Commercial Strategy | Connecting Science, Strategy, and Storytelling

In this SCORRCAST episode, Derek Gooderham of Allumiqs shares how life sciences companies can bridge the gap between science and strategy. From data storytelling to navigating internal silos, Derek offers a perspective on aligning teams and driving clarity in a complex industry.

Transcript

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Music Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the SCORR cast. As always, I am very excited to be here to talk to an individual that I met a couple of years ago now, Derek, as as I'm getting ready to introduce you, where I walked out of our first meeting, and I remember sending a message to somebody and saying, holy shit, this might be one of the smartest people I've ever met. And I said this about you and about Kent, to be fair, he's not here, but I did, I did say it about him as well, and I was instantly fired up about your background, how you think about commercial strategies, about how you think about just being a leader in general, and the connection between commercial and customer success, client success, and how marketing plays A role into that. And then I think, you know, a really important topic in today's day and age is, how does data play into all of that? And so I'm excited for everybody listening to the podcast to also get to learn a little bit from Derek. I'm going to have him introduce himself here in a second. But as always, the SCORR cast is the place for you to come to listen to to hear all of the best minds and leaders within marketing, within commercial, within operations, within the life sciences. Thank you so much for continuing to listen. For some reason, we're on 62 episodes now of this show over the last year, which is pretty wild that SCORR has let me do 62 episodes and no one has told me to stop doing 62 episodes. But with that being said, before I get on a tangent and start running. Derek, thank you so much for being here. And if you don't mind, for those who don't know you yet, give us a little give us a little background. Give us an introduction here. So Alec, thanks for allowing me to participate in your in your podcast. It's good to know that $20 goes a long way. And some words the beginning of the meeting. Yeah, no, I recall meeting you a few years back as well and having a very engaging conversation. I quite enjoyed that I have a marketing background myself, actually a tenured background in the IT space. I've worked for IBM, worked for Microsoft, worked in the IT world, before joining the science world just two and a half years ago. So much of what I have attempted to adopt is from the IT solutions environment and try to strip out the noise, to get it to, I'd say, a working relationship in the in the science world. So we've had some successes at the company I work for now. I'm with an organization called Allumiqs. We're in the life sciences space, and I'm the commercial lead. So presumably I'll have a chance to chat with you about some of the cross pollination, across from it into into science, and some not everything has worked well. So I may be able to speak to some areas that haven't worked as hoped, but a lot of similarities, lot of synergy. And yeah, sky's the limit. I love it. I love it. And I think you know, one of the things that we talk about on On this episode, almost every single recording, is, how does somebody end up in the life sciences? And you know, I think you're going to have an even more interesting story with that, as you've worked through different industries, and then suddenly we're in the life sciences and and it's, it is, albeit it's a similar industry to a lot out there, but it's its own beast in its own way. And so before we even jump in, you know, do you mind sharing kind of the story of what led you to join the science side of things? I don't mind sharing at all. I have a relationship with our CEO, Kent McLean. In 2023 he gave me a call we used to work together a number of years ago, and he called me and he said, I think we can do something different within our organization. He, of course, is speaking of Allumiqs at the time. There were some average sales, but probably an opportunity to integrate marketing a little differently, maybe look at Channel ecosystem a little differently, and he was keen on trying to take and leverage some of the successes that we had in the IT space, and bringing that over. So I of course, challenged him on a number of questions, crafted out a bit of a high level strategy for him, and that very quickly turned into an offer for him to or for me to join. So, yeah, the rest is history. I love it. I think I would pay a good amount of money to have been a fly on the wall in that meeting. But I do think it's a good segue into kind of shaping the commercial strategy inside an organization, and especially in. A unique life science market in a really unique timeframe, certainly in the United States, and as you know, as that pertains to the globe and how it's all reacting to it, but I kind of want to just talk about exactly that meeting where you're starting to kind of set the roadmap for a commercial strategy. Where do you like to where do you like to begin? Derek, so the first is listening, and then hearing, listening to what's working, hearing from our customers, and trying to define something that would be shaped and tailored to really their customer success. So it's one thing to be set with KPIs. We all have business. KPIs grow more revenue, be more profitable. Try to find a floor or some run rate of ongoing business. It's another thing to be a reference a year from now, when your customer can't wait to talk about the tremendous experience that they had in working with you. And as we all know, viral marketing from referrals are much stronger reference than than anything. So earning the right to build that that type of growth starts with listening and starts with spending a lot of time hearing from our customers. So one of the very first things that