to where you believe this was you. If I've done that, I've done my job well, and really if no one knows that what I'm doing is creating change, I've really done my job well.
Anthony Cessario:
Yeah, it's a great lens to look at it through. At Clari, we're really fortunate we get to work with chief commercial officers and their teams from some of the top go-to-market orgs on the planet, and one of the meaningful shifts we've seen within commercial groups and sales groups is when a company is shifting their product or service to a fairly different selling promotion where... We're seeing a lot in the life sciences and even in the med device space, this shift from what was typically a purely capital and consumables type sale to now having more digital product lines within their bag to sell. I'm curious, I mean you're right in the middle of that at Thermo. Why do you think this shift is happening? And putting your consultant hat on, I'm curious how you're thinking about selling software and services at a place like Thermo compared to some of the traditional devices.
Franklin WIlliams:
Yeah, it's actually a good topic to step into and I've been thinking about this show that I just started watching yesterday, I think it's called Hello Tomorrow, and it's this retro futurism where imagine a world where in the 1960s we colonize the moon and you could sell timeshares on the moon, and it's that door-to-door sales approach. When I think back in time, I think to the stages of selling, that was really phase one sales, phase two being the 1970s through early '90s where you show up in a Porsche or a Corvette and you take someone to a steak dinner and a club, you get the sale.
And then we stepped into phase three, which was 2000 through 2008 maybe, and it sort of overlapped the last version of sales, which I just like to call the phase four, which was The Challenger Sale in which you had the solution sell, which was really product selling, just bundled product. Then phase four, which overlapped phase three, which was The Challenger Sale where you had people starting to push boundaries, really drive on value and dig into a customer's need. We're now in the post phase four world, I don't know if it's really phase five or it's an extension of four. It's the consultant strategy, which is I have a knowledge that you need. Let's go be a consultant for you and help you drive forward. Oh, and by the way, I have a solution to the problem that you have.
That's where we are today, and I think this is why the market is reacting. I actually think it's more about selling that's ironically driving a new way to pitch and a new way to build product than anything else. Businesses are recognizing that nobody really cares about your product. They care about the value your product brings, and instruments are a commodity at the end of the day. You build it, someone's going to have a new one in a couple of years. Software on the other hand is that binding force. It's the thing that takes all of your disparate solutions, system tools, et cetera, and puts it in one place and makes it unique. You can drive efficiency across instruments, across solutions, across all these things. You can streamline processes. Audits are faster. It's the accelerant and if we're going to talk science, it's the accelerant to all the other things that you're doing, driving them forward, making them faster, and making them react.
So when I step back and I kind of look at the industry that is today versus what we had in the past, software is dragging the rest of it forward and the industry is being forced to think a little bit differently in how to keep up. Now, the irony is that it's forcing us to eat our own dog food in a sense. We have been paper-based, everybody consumes and documents stuff on paper. I can tell you that some of the most cutting edge R&D floors and laboratories and manufacturing floors in the world document in notebooks. They put things in notebooks and they have piles of notebooks sitting in a storage warehouse somewhere that no one's ever going to check, and what we do streamlines that.
So I think across industries, you're starting to see this. The new language is platforms. Everyone's now got a platform. Really most of them are just rebranded single products that are used to say we're thinking in the future. But I think what you'll start to see as you move forward is a consolidation of all of our software onto single platforms like you've seen in other industries so that you can adopt, buy on demand, do all these things in a centralized way. You do see this today in numerous other industries.
Look at automotive, you can now purchase from like 5,000 different places on your cell phone. Consolidation of basically dealership and dealer advertising on a single platform. You see it in the housing industry, you see it in the precious gem industry. GIA has singular platforms that you can go and wrap sheets that were all stuck on paper and over the phone are now available for a small subscription fee. You're seeing it everywhere. You're even seeing it in medical. You go to a hospital, you want to access someone's chart, you can now go bleep, blah, bleep, blah, bleep, pull it down, and you've got someone's chart from all the hospitals in one place, and now they're even higher level, higher order systems that do the same thing for multiple different chart systems.
I think life sciences is just right behind it. We're an older industry similar to legal, similar to finance, updating their systems and solutions both internal and externally facing and software, it's just overdue to catch up. I will say, just like every other industry, once it hits one business, every business will follow suit. Software, you can build a new platform in months if not weeks, if you really allocate resources to it. It's just that agile, thoughtful approach and a willingness to acknowledge if you don't drive change, your business will fall on its face.
