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Welcome to the Succession newsletter where 2,000+ life science sales reps improve their skills in 5 minutes per week. If you’re getting value from these newsletters, we'd love it if you could forward it along to your sales colleagues. If you’re new here, subscribe below.

Succession Bio works with life science/biotech companies to help drive sales, licensing, and partnership opportunities.

We do this through market research to identify the right companies and people, craft scientifically credible messages, and then perform the outbound sales and marketing tactics on your behalf to facilitate meetings with the right people at the right companies.

Succession

• Specializes in life sciences/biotech (it's all we do!)

• Provides market research, messaging, and outbound sales/marketing services

• Facilitates meetings and opportunities with the right people at the right companies for our clients

• Sales training for teams of 10+ who want to find and close more deals with biotech and pharma

I keep seeing the same problem everywhere. Knowledge exists but we struggle to make it accessible and understandable to the people who will need it after us. In cave diving, one person maps a system, pushes it as far as they can, and the survey lives on their laptop. In data management, the one scientist who understands the pipeline leaves and the pipeline stops making sense. In every sales team I have been part of, the real knowledge of an account sits with two or three people and everyone else works around them. The problem is not field or context specific. The problem is that the information was never made accessible to everyone who needed it. Sales is just another place it shows up.

Every life science sales team has a rep who knows the answer. I do not mean the official answer in the deck. I mean the real one, which is which objection the lab manager will raise, which procurement step always stalls at a particular pharma, and which type of paper to send a skeptical PI. That knowledge is the most valuable thing the team owns, and almost none of it is written down.

Here is how it gets lost.

The first place is the handover that never happens. A rep leaves, their accounts move to someone new, and the CRM holds the contact names, the last meeting date, and nothing about why the deal was moving. The new rep starts from zero, and the customer notices.

The second place is the objection that only one person can handle. If you ask your team who closes the “we already use a competitor” conversation, there is usually one name. Everyone else either loses that deal or routes it to that person, and the method is not in any document.

The third place is the notes that stay in someone’s head. Call notes go into the CRM as “good call, follow up next week” (guilty). The part that mattered, which is the thing the customer said that changed the plan, stays with whoever heard it.

The fourth place is the onboarding that takes a year. A new rep selling to scientists spends most of that year learning what the senior reps could have told them in a week, if the process existed anywhere outside their heads.

Here is one we solved for our team. Last month Keith and Divya sat down, recorded a working session, and wrote out every type of campaign Succession runs into a single playbook. It took them a morning. The next person who joins us will read it on day one instead of collecting it over six months of asking around.

On Thursday, we build the fix live. Session 2 of our Applied AI series is called “Your best rep’s brain, written down.” It is a 45-minute working session. We’ll take one team’s unwritten knowledge and build the structure that captures it, on the call, so you leave with something your team can start filling in the next morning.

The session runs on Thursday, October 29, from 12:00 to 12:45 ET.

You can register for Session 2 here.

If you have a rep like that, bring them and the one thing that only they know. That’s where we’ll start. See you Thursday.

Arielle

Apple Podcast | Spotify | YouTube

1. Lead Generation: We’ll build target lists, write scientifically relevant messaging, and send messages on your behalf to book qualified sales meetings with biotech and pharma companies.

2. Training for Teams: If you want to upskill your team around prospecting, driving to close, key account management, AI, or any other topic, we can put together a training plan specific to your organization’s needs.

3. Strategy Call: Need more than training? Want help implementing and executing your sales strategy? In a 30-minute call, we will assess your company’s current situation and identify growth opportunities.