I chose to do was, as you said, spend some time with with the customers themselves, and then we really focused on solution selling, which is a key, key component to our commercial strategy, and I think it's a key component to really any organization that is focusing on both services well as well as products. Forget what the products are in the IT space. It could be licensing, it could be Software as a Service, experience in life sciences. It could be any scientific hardware. A piece of hardware is part of that solution, and then the services are, you know, everything from implementation to consulting to project management to deep scientific, bio, bio, analytical, you know, outcome determination, whatever that time and effort is that's effectively services. You blend that together and you have an opportunity to sell in a combined way. That is basically by staying customer centric. So for those that have never spent time solution selling, I recommend Google searching it, or chat GPT, because what you're really doing is you're spending your time listening to your specific needs of your customers. You're trying to tailor a solution that's in line with the pain points to those challenges after listening to them, as opposed to pushing a product on them or pushing a service on them. So you're creating an environment for their success, that customer success that we talked about at the beginning to flourish. And, you know, there's some principles of solution selling we'll talk about in a minute. And there's some principles of, you know, a stepped process and structure you can create. But I would say that one of the first things we did is create an architecture for solution selling. I love it, and instantly have three or four different tangents that we can run down within this avenue. But I do think, you know, right out of the gate, I come back to one of the B to B marketing leaders that I'm a big fan of, Dave Gerhart over at an organization called Exit five talks about the best marketing is the product market fit. And if you have the fit for what your audience is looking for, it's it's going to make marketing a lot easier. It's going to make retention of clients a lot easier. And then you mentioned the referral and and just kind of that lead flow. And, you know, for me, it comes back to kind of being that that partner, rather than being a vendor, even if you do sell a product or a technology, and the relationship can kind of end there. How can we build partnership into each of these pieces of the puzzle? And for us at SCORR, when we see a team that has client success and customer success and operations involved in the branding and then the messaging, we feel a lot more confident that that is something that's going to stick, because the brand and the messaging and the marketing is what you do on a day in and day out basis. And if you can have that consistency, consistency across the organization, you've got a better chance of being successful from from an execution standpoint, but certainly from a marketing and sales standpoint as well. The structure needs to be born in the foundational layer. So I'm ex Microsoft and ex IBM, which means I like my acronyms, so I'll try not to use them. But there's some stickiness when you define a process and give it an acronym. So I'm going to talk about RVI champ and ASSP. RBI stands for relative value index, and what that is, it's our way in our organization, of taking all the unqualified leads. Is that may exist, put them through a set of questions, give a point value to those questions and a yes no answer, and based on a high degree of Well, based on a high volume of yeses, there's a higher degree of probability that that would be a lead worth entertaining into a sales engagement at the very early stages. So understanding and having some consistency with the funnel of unqualified to qualified is one of the first things that we do that we apply across every marketing activity that has a pipeline impact. Second thing we do is we focus on champ in a traditional selling methodology, it would be common to see BANT, budget, authority, need and timelines, life sciences, space in a solution, selling space. It's more appropriate to speak of challenge authority, money and prioritization. In other words, understand what the challenges are of your customer or your prospect. Understand who the authority is. It may or may or may not be the individual you're referring to or talking to, at least understand what that is. It's not so much that they have the budget. But do you understand the money? Where does the money come from? Is it a grant? Is it predetermined? Is it ongoing? Is it monthly? Is it calendar based? It doesn't exist. It does it not exist? And then the most elusive, one of all of them, which used to be timeline is really about prioritization is how does this initiative fit in the scale of all the 100,000 other things that that individual has to do? Is it high priority, or is it other? So those qualification criteria helps to set the stage of how we qualify these opportunities, and therefore, based on the answer to each one of those questions. Get further along in the step sales process, then ASSP is the Allumiqs solution selling process, and that is a fancy way of saying, let's have a consistent methodology and a way for the opportunity to go through the sales pipeline in a strategic and consistent way, to get out to the point where there's a suitable handoff, in this case, to operations. So we're in a services line of business, it needs to be over to operations. Doesn't stop there. Alec loops. Make sure that turns right back into the new lead, which then gets then nice rolling loop. So I'm being a little facetious when they talk the acronyms, but they have landed. It does demonstrate consistency and value, and it's resonating because now you can start to do some very interesting things in terms of predictive models and in terms of getting some data insights. You can focus on deal velocity, you can focus on opportunity