Stop Selling and Start Partnering: The Art of the First Contact

In this episode of Bridging the Gap we focus on how to land exciting industry meetings. You found them. The perfect partner. The one that could change the trajectory of your year. Now, you’re staring at a blank cursor, and you’re one click away from either building a bridge or hitting a wall.

We want to teach you how to deconstruct the Art of the First Contact. We’ll show you how to craft an email they’ll actually reply to, and how to lead a first meeting that establishes you as a peer, not a vendor. Stop selling and start partnering today. 

Hosted by University of Minnesota Corporate Research Partnerships Managers Leza Besemann and Jason Stockman, "Bridging the Gap" is a practical podcast series designed to help university faculty navigate the complexities of collaborating with the private sector. 

Transcript

Jason Stockman 0:10

Welcome back to Bridging the Gap, Demystifying University and Industry Partnerships. I'm your co-host Jason Stockman, along with fellow corporate research partnerships manager Leza Beseman. Before we dive into today's conversation, it's important to look back at our last episode, where we laid out a roadmap for researchers looking to break out of the lab and into the industry spotlight. And if you missed it, we covered three important rules for making the transition. First, file away the CV. Academics love a long list of publications, but industry loves a problem solver. We talked about building an industry bio, which is really an R&D resume that translates your lab's capabilities into business value. Second, get out of your comfort zone. We challenge you to attend a conference where you're the only scientist in the room. If you're in mental health, go to a health techs expo. Be the subject matter expert at the coffee bar that every entrepreneur is dying to talk to. And finally, stop pitching. The best partnerships don't start with a slide deck. They start with a question. By asking a company about their bottlenecks first, you position yourself not as a vendor, but as a vital extension of their RD team. Now building on that foundation, today's episode of Bridging the Gap will focus on how to land exciting industry meetings. You found them, the perfect partner, the one that could change the trajectory of your year. Now you're staring at a blank cursor, and you're one click away from either building a bridge or hitting a wall. Most people treat the first contact like a transaction. They pitch, they push, they end up in the archive folder. But the best in the business don't pitch, they position. In this episode, we're deconstructing the art of the first contact. We'll show you how to craft an email they'll actually reply to and how and hopefully lead to the first meeting that can establish you as a peer and not a vendor. So stop selling, start partnering. Let's get into it.

Leza Besemann 2:18

Let's start with the hard truth, Jason. Everybody's inboxes are full. We're all overwhelmed. We get too many emails from too many different people. So now you're gonna send an email to somebody that you want to connect with at a company. How do you make that email not look like another email that they just have to read or another thing they have to do? What do you need to do to get them to open it? First, you need to avoid the eye trap. This is a huge pitfall. Most of us think about the situation from our own perspective. We're pretty much self-centered. So the default is, hey, I'm gonna tell them about me. Common culprits and sentences you might use sound like, I want to show you my slide deck. I think we have synergies. I'd love 15 minutes of your time. Can we hop on a Zoom call? Your request then just becomes another chore in an already overwhelmed inbox. How do you move from that into an email that the person actually wants to respond to? So you need to become a connector. The best connectors work differently. They don't start with what they need, they start with what the other person needs. So before you write anything, you have to align their priorities with your interests. So shift that focus away from your own needs to the company or the individual's current reality. Before you contact them, you need to figure out the partner's strategic goals and challenges. Where is the company at today? Where are they trying to get to? And how can you build the bridge between your expertise and where they want to get? Then you have to identify the value you can bring to them. How can your expertise support their strategic goals and challenges? So turn that I perspective into a them perspective and send them an email that grabs their attention.

Jason Stockman 4:11

That's excellent advice, Leza. So how do you find this information?

Leza Besemann 4:16

First of all, you've got to get curious. You want to learn about that company. If you don't want to learn about the company and what their focus area is and what they're trying to get to, you're probably not going to be able to build that bridge with them. So you need to look for the latest indicators of their corporate focus. A great place to start is with their website. That's the first place I always go is actually to the About Us page to just understand their business. What are their foundational values? What's their company history? You know, what type of language and terminology do they use to describe their business? And then also it gives you a great way to get an overview of their business areas. What are their product areas? What are their different business units? So that you can start talking the same talk that they do. Then another great place to go is the careers page. This is a great way to identify internal gaps and needs for expertise. For example, if they've posted for five different data scientist positions, you know that they're signaling that they have a need for expertise in the analysis of data or they have a void in that particular area. Maybe that's a place that you can fill for them. Next, you want to take a look at recent news and press releases. This is a great way to get a sense of new products that they have launched, maybe new partnerships or acquisitions. It gives you a sense of where their business is going and what their interest areas are. Then once you've taken care of looking at their website, switch over to LinkedIn. LinkedIn is another great place to find business intelligence on the folks you're trying to contact. You might want to look at the LinkedIn page for the specific person that you're reaching out to. You might want to look at the LinkedIn pages for the company as well. So don't just look at their original posts, but look at their entire digital footprint. You know, get a sense of the engagement the company has with their own ecosystem. What articles are they liking? You know, what industry posts are they commenting on? What announcements have they posted recently? The ultimate goal is to get curious and to learn about the company or the individual you want to reach out to. You want to make this less of a cold outreach and more of an informed conversation where it's clear you know something about their interests.