Anthony Cessario:
Fascinating. I think the first thing that comes to mind for me is gratitude that there's really smart people at companies like Thermo, making the labs across the world better and more efficient places. I think that's good for humanity, so thank you for the good work you all are doing. It's a good transition though as you talk about software and the efficiencies it drives and things like that. Obviously there's been a tremendous amount of investment in this buzzword "digital transformation" within life sciences, biotech, my device, within the R&D departments and manufacturing and things like this.
At Clari, we get to work across a lot of different industries. One of the things that we've seen is that the commercial org has actually been a little bit slower to adapt digitally. They haven't seen some of that innovation investment that some of the science-based teams maybe are seeing, and we're starting to see a shift there now where some of the top commercial teams on the planet are looking to similarly figure out how do we make the right digital investments? How do we improve our digital maturity as a commercial org? You're one of the leaders leading that change. I'm curious, why do you think that investment is starting to accelerate now and any impact you've seen in some of the teams that you've led?
Franklin WIlliams:
Yeah, it's interesting. I think the biggest ones are that, well, there's three things. I think number one, organic selling is starting to slip, and that's okay, but the way that a lot of these organizations worked was that you would be in someone's business, they would buy more and then reference you. But that's like it basically locks you into organic growth and if organic growth takes a backseat... And I mean look, that happens when you have things like a pandemic, when you have things like economic uncertainty worldwide. Our Ukraine war is a great example causing a lot of hiccups in Europe. You're going to see that organic growth slip and people be more conservative in their spend and then buying based on reference. So you end up having to go out and drive awareness, and whether that's in direct sales, whether that's in more modern social selling, whether that's in semi-automated sales, it doesn't really matter. You have to think about ways to make your team more efficient so that they can go out without adding real head cost to scale at speed.
A great example, my favorite tech stack that I recommend to everybody top of funnel, it's simple and it's cheap. We start out with LinkedIn Navigator with like a ZoomInfo on it. You pull it into your Salesforce with data already attached. You pull that out to an Outreach or a Salesloft into your outbound, you've now saved yourself in terms of lead aggregation and name attachment months. I worked with a company as a consultant that would bring in about 200 leads a month with an email and phone number attached, and that was doing active, like scanning for leads with 40 sales reps. So you're telling me that each of these reps is basically getting... I mean the cost per lead had to be astronomical because you have 40 highly-paid people bringing in 200 a month. It's only five leads a head. It's not a big turnaround, and who knew if they were viable leads? You can do that with one lead, or one rep rather, 20 minutes.
So you've now collapsed that entire spend into a few minutes with one inside sales rep doing outbound. You can track what works, you can track language conversion rates, you can tweak your messaging, and then you iterate, iterate, iterate, and then every time you add a person in, it just adds more value to the stack on a linear growth rate. Each person you add in the amount that you know that they can handle, done. And eventually you maximize your TAM and you cap out. But the idea is that by that point, you have a new product to sell or an upgrade to sell or someone to re-attack or whatever, however you want to address it.
Today, we can't do that. Spreadsheets don't work. People fudge numbers. People don't want to be transparent. Sales reps are notoriously conservative in how they share because sales reps like to win. We are coin operated, as my boss likes to say, and frankly how I like to say it, we are by design the laziest people in a business. We work as little as possible for maximum output because it's really what our job is. So if we're going to say, as sales leaders, we want to be efficient, we need to hold people accountable to results that are measurable and modifiable.
So the way I look at this, our industry, most industries are starting to change all for the same reason. If you don't drive change, you fall behind because another company, which is probably this big but has some investment and a knife to their throat by their investor to hit certain targets is going to drive that and eat your lunch. And if you don't think about how you can compete, you're going to drown. And what I'll tell most people in an established market to watch out for is the long tail. There's always a long tail in every business. Even if you're a business with a short tail, there's still a tail that you need to look out for. And that's typically the spot where these incoming companies go first. Hey, you don't have a lot of money. You got to go buy from someone with a more cost-effective model that's simpler to use that your team can adopt. They're going to go there, they're going to go there, they're going to eat that all up, and then they're going to start picking away at your big accounts.
So if you don't think about how to be as agile early, you're going to get trapped. And we have seen this a million times and it's why you get a lot of startups that they pop up, they suddenly have evaluation of 100 million, and then a well-established mid-market company gobbles them up and becomes a small enterprise. So I will say to every leader out there who's thinking about the market that they're working in and thinking, oh, we'll never be knocked over. Look out for the small guys. You're either going to have to fight them or buy them out, and I couldn't say based on your industry, business or market, which is better for you.