optimization. You can start to take a look at some of your acquisition strategy and bring some reports against how they were working or not working. You You are an environment now. You're creating an environment that could make some data driven decisions simply by having that consistency. Plus, in our case, we have six business development reps, but you could have 600 business development reps, right ecosystem, right across the board. So I took, effectively, a tried and true methodologist, worked well, the number two brand and the number three brand in this world, that's Microsoft and IBM, stripped that out, applied that to an area that said, Okay, this can't be that different. In Life Sciences, we need a structure. There's still people. People buy from people. They want to work with. You know, we still have services. We still have products. Let's morph that together into a structured way, and it seems to be working very well. I I'm pausing so Braden, our video editor, can just take that snippet and then sell it as a class on on YouTube. Because, because for me, you know, I cannot tell you how many conversations we have on a day in and day out basis where we talk about how complex the sales, market and sales journey is within the life sciences. And it both is that complex, and also, I feel like you simplified it for me in four minutes, and I the champ the challenge authority money prioritization is everything for me. And I know, you know the others have their time and place that you've built specifically within Allumiqs, but I feel like the challenge, the challenge authority money prioritization, you could bring that to any organization tomorrow Go through a HubSpot or a Salesforce or a CRM and be able to identify and you would feel much more confident, like you mentioned, you know, in terms of the predictive modeling, in terms of time to close, in terms of are we even having the right conversation with the right person? And there's a lot of pipelines right now where we are not having the right conversation with the right individual well, and think of how you can scale So marketing is an excellent way to help optimize that pipeline, but the material that you're going to be showcasing to an organization that has a lower prioritization might be a little different than some. That is money issues. Yeah, we talk about, what does it take to win a piece of business, and we immediately go to discounting. Well, why are we discounting? Maybe that's not their pain point. Maybe they have money. Maybe the issue is how they're prioritizing. Can you remove a pain elsewhere to help prioritize? Can you bundle together? Can you look into a commercial term that has, you know, cash flow differences and implications, understanding and again, comes from listening and a stepped sales process and appreciating how the marketing, I gotta say, material feeds into that can really start to scale. So we have a nurture program within our organization, and it would not make sense to apply. You know, you let's, let's use a regular consumer example. My wife and I are at the point where we're looking at my vehicle, thinking it might be time to to change vehicles. And we learned that we have very different wish, want and need, but it's on her need list is more of my wish list, and what's on my need list is kind of her want list. So we're not really aligned. However, let's say we agree that, yes, we are in market to buy a vehicle. We're going to be very open for the next few weeks and understanding as much as we can we are going to be as consumers, educating ourselves deeper into the sales process than it's ever been because of all the material that's available online. I'll talk to friends and neighbors. We all like the number three. We'll get three quotes. You know, it'll be all the usual consumer behavior and the time to sell me on a vehicle, and so my wife on a vehicle will be within the next few weeks. Okay, fast forward few weeks. I just purchased that vehicle. How open Do you think I'm going to be to a brand new flyer that comes in the mail for a new new vehicle that's going to offer 10% discount, first thing that goes into recycling. So understanding the timing and understanding where the customers and prospects are in that buying cycle is paramount, and you only do that when you have a consistent process that allows for marketing to really demonstrate that impact and influence, because they can understand it so silly example being, you know, for a car, but effectively it's the same thing. It's, you know, this the person who's a husband or a father or a wife or a daughter or what have you. There's also a leader and the decision maker at the in a work environment, and knowing that journey as much as you can, appreciating the opportunity in its fullest capacity only increases your close rate and only increases your ability to have that pipeline impact. And all starts with well, measuring twice and cutting once, asking a lot of questions, listening a lot, hearing a lot, and then making sure that you're aligned with their with their success criteria. Yeah, it's a perfect example in terms of bringing the human element as well into the industry and the business decision. And I think, you know, I talk a lot about all the time, it's not B to C or B to B, it's, it's H to H, it's, it's humans talking to humans. And humans still are going to utilize the same philosophy from a buying behavior. They're they're they might take a little bit of emotion out of it, but they are still going to go and check within their network. They're going to ask their previous colleagues. They're going to consume the content. And we know more and more of the buyer's journey is happening online, and you can get deeper in the buyer's journey, even in the life sciences, than ever before, without having to talk to somebody because of all of the content that exists. And so that starts to get into the area where now we're talking about marketing's role is to be available in the content creation, in the content consumption for