Jason Stockman 6:44

That's outstanding, Leza. I love that advice. I feel like this 10 to 15 minute investment can transform your outreach from a cold pitch into more of a strategic observation. I mean, after all, you're not reaching out to check in or just say hello. You're reaching out because you have identified a specific friction point in their trajectory and you have a high probability hypothesis on how to resolve it. You're no longer asking for 15 minutes of their time. It's almost like you're offering to give them back five hours of their work week. You know, when you position yourself as a bridge over a gap that they're currently staring at, you stop being work and start being a solution. That's how you turn a delete into a reply. Alright, so you've done the research, you've identified the friction points, now comes the moment of truth. Sitting down to actually write the email. But this is where most people revert to their sales settings. They get nervous and they start over explaining. We're gonna do the opposite here. We're gonna move into what I call the anti-pitch formula. This isn't about convincing someone to buy, it's about inviting them to collaborate.

Leza Besemann 7:55

Exactly, Jason. If you want to get a response, you have to tune into what interests them. So let's talk about a three-part structure for sending emails or drafting emails to send to somebody at a company. First of all, you need a contextual hook. Kill those pleasantries. You don't need to start the email with, we hope you're well. The generic openers often signal mass marketing and kind of trigger an immediate delete on that email, especially if the person doesn't already know who you are. You want to prove to them within the first five seconds of reading that email that it isn't mass marketing. You want to do something that shows that you know what's going on in their world. So you could start by saying something like, I saw your recent move into the medical device market. Immediately the recipient knows that, hey, this person actually knows what's going on in my world. They actually know what my company's doing. And so maybe this isn't mass marketing or just a cold outreach, but somebody that could actually help me out. The result, you transition from a stranger to a peer or a potential collaborator who understands what's going on in their world. Next, you need to pivot the conversation into the value that you can bring to them. So remember, I mentioned earlier, we don't want to use any of those I statements. I do this, I do that, my expertise is this. You don't want to just pitch and list all your research areas or the services that you can provide them. You want to show that you're a fellow PI. Use language that suggests that you want to be a collaborator on their initiatives rather than just a vendor at their door seeking their funding. Position yourself as an intellectual contributor to their projects, not just a line item for their budget. So you need to show that you have a perspective to offer them on a challenge that they've made public or an area of interest to them or a recent acquisition. You need to show that you have value to bring to them. Next part is maybe the toughest. You have to figure out a way to get them to take action, but in a way that's low friction. If you ask for a meeting, the person's going to assume that it's a 60-minute Zoom or calendar meeting. And who wants another meeting on their calendar? It's just another thing for us to do. You need to make the reply for them super easy. You can either ask them a high-level question that only takes them a sentence or two to respond to, or maybe even just ask for a brief chat. Put in parentheses, do you have 15 minutes to chat? This makes it a lot less burdensome for them to reply to your email and makes it look less like another to-do item on their list. And then lastly, my personal um pet peeve is brevity. Forget the super long emails, forget the emails with five attachments. Show up with a short email that shows that you have value to add to their work and respect their time, right? Short emails show that you respect their time, but not only their time, you respect your own. So forget all the fluff. Get to the core message right away. And if it your email takes more than two scrolls on a phone, it's probably too long. And then lastly, feel free to use your AI tools to tweak the tone and the length of your email to get it just right before you send it to that corporate partner.

Jason Stockman 11:32

Those are some absolute wonderful nuggets of advice, Leza. Thank you so much for that. Now let's say your email worked and you're now in the conference room or at a minimum on a Zoom call with a potential business partner. I want to provide a cautionary tale. This is often where most researchers revert to vendor mode and pull up a 20-slide PowerPoint and start talking. Please don't fall into that trap. The goal of the first meeting isn't to close the deal, it's to qualify the partnership. You need to flip the script. Instead of defending your value, ask high-level diagnostic questions. Ask questions like, in your ideal world, what does success look like for a potential partnership or project? Ask what's one thing that's been a roadblock for your team lately. What kind of internal bandwidth or expertise is currently missing that would make a project like this ideal? When you ask the right questions, they do the talking. And when they talk, they reveal exactly how you can help them. You aren't a salesperson trying to get their money. Instead, you're a consultant, an extension of their team, helping them navigate the R&D roadmap. The difference between hitting a wall and building a bridge is intentionality. It's the difference between saying, look at me versus I see you. So the next time you're staring at a blank cursor, remember you aren't asking for a favor. You're offering a solution. If you genuinely believe your partner's year will be better with you in it, then you owe it to them to get that email right. And with that, we've reached the end of today's podcast. We truly hope that this episode has helped you rethink your outreach to prospective industry partners. And Lisa, thank you for all of your wonderful insights today. Keep an eye out for our next podcast, where we'll be talking about how to choose a partner and not just a project. So with that, thank you for listening to Bridging the Gap, where we help build the bridge one partnership at a time.