Anthony Cessario:
Yeah, it's a great point, and it's interesting. I think when you combine everything we just talked about, these changing requirements of the sellers being forced to not just sell on relationships and steak dinners and actually happen to sell value. You put the managers into that conversation as a frontline sales leader, you have to actually coach your reps now to not just go out and create relationships, but to have a value sale, to be a challenger. Some of the great work from The Challenger team, if you haven't read it recently around The JOLT Effect, how do you get people out of the indecision paradox? There's a lot more coaching that needs to happen for these reps. It's just not on the wraps.
And that's one of the things that we've seen accelerating that shift to digital is that more digital-based selling gives managers more data to coach on. They're watching recordings of calls, they're seeing things shifting in the pipeline that might indicate there's risk, and they're using that to represent the business in a more accurate way up the chain and the way they forecast the business. So makes a lot of sense and, again, grateful to see leaders like you investing in digital innovation within the sales department within a commercial org, hopefully more leaders will follow suit.
Any advice? You talked about top of funnel and getting the leads in place and stuff like that. As you think about further down the line, pipeline management forecasting things, do you see innovation investment going in to that part of the business as well, or any advice you have just on other high-impact areas that leaders should be thinking about?
Franklin WIlliams:
Yeah, there's a couple of things and we can talk about them relatively high level, but first things first, be willing to invest in a stack to make your team efficient and to drive visibility. A lot of historical businesses get stuck behind this wall of, well, I'm the rep. I know what's best. And again, if you've read Challenger, it's a pile of lone wolves. They're out there, they're doing the work. They're saying, "Well, I'm working hard. I don't need your help." We have no clue what's going on. Salesforce, every opportunity's empty. It doesn't really work. So let's, number one, make sure that you have the ability to, and you empower yourselves to track your teams and see what they're doing.
Secondly, as I said earlier, as you do it, buy-in is critical, but buy-in from the right people. It needs to be bought in by your leaders and their subleaders or they don't drive down to feed on the street what needs to be done. So you have to have a good change management plan.
Three, don't feel like you have to do this alone. You're not an expert in this yet. It's okay to go hire a consultant. You're going to spend 100, 200, 300,000 bucks on this. It's not cheap, but it's going to pay returns in orders of magnitude. You spend $300,000, you'll probably see $3 million later, if not more, depending on what you do. So be cognizant about that and be okay asking your consultant for an ROI calculator. Most of them have it.
Four, be smart. Don't just do things to do things. Do things with an expectation of what you're getting out on the other side. Digital transformation is a journey, and you're going to have to understand that there's a path here to get to that point.
And then I'm going to leave with this one. This is the big one for me. Recognize that change is hard. Humans are by nature risk averse. It's not something that you're going to say, "Oh, yep, okay, we're going to change today. High five, everybody. Digital transformation, we win." It doesn't happen. The migration of tools is hard. The change in behavior is hard. Change management is not an easy thing to drive, especially if you've never done it and you don't have a framework.
On top of that, transforming your solutions to be something that is saleable in a more modern digital way, SaaS, PaaS, self-consumption, it's a process. So understand you're going to spend years and you need a multi-year plan. And again, don't do it alone. Salesforce can help you, consultants can help you. The Clari team can help you. There's tons of organizations out there that are willing to invest in your success, big or small. You just have to be proactive about that concept and be willing to dig deep and recognize you're going for the marathon, not the hike. And that's actually the last thing I'll say. This is not a hike. It's not something that you're going to climb and say, "We made it." It's something that you're going to be going through for a long time and you need to plan from beginning to end to pace yourself. So set your plan, hire smart people, model well, and partner properly.
Anthony Cessario:
Great, and I think it's a great place to wrap it. If I recap, I think what we talked about today, one, it seems like there is a big shift across life sciences, med device, healthcare in general, to this more digital world by way of the nature of your products and services as well as the nature of how you get your own work done. You need to be ready. You need to be willing to adapt to this new world that you're living in, both how you sell and what you're selling. And you need to prepare your org to be adaptable, be ready for the change management, know that this isn't going to be a quick fix. Be ready to make changes as things come up because we have global pandemics and downturns and things like that that are going to force you to make different decisions. Great advice. Really appreciate you sharing, Franklin. Thank you so much. And hopefully we can do this again.