the first 3040, 50, 60% of that buyer's journey. And then you're taking it even, you know, a step deeper in terms of what I might refer to as kind of that account based, or really targeted marketing, where the content that I want to create for somebody in procurement is going to be different than the content that I need to create for somebody that is a CEO of a smaller shop, but they're at a different stage within within that journey. And I think to your point, you know, not only knowing what steps are in that journey, but being able to identify that through the right line of questions at the beginning of the sales process is going to is going to transform how you can predict and have an effective pipeline in there as well, well in where you are weak and where you are strong and where you need assistance. And it's okay to ask for help. Okay not to know. That's how you can introduce channel and bring subject matter experts. That's how you can bring consultants. That's how you can learn from the deals that you've lost and improve how you've lost. I've always thought that the value, one of the primary values, of marketing, is to make selling more compelling. And a big strategy for our organization, our marketing impact is to basically be where our customers are so. And that can be figuratively and literally. The days of physically being at every trade show and every conference is cost prohibitive, not to mention, are the decision makers and are the the decisions to move forward being made at that at those conferences, you later realize that the answer may be yes, the answer may be no. So what I love about the data aspect is we've also uncovered. We've created something called ACE I love here's another acronym. I love it. It's the Allumiqs conference evaluation tool that was built by one of my one of my colleagues, that works with me. And what effectively it is. It's a daily debrief at the end of every day, at every conference or every event, where we ask ourselves, there's about 20 different key questions about the value of the activity, participation, what have we learned? What did we not learn? Who's their competitors? Uh, competitively, who's there, who's, uh, when industry updates have occurred, and then it gives us a planning board discussion for the next day to be proactive. And saying, okay, Alec, can you go see the following? Two or three people learn this, you know, you go here, you go, here, you go, here. And then we come back and do this every day. At the conclusion of a four day event, you have a document which basically outlines every pipeline impact, every lesson learned. When someone says, what's the value of your participation, you've got all the content you need Allumiqs conference evaluation form, which then gives it a SCORR. I like to gamify things, so it's a one, one to one to 10. One is poor, 10 is can't get any better. And then you keep track of these over and over and over and over and over, month after month, quarter after quarter, year after year. So the time comes to make a marketing plan for the upcoming year, you've got some data you can rely on that reminds each other and ourselves of the micro detail that helped to find that this was really strong in one area and really weak in another area. So one of your KPIs, as an example, is to inject some funding into a marketing activity that's going to produce the most amount of new pipeline leads in a particular industry. I have a repository now, a few years worth of ACE data that says, give me the best types of events that had the best type of marketing impact, as translated by promo code or as translated by tracking history of an event in our CRM system, that might be less than $10,000 or more than, you know, less than $25,000 or whatever. Put whatever parameter you'd like, and you're starting to build and refining a dartboard of prediction for, okay, if this is the type of spend we'd like to have, these are the types of activities I look for. Then you make a bet on an industry. You make a bet on what your customers are saying are important to them. You'd be present there, and you start to see a higher close rate, a higher probability for success, because it's starting to refine. Or you can come back and say, Look, you need to have some awareness and consideration in the following areas. We need to have some brand equity. What is the best price we can get and or value that we're getting? What's the sediment out there from our nurture campaigns and our readers? What what click through? Rates that we received based on the content? Are they staying here? Are they leaving here? Right? So you make these data driven decisions now, is it the right decision? Not always, but at least you are refining if it's something has turned out to be incorrect, what a great opportunity to update ace and update your predictive models so that that doesn't happen again, and you can further refine it. So you're on this journey with marketing and selling, taking a bats back seat, quite frankly, to the purchasing behavior is really what we're should be asking sales, what are customers buying? Not so much. What are we selling? What are we marketing is, what are our customers buying? And mapping solution architecture to that by using these data points. So it's a bit of a different philosophy. It's a bit of a different approach, but it will breed long term success criteria, which is usually recurring business. It will breed and continue to foster customers that are happy to introduce you to other colleagues, your other people within their organization and or give you more business, which is really what we're trying to define. Again, success is a reference a year after implementation, not necessarily on the sale. So I'd like to see recurring run rate of business coming from those customers, because it makes it a lot cheaper and a lot easier to kind of to grow your business when you have happy customers wanting to just give you more business than it is to find new customers. But I digress. Don't digress. I knew. I