Caitlin La Honta (00:05)

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Science of Sales and Marketing. I'm Caitlin La Honta. I'm the co-founder of Sirona Marketing, and I'm hosting today's session with my co-founder, Abdul. And today we're joined by Emily Nault, who is the SVP of Commercial at Invert. So Emily, you've spent your career in the life sciences industry across numerous roles from the supply chain to procurement to sales and commercial leadership. Can you sort of talk us through this journey?

 

Emily Nault (00:25)

And so.

 

Caitlin La Honta (00:29)

and how you ended up now leading commercial at Invert.

 

Emily Nault (00:32)

No, absolutely. So I was very lucky to be able to join Genzyme when I did. Genzyme was, I to say I was under the leadership of Henri Termeer who was like the founder of Biotech. And while at Genzyme, I got to wear a lot of different hats. So technically in the early age days, I reported into operations and then I reported into, I felt like I always had multiple bosses, tech ops, different things. I loved.

 

wearing different hats and supporting different groups. And I always viewed my internal customers as my customers. And I always took that hat. So I spent the first decade of my career just really learning about what it takes to make a drug product and really focusing on the rare diseases. And I really enjoyed that. I really liked it. So after the acquisition of Genzyme to Sanofi,

 

The company changed a lot, so I was ready to kind of do something different from my own career. again, I decided, you know, I had spent a lot of time and I knew what it took to get validated in and to work in a large company like Genzyme from a supplier perspective. So I thought a natural progression would be to move into sales. So was very lucky to get to work for Sartorius and I learned so much working at Sartorius. And I chose Sartorius at the time because they had such a breadth.

 

of products and there was never a product you couldn't get in because there were so many products that were available from a portfolio standpoint. And so once I made the transition over to sales, I then moved into sales leadership at Sartorius and then ended up transitioning over to GE that became Cytiva and Donahue and was always working with this customer base. And again, people who I considered my peers and it's just been

 

kind of a natural progression to move into different stages. And I've really liked, I really have always liked being a builder. And I love helping customers solve their pain points and what can we do to help really get to patients faster and to help cure diseases. So I've always enjoyed that. And when Invert approached me,

 

I was like, this is a combination of all of my world. So the builder part of me helping work with bioprocessing, solving the software, I've just really enjoyed it. And it's the same customers that I have been working with for a really long time.

 

Caitlin La Honta (02:54)

Yeah, and so you joined Invert recently, and you sort of started talking about Invert. But can you kind of expand on who Invert is, what you all do, and sort of what you were brought on to do from the commercial sales leadership perspective?

 

Emily Nault (03:06)

So I really was brought in as a builder to really help build and transform Invert to the next level and to really get with the customers and hear the customers and help them really what is causing pain in the bioprocessing space and primarily in a process development organization today. And a lot of that pain is they get all this data from so many different sources. How can we help them? What is this data telling us?

 

What data do I have and how can I use this data to make what I do every day faster and easier? So that is what I've been brought in is really to help position us so that we can hear our customers, our customers know that we're here for them. We've built a fabulous tool and right now it's just really getting it in front of the right customers so that they can see that this exists. So I think our customers for a long time

 

have been conditioned to say, I have to do this through the batch records. I have to have Excel spreadsheets. I have to collect this data from this piece of equipment and this piece of equipment. And just, OK, now that I have the data, OK, I could use this software. I could use this software. I don't think they even know that there is one software out there that can do all of these things for them quickly and able. And even some customers say, we'll make our own systems. We'll do that. There's so many.

 

Caitlin La Honta (04:19)

Hmm.

 

Emily Nault (04:28)

luxuries of having a software company who does this every single day manage this for you. And why take that on and own that your own risk in that standpoint when we can do that for you and make sure it can scale appropriately for you.

 

Caitlin La Honta (04:43)

Yeah, one of the things that we see a lot in this space and you alluded to this is like the build versus buy and that can be truly from the lack of awareness of what you just said exactly. I don't even, I didn't even know there was a solution that actually stitches these pieces together. They maybe think of it as like, there's a database or there's instrument integrators, but they don't actually then potentially compile and structure and organize all that information. So, you know, and you spoke to as well to kind of awareness, awareness piece of actually.

 

working on sort of the brand for Invert. And I'd be curious to hear your perspective on this. From a sales perspective, there's, again, you've alluded to this, there's the customer and the relationship building. That's sort of the, you know.

