#009: Selling to Scientists

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Now, back to our regular scheduled programming.

Today we’ll cover how scientists make decisions and how you can adapt your sales strategies to align with their decision-making process.

Read Time: 3 Min

Persuading Scientists

Hamid Ghanadan, CEO of The Linus Group, wrote a groundbreaking book called “Persuading Scientists: Marketing to the World's Most Skeptical Audience”.

In his book, he notes that typical “buyer journeys” don’t fit the mold of how a scientist makes decisions. Scientists are trained to bounce back and forth between curiosity and skepticism. While curiosity is what drives them, it also summons skepticism, making selling to scientists a unique challenge.

Scientists are often seen as objective thinkers, unfazed by emotional biases. However, while they're trained to only analyze factual data, each person has a unique subjective frame of reference that shapes their interpretation of the data.

This creates four possible modes of thinking that scientists navigate in real time when presented with information.

The most commonly referenced buyer journey is AIDA (Attention, Interest, Decision, Action). Hamid argues that this doesn’t accurately depict the buying process of a scientist.

Using the 4 dynamic thinking modes above, he lays out an alternative buying journey that aligns with how scientists make purchasing decisions.

1. Recognition: The buying journey doesn’t start with awareness of a product, it starts with the recognition of a need or new opportunity.

2. Exploration: Once a need or opportunity is recognized, they develop a hypothesis of how to best take advantage of the new opportunity.

3. Evaluation: Once the hypothesis is formed, they can begin to evaluate potential ways to validate their hypothesis. This is when they are open to learning about products and services.

Where current sales techniques fall short

Most outbound emails focus on the capabilities and features of your offering. This means you’re delivering an “Evaluation” message to a scientist who is not even at the “Recognition” stage yet.

This is a complete disconnect from their decision-making process.

It’s no wonder email reply rates are so low!

The same issue occurs in your initial sales conversation. If they are still trying to form a hypothesis around how to solve a need or take advantage of an opportunity, and you jump into pitch mode, your message will fall on deaf ears.

Adjust your sales strategy

Now that we understand how scientists make decisions, we can tailor our message to each area of the buyer journey. Meeting them where they are.

Prospecting needs to pique their curiosity. Get them to think about what is possible. Create messaging that’s filled with emotion and limit the use of your features and capabilities.

Discovery conversations need to solidify their hypothesis about how to solve a need or take advantage of an opportunity. Ask thought-provoking questions. Challenge their thinking around root cause analysis. Share the way others have solved a challenge or taken advantage of an opportunity. Help them evaluate the impact of not solving a problem or missing an opportunity.

Once their hypothesis is formed, shape the decision criteria they are going to use when evaluating products or services. Tip the decision criteria in your favor by sharing unconsidered needs that tie back to your differentiated capabilities.

By identifying where someone is in their decision process, you can adjust your sales strategy accordingly.

That’s all for this week. Short and sweet but packed a punch.

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See you all in there.

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