knew. I knew that. Was gonna be a good episode. I knew this was gonna be a good episode. I promised you one bad podcast question before air, and I'm sitting in this in my seat right now. I'm a commercial leader. I'm a marketing leader, sales leader within the industry, and I'm listening to the SCORR pass because goodness, what a great way to get educated on the industry, and I'm hearing you already, so you got a whole lot of them to listen to. I'm I'm listening to Derek say all of this, and I am thinking, there's just not it's not possible. My my sales team doesn't update their CRM. My sales and marketing team don't like each other. How am I even supposed to create this alignment and let alone use this I can't get my team members to tell me if I had a good trade show or a bad trade show until three months later, and they still haven't even done their expense reports since the show ended a month ago. How? How do you create the for lack of a better term sales and marketing alignment and synergy across the organization, where not only is this something that exists, but it's something that has the right information in there that when I pull the tool, I know I'm getting the right data that I'm supposed to be looking at. Yeah, great question, a loaded question, but yes, I told you. I said one bad connection, but I love it, because what an opportunity to reshape So in my experience and I didn't, haven't just done this with the organization I'm with now, after leaving Microsoft, I helped build a Microsoft business partner practice that operate in 13 countries. Grew to about 35 resources that had a very similar, similar scenario, and in some ways, I cut my teeth on that experience of trying some things that didn't work out so well, so that when I came to this organization, I was able to pick the best ones and make it look like it was just off the top of my head. The reality is, in our case, our marketing team, our sales team, immediately became business development professionals. They have titles for marketing. They have titles for sales. In the case of science, it might be a scientific sales person or a solution sales person, or what have you. I redefined effectively everything. Their targets are combined, and it's a team based target. They have identical accountabilities to the same outcome, different roles to play different expectations, but we are as fast as our slowest runner, and we all high five when we win on that bonus. So compensation drives behavior, but also a Team Drives that behavior as well, and it was one of the first things we did, is we structured completely their comp system, comp program, yeah, and identified as business development professionals. That means that we are entrepreneurs, and it's okay to come up with as many ideas as you can. Nothing's wrong. They're just great ideas, and we'll pick a few of them and work on and that immediately started to breed a mentality that we are on a team. We're generally interested in our collective success, and how can we do better? And it became a little bit contagious. Next thing we did, obviously, was introduced, as I said, these structure, and I think it helped that it wasn't just made up. These are structures that were tried and true, structures that have worked in larger organizations, that adapted to a smaller group. And we needed to have resources that were very open to change. And I am blessed to have had a team be very open to the new guy that didn't know anything about science coming in, talking about how we're going to change the world. And over a two or three year plan, it was important to have that vision, yes, but a strategy specifically of when things are going to occur, and how that will be, how that will occur, and be open to tweaking along the way. I personally view my success as my team's success. If they're unsuccessful, I did something incorrectly, and it's a different management approach. It's a different, I can say, mentality, but what that has done is that has fostered an environment of excitement, has fostered an environment for learning, and is fostering environment for, you know, being adaptable. And look at the beginning of this podcast, you talked about the current market conditions. If we don't diversify as a whole, we're in trouble. I'm happy to say we're having. One of the better years yet for some key reasons, which we'll talk about in a minute, but that's because we're diversifying. It's because we're being adaptable. It's because we have a team that is open to each other's success in that regard, and that works well in a smaller team environment. If a commercial lead was talking to you that might have maybe 50 or 60 people, you'd obviously have to have a subset hierarchy to that. But in our case, I say for anything less than 10 very doable. We did this within less than one month. Made that complete adjustment in less than one month. I mean, the revenue is a team game is a T shirt that I want to have and and hand out to everybody. And so I'm all in on this. Too many, too many companies that we talk to on a day to day basis, the commercial team and really the marketing business development team members, they're not they're not only not on the same team, they're playing different sports. And so there's no no consistency and and alignment throughout all of this. But I love the the team based goals. You know, I make, I make light of this all the time, but I marketing needs to rebrand, and marketing needs to just be business development operations and business development support, and that can incorporate all of the branding elements and the website and the more fun stuff that you get to do within marketing. But if we did that, I think that there would be a bigger buy in. But for me, the big takeaway out of all of this is the vision, and why are we doing this? And when you can align at the comp plan and that strategy, and when you can align at the result that you're trying to create, it's a lot easier to buy in as an individual contributor as or as a middle manager. Then