 

N of one tactic where you're only really having those conversations with that person or that company. And then there's this larger brand effort that is more of a larger marketing or company effort. How do you kind of think about that as you're building those pieces out and what tactics are you employing, knowing that you've gone through this before in your kind of past history at other companies?

 

Emily Nault (05:40)

Yeah, so I think they're both equally important. But the biggest thing is, you know, especially with some of the larger pharmas is making sure that they know that you hear them, you're there for them, and that you can scale appropriate with them, because especially the larger the organization, the more complex they get. And people don't even know who to go to for certain, especially in software for different IT support.

 

within their own organization. So my job here at Invert is to make sure people first know who we are, know that we're here and that we hear them and we understand their unique pain points and that we're not just, you know, like a company that just decided to move and we are people who came from the space and a lot of the people at our team, even software engineers who worked in process development. So

 

Most recently just met a colleague who I was like, you made a really different leap from someone coming from process development to actually being a software engineer. So we're building tools specifically for them and getting that out to people is really important because again, it is such a unique world that you need to make sure that people understand that you hear them. hear your problems. We know what you're going through on a day to day and we built this tool for you.

 

Abdul Rastagar (07:02)

Given all those different departments you just kind of listed, I mean, there's like the functional department, right? But then there's also the compliance, legal, finance, procurement, name it, right? Do they have different perspectives on what, do you find that they're having different perspectives and do you help them get through those conversations?

 

Emily Nault (07:19)

Yeah, I mean, my whole career in sales has been with a lot of those different people and different stakeholders and really trying to speak specifically to them. So yes, the person who's, you know, specifically owning the benchtop bioreactor and the data comes out of has a very different perspective than the finance person who owns that owns that budget. You know, so speaking to them, making sure they understand, you know, the ROI.

 

of the software as well. Like the person owns who owns it and works with it on the day to day. They mostly care. Does it do what I need it to do? They are not focused on the ROI versus the financial person is like, okay, this is another piece of software. Where's this going to fit in my organization? How are we going to use that? So yeah, a lot of my job in my team's job is really making sure we help our customers navigate those challenges and where in the org and

 

Caitlin La Honta (07:57)

you

 

Emily Nault (08:13)

you know, really a lot of times is connecting the dots for our customers as well. Like, okay, no, we've talked to this person. We've talked to this person. We can do something that works for both of you in different environments. So yeah, it's very important.

 

Caitlin La Honta (08:20)

Mm.

 

Abdul Rastagar (08:27)

And what I've personally seen over the years, and I don't know if you have as well, but those buying centers, right? Those different teams that come together, they've gotten more and more complex and larger and larger over time, right? It has not simple, right?

 

Emily Nault (08:38)

yeah. Yeah.

 

I mean, the smaller organizations, I saw it firsthand even when I worked at Genzyme, bigger we got, the more complex that we got. And it's also, you know, getting into a lot of these companies is very complex, too, because, again, they want to make sure you understand their security requirements, their compliance requirements. Like, it isn't just the same as, you know, you can buy an

 

that you put on your phone today. That's not how it works. just, again, so much of it is, again, they don't even talk, like they could have the same piece of hardware, for example, a bioreactor that's being used at one building and just the other one across town, and they don't even know who those people are. And, he uses the data this way, but she uses it that way, because they don't talk. So it's a lot of the time is just...

 

Caitlin La Honta (09:04)

Mm-hmm.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Emily Nault (09:28)

helping to connect the dots and make sure that they understand, did you know that downstream they're doing this with the data, but upstream they're doing this. How can we share? How can we help you do that?

 

Abdul Rastagar (09:38)

is it more difficult for you generally to kind of convince the bioprocess department about the quality of your software or the capability of your software? Or is it more complex for you to go through all of those other adjacent departments?

 

Emily Nault (09:48)

So

 

the longer part of our sales cycle is not finding a champion. It's making sure that they they can then convince the rest of their network that this is this is the right play for them. So my experience at Invert today has been most people love our software. you really you do this. You do this. But it's figuring out, OK, where do I have the right budget for this? And

 

what line items can it replace of other people's and which line items are new and how do I get that through.

 

Abdul Rastagar (10:21)

Yeah.