if you're just feeling like, oh, this is another this is another dreaded reorg. There's a new system. There's a new thing that we're doing, we can buy into it when we actually have that vision, and it does feel like we're playing on the same field, too, very much. So So I have rock stars on my team, yeah. So it made it very easy. I'd like to acknowledge that I did very little, quite frankly, yeah, suggest some things, and they were the ones that really took it off and embraced it. And I've always said, if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. And I never touted to be the double PhD scientist. There are members of my team. I don't need to know that part. I know a thing or two about some areas, and I think we can all contribute collectively. So when we can be open minded to growing in that regard, I think that's where you'll do really well. The other piece too is we're scratching the surface on the integrated marketing communications that can exist around effectively that the entire brand and the differentiation, and we actually went further than just the commercial reorg. We redefined the core values of our company. Yeah, we spent some time not having managers choose what those core values were. We spent some time having many workshops with our entire company, building more of a symbiotic, I can say, assessment of what they could be, overlaid with a lot of customer feedback. We took all customer feedback that we had on reasons why they purchased from us, we added that as some of the differentiation. So we've got five core values, which I'm very proud of. You know, customer success, being results driven, being bold, being agile, and all together, we could spend a lot of time talking about what they mean, but more importantly for us, it defines the culture that is our organization. And the good part about it is when we start to do people assessments, or we start to do any adjustments and change within our roles and responsibilities, we always fall back on decisions that are in line with these core principles, and if they stay within our core principles, it's okay to fail, as long as we are, you know, being bold altogether, and trying to be agile in an effort and learn something from it, and tweaking and moving ahead with that. So it really started off as a commercial adjustment, but it went deeper into a structural change to our culture, and people were really open to it. They were very open to it because it was based on experience. It had feedback from customers, and it's made sense. Just logic really wasn't imparted upon it was selected by the group. So we try our best to where we can to live by those values. And in my humble opinion, customer success is primary number one. And you know, as a director of our company, one of the directors I sit in a number of meetings often raise my hand is to say, well, the most important voice in the room isn't here. That is of the customer. So let me, let me read to you what they're telling us for the reasons why they're working with us, and let that echo in some of our making and. And I think it comes down to a willingness to really try to have a team approach to it, more than just a commercial operation. So, you know, for those folks that are are trying to change the methodology, maybe, in this case, adapt solution selling, making it more customer centric, you gotta go a little deeper into the ecosystem of your culture and the ecosystem of the the decision makers in your group and the team that you have. If we didn't have willing participants, it wouldn't have been successful as we are. But every single one of these folks looked at me and said, Okay, it's on you. Let's give it a shot. Let's do it now. They're making the decision themselves, because they can see it, right? So not preaching if they can see it well. You know, I think one of the things that we talk a lot about right now is the retention of of top employees. And that's a, it's a it's a huge topic of discussion in the industry and and just in general, in the workforce. And I think what we're seeing more and more of is people want to have that community. They want to feel like they belong and are a part of the program. And it seems like you've kind of hit the nail on the head in a lot of ways there, and especially talking about, you know, leadership, but then also tying it back into the commercial impact and having those core values that that you're able to have as a true north, which I think is a it's an interesting segue. It's not a segue that I thought, that I would, that I would use today, but we talked about the the market, and we talked about how, you know, for some of our clients at SCORR, it's really hard to look forward six months from now, 12 months from now, and have a predictive landscape of what is, what is going to be, and how are we going to be able to pivot? And, you know, it's, it's caused a lot of stress on marketers, on sales leaders, on business owners and leaders alike, in terms of saying, how do I build and future proof this strategy? And I think, you know, to go on a little bit of a soapbox, the pandemic felt like this giant thing, and it was, and now I almost feel like somehow this is even weirder and and not not worse, but weirder than the 2020, era, because there was still work that was happening. It was just in a different way. There was budgets that were being moved around. But what's happening right now feels even less predictable than what was happening after the first couple of months of of the covid 19 pandemic. And so I'm curious, just as an overview, what your thoughts are on how companies like yourself and you kind of alluded to it with the having the true north of the core values. But how do you go about planning commercially marketing on more than a quarter by quarter basis, knowing that there is a really good chance that a policy might change or a tweet might go out, and we might have to pivot a little bit left and right. What does that look like for you guys? And just what are your thoughts on it? Great question. We have a magic eight ball under our desk and we hold it up. Can I get it? Can I I would, I would love to get that's it, the magic eight ball. No, we diversify our portfolio, and we stay constantly aware of what our channel, opportunity exists, what, what, what exists with our partner. And that's, that's actually an observation I've had and a learning that I've had in how behind the life sciences space is in P to P marketing, P to P just relationships. It's prevalent in it the road to market is through the channel. It's well within the customer's comfort zone to receive subject matter expertise join a call that works for another company. It seems to be very, very new in the life sciences space to collaborate and not compete with one another, but actually have subject matter experts assist. So the opportunity for our organization is to as part of our organic growth strategy, embrace the channel and really blossom the channel. So no longer do we just have additional services, delivery options and or maybe technology partners. We have affiliate relationships now these organizations with companies that can say, well, you maybe not be that deep in this particular area, we are. Why don't we work together? We'll find some symbiotic price point that makes sense, where you make an uplift on margin and or we make something here, and we can work collectively your customer. We flow through the revenue through you. You flow through us. Yep. Why not use use our environment, use your environment. So what an amazing opportunity to collaborate. What an amazing opportunity to find and build a true channel, not just partnership. The word strategic partners. Strategic Partnership is an overused term, but truly finding affiliate organizations that you can go to market with and through. So that helps diversify. That's key. The other key thing is, I'd say leaning into something which maybe your question isn't going towards, but I'd like to take it towards, is the power of choice. And it comes back to how our most important person is a customer. People buy from people they like to work with. We're learning now that they'd like to have options, and these options, when presented, allows for versatility. And in our case, I was able to construct different commercial terms, different commercial options that would be unique for, let's say, the business value, not just the science value, but the business value for these organizations. So in our relationship with procurement teams and CFOs and senior business leaders, they were quite excited and happy about sort of the commercial operations side of some of these, these things that we have. And you know, it doesn't have to just be the traditional I have an assignment. I want to tinker with some science. How long is a piece of string? What do I get? How much do I spend when I sign the contract? How much is due upon midstream milestone, how much is due upon delivery, and then we're done. You know, it can be a more fruitful dialog that has a stronger, closed loop approach to growing well beyond just that, that revenue stream. And then, if you involve channel, well, now you're actually offering a different, diversified portfolio. You've got the relationship with the customer. They're buying more things for you. And if you really want to talk about the business value that of of KPIs and some of the gonna say success criteria in you know, most accounting principles have revenue recognized after, after the services are delivered. Well, if somebody else is delivering them, not in other words, freeing up your ability to deliver services. Yeah, your environment, you get twice the speed, higher recognized revenue. You have a chance to be a little more profitable, earlier, quicker, better, faster you get you can fill in the blanks. Yeah? Well, I think when we start to diversify and be open to diversification. Maybe it's different countries, maybe it's different verticals, maybe if it's different solutions that existing partnerships sell and or market that just opens up the conversation. And then I'd say another thing that I'm thinking of is, the more you understand the velocity within your the things you can control, you can you can speed things up quicker. So you can optimize quicker. For example, we can optimize the way that we take the discovery detail and formulate it into a quote that's in the customer's hands. Well, used to take 30 days that gathers feedback from this person, this person, this person. We can consolidate that and find synergies to get that down to three to four days, which means you're getting a quote in the hands of a customer. They still may take some time decision, because maybe the funding has changed, or maybe they have to delay things are frozen, or what have you, but the parts you control, you can do it much quicker, and you can also educate the in our case, let's say the project management, which is the receiver of the project, after it's been one To not only fulfill a great project, but to sniff for new initiatives. What are the other opportunities to be new opportunity conversations, plant the seeds for conversation which doesn't behave like a selling business professional, but you can behave as a marketer in planting some some questions, which will open up a dialog, which will then open up a new conversation, which might again continue to diversify. So that's I would approach. That's how I would approach, and it's actually how we are approaching the recent fund that is today's Well, I it goes back to the first thing that you said in terms that the project management. It goes back to that first thing you said about listening. And hearing and just being curious throughout that process. But I think your answer from, you know, from the the power of choice to just having the diversified, diversified portfolio, comes back to something that you said, which is fostering a, you know, an organization of adaptability in an environment of people that want to be there to bring new ideas, to try new things. And