 

Caitlin La Honta (10:21)

That's sort of the paradox of selling a solution that replaces multiple solutions is that there isn't a line item that exists. So it's like, I'm coming to solve the problem of you had to buy five pieces of software, now you only have to buy this. But as a result, we don't know how to ask for a budget for this because it's never existed before. then the burden is on you and your team to figure out how to navigate that or how to enable those champions to best position, invert within their organizations. I guess from that perspective, how do you help?

 

Emily Nault (10:35)

Yep.

 

Caitlin La Honta (10:49)

those champions or those internal folks best pitch or best build a business case for Invert and navigate that? What are the types of strategies?

 

Emily Nault (10:56)

Yeah,

 

so the best approach I've seen so far is basically helping them build a business case and really going through, like I have found just the best, even when anything, when buying anything, to be honest in this environment is what is your process today and how does it look and what do you do and how will that change? So sometimes that's making sure that they try it and you show them a pilot and you can pilot a piece of, know, a couple different integrations of certain systems.

 

just so they can get a taste of it, so they can feel more comfortable. It also takes out the risk that they feel like, it does work. I can see that. So that's, I think that's really important because when I was in procurement, you know, you're very risk averse anyway. So you want to make sure that people feel like, you know what, I feel really strong. I'll stand behind this. I'll be the champion for this at my organization because I believe in it and the product works and it works great. So.

 

we have no problem giving a pilot or letting people test it out because usually then they're like, how can I do this more? How can I spread this further in? Because sometimes it's even, it's people's time. Like uploading Excel spreadsheets, going through that data, incorporating what's in your batch records, offline data, different things. That's just all very, very time consuming. if it's like, listen, instead of getting to a finance person explaining instead of having two additional head counts,

 

Caitlin La Honta (12:01)

Mm-hmm.

 

Abdul Rastagar (12:06)

Mm-hmm.

 

Emily Nault (12:22)

You could buy this, that's a huge ROI, but you have to go through that and put that data all together. And sometimes that is complex and getting it in front of the right stakeholder is a challenge the larger the organization is.

 

Abdul Rastagar (12:38)

so you're going into these conversations with multiple people within different buying departments, buying groups, and in many cases, they may not know you or your organization, right? There's an old saying that no one ever gets fired for, what is it? Booking IBM, right? Purchasing IBM. How does the brand awareness help or perhaps hurt in this case? Like, does it help you if people know you better ahead of time?

 

Emily Nault (13:01)

I think that it hopefully will help us. mean, again, having people from industry is part of my strategy in helping to build up our brand because again, they've worked in it. They understand what they're doing and how the software can help them. And they're helping to build a product that works for those people. I mean, people all have their own like baggage, I guess is the best way to say when

 

they think of different startups. And I think just proving that in over and over again, or doing pilots and showing that, you know, we have a high touch and that we'll be there for you and we'll support. We're not the large, huge IBMs or Oracle where you're going to put tickets in the system and hope that they call you back. Like I ran e-commerce at Sartorius and I had to put all those tickets in and hope that people would get back to me in the day. And

 

Abdul Rastagar (13:45)

You're right.

 

Emily Nault (13:55)

a month later, but those were impacting. Like you don't get that with us. You get that high touch. You get that support. You get, listen, I have a unique piece of equipment that all of this offline data, we work with you to help you get that information and put it online for you. We're willing to do that concierge type of touch versus other people might not at the big company. So, but explaining that is, it's sometimes a challenge.

 

Abdul Rastagar (14:21)

Yeah, absolutely.

 

Caitlin La Honta (14:21)

And also with the concern that you mentioned of scalability, if there is that concern that they have, though there's the benefit from that personal touch that they're not going to get with a larger company. yeah, and anything to add in terms of brand from the marketing perspective, how you all have been building that or thinking of building that, and if you're seeing anything.

 

from the marketing brand building, influencing conversations you're having with customers. Or if it's too early to tell, I know that you all are obviously been building the marketing function out.

 

Emily Nault (14:51)

Yeah, so. So one

 

of the things I mean, I'm working more and more on case studies. I think that showing customers what we've been able to do with other customers. I mean, this industry is notorious for not wanting to say in public, because again, it's their data. It's private, but just examples of where we can do things to show people case studies to show that we.

 

Caitlin La Honta (15:06)

hehe

 

Emily Nault (15:15)

we do walk our talk and we can deliver it is really important. So the more case studies really trying to put in short type of marketing verse what is invert so people can kind of understand that that's something that I'm working really closely on with the marketing team. And I also always take the perspective of the customer lens. Like I look at things as like, would I respond to that if that came to me?

 

Also just spending a lot of time in industry with consultants and different things to just get the word out there. I mean, that's the hardest part. I managed categories back in the day and it was always, okay, who's the players? Who's out there? What can they do? And especially with different mergers and acquisitions and name changes and brand changes and dropping different parts of portfolios, it's very complex to figure out who's out there. So that's part of the initiative.

 

Caitlin La Honta (15:51)

Mm-hmm.

 

Emily Nault (16:09)

going to the conferences, participating, so people really understand, if we have a digital initiative and we're in process development, I should be sending a bid to Invert to have them talk about this. That's complex. Like when I was in purchasing, I had to gather all of that intelligence and sometimes, mean, with all the tools that are out there now and AI, hopefully it's getting better, but that is.

 

really, really hard to always figure out, well, they can do this, but they can't do this. And with all the different manufacturers of the hardware as well. It's very important to make sure that you know that it's your data and it's in your individual environment versus taking that from manufacturers.

 

Caitlin La Honta (16:43)

Yeah.

 

Abdul Rastagar (16:53)

What you said about the social proof and how important that is, it reminds me actually, so when I used to be years ago at Oracle Health Sciences, and we were trying to enter Japanese market and they're asking us to show us your proof points, right? And we're like, well, we did it for this company here in Germany, and we did it here in the UK and here in the US. And they're like, no, no, no, that's not proof to us. You need to us in Japan what you've done, right? And we couldn't break into the Japanese market because we didn't have, it was this kind of catch-22, right?

 

Emily Nault (17:16)

It's very hard. And the Japanese

 

market is really hard just because a lot of things go through dealers there too. So you really need to have partnerships. It's very much a challenge. Yeah.

 

Abdul Rastagar (17:22)

Yeah.

 

absolutely. Yeah, that's very, yeah.

 

Well, we ended up doing those. actually showed up with an American company. They're a Japanese company. They're American division. Worked with them first, showed the proof and then they accepted that as their proof of concept. Fine. So let's do it in Japan. And once we got that first Japanese customer, everybody else just followed suit because they saw the proof point. I just kind of.

 

Emily Nault (17:38)

Yeah.

 

Yeah. Yeah, I call it the domino

 

effect late too, especially in this in, in the pharma and biotech space. It's like, yes, you delivered, you got these, then the other ones follow, but it's really showing them, no, it's not just small companies we can support or midsize companies, we can support all companies and this is how we do it. And we are going and they want, they really want to make sure you can scale with them. And

 

Caitlin La Honta (18:00)

Mm-hmm.

 

Emily Nault (18:10)

lower the risk and that again you meet the security requirements and the compliance requirements are significantly important as well.

 

Abdul Rastagar (18:18)

And that's interesting what you say about lowering risk, because in many cases we tend to talk about, look at all these capabilities, how much better we're going to make you at whatever, right? But in fact, the client is actually looking at it as this risk for me, as this risk for my company. And they're much more focused on that part of it.

 

Caitlin La Honta (18:24)

Mm-hmm.

 

Emily Nault (18:24)

Yeah. Yeah.

 

Yeah, yeah,

 

because I mean, again, it's one thing when you can you can have multiple spreadsheets and just have it on your OneDrive or whatever it is you have it all there versus, you know, having to put it on a cloud storage, having that there. But there's a lot also a lot of benefits. So if you're doing run certain runs at your CMO, you can share that data back and forth, which then, of course, there's a lot of cost and a lot of raw material costs.

 

that go into every time you start up your bioreactor, that you want to make sure if you're putting all of that cost into that bioreactor, that you're getting successful runs out of that data. And if you're not storing that data anywhere, you're not sharing that data, how are you showing that, especially when you're doing scale up runs, you know, from 160 liter to 2000 liter virus, what's going on? What happened? It's very complex.

 

Caitlin La Honta (19:01)

Mm-hmm.

 

One of the things that just keeps coming up in this conversation is that notion of how important scale and being able to grow with your customers is how are you all navigating that from a resourcing perspective? Because obviously, you're growing and that's awesome, but you still are in that startup mode and startup space. You have the size team you have. And from a sales perspective with these long sales cycles that require a lot of hands on.

 

work from the reps and from you, how do you sort of navigate that tension between our customers