you know, it's really interesting to me, because I've only ever heard that fostering an environment of when the word that was going to come after it was innovation, and I was instantly going to. Saying that's not true. You're not fostering an environment of innovation, and you know, you're not fostering a culture of innovation. But when we talk about fostering a culture and an environment of adaptability, of bringing new ideas to the table, you know things like that, and then you know the learning from every experience. Those are tangible things that I can actually do. You know, I as an individual contributor that with a weight of innovation, and what does that mean? And AI, you know, there's, there's so many ways in which that goes, but the idea of, hey, I actually have the autonomy to bring an idea to the table, to try something new and to recommend something, you know, that is something that you can, you can build a culture on and I think it's a really applicable way to wrap up kind of that thought process on, how do we future proof some of these things as well. I think we embrace it. Entrepreneurial means, get creative, come up with new ideas, but speak in an environment that is accepting and encouraging of that close to, well, not exactly, yeah, pretty simply, right? It's pretty it's really, it's as simple as that. It's, are we? Are we creating an environment for that entrepreneurial approach and thought process to exist and as managers and as leaders of a company, in my opinion, we need to foster that. We need to create an environment, you know, for that engagement to be to flourish, right and good ideas are going to come from people that care about and the best people I care about are the people that are motivated and compensated well. When they do well that are listening our customers and adding new ideas, we don't need to take them all. Heck, we don't even need to take many, you know, but there's going to be a kernel, a few of them in there that'll help diversify. And who knows, maybe six months from now, I wonder how we doubled our revenue. It might be from somebody that just came up with an idea, that listened to a customer that talked about it, yeah, and, and it might not be an otherworldly idea. It might be in the margins, you know, might be little things that can make that impact. Derek, I said that I'd have you out of here at the top of the hour, and then I look at all of a sudden, it's 354, seven, because this has just been an absolutely fantastic conversation. This is exactly what I expected you to deliver, as you do every time that we connect, and I know anybody that's listening to this is going to get immense value out of the acronyms and the process and the thought, the thoughts that you have. So thank you so much for for taking time. I want to give you an opportunity to wrap it up with a final thought. Either wrap up something that we talked about, give me the 32nd pitch on Allumiqs, wherever you want to go, the microphone is yours. So first off, thanks for the opportunity to chat with you about this. I think this is exactly what is needed in the life sciences space. We started by talking about life sciences, and all I have done is tried to bring in some lessons learned from some other industries and apply them, but then learn from life sciences in a way to improve. And I think the word collaboration is probably the one area that I would encourage others to be very open minded to to spend time in collaborate with your partners, collaborate with your customers. How many times have you had a marketing campaign that just went up to your customer to say, Can you please introduce us to one reference? We did this last September. It was one of the most successful campaigns. If you even want to call it a campaign, we said, find an existing customer, ask them for two references, one that we've earned the right to talk to within the organization, and another, somebody that they feel personally would benefit, that's outside of the organization, that they would be happy or delighted to communicate and introduce us to. Wow, and that is probably when I said one of the most successful initiatives by earning the right to ask that question and through continued collaboration, learning more about new opportunities that may exist as a result of that. So I would just, I would leave, I would leave this on being open minded. Work with your team. Success is their success. And collaborate as often as you can. That's probably the easiest step forward to my mind. I love it. What a what a way to to end it. That's definitely going to be a sound bite. It's a, it's a perfect conclusion to a fantastic episode of the SCORR cast. If you are interested in reaching out or connected with Derek. I'm sure he'd love to hear that you listen to this episode of the SCORR cast, send him a note on LinkedIn. Let him know that you loved it. Send me a note. I'll bug him in the coming weeks. I'm really going to be bugging you because I'm curious who's going to win the card debate between you and your why i. I've got to be honest, I like to pretend I got a shot. That's it's a we're fostering a different type of environment in that setting. If you did listen to this, I know you greatly enjoyed it, remember to rate us wherever you're getting your podcast. Leave a review. Leave a comment, because, like I said at the beginning of this episode, somehow, the SCORR cast is into the 60s in terms of numbers of episode and they're still letting me talk. And I think the reason that's the case is because we've got unbelievable guests like Derek and so one more time. Thank you, Derek, for making some time for us this afternoon. And everybody listening. Have a great day. Thanks, Alec. Take care. Bye. SCORR As always, thank you for tuning in to this episode of the SCORR cast, brought to you by SCORR marketing. We appreciate your time and hope you found this discussion insightful. Don't forget to subscribe and join us for our next episode. Until then, remember, marketing is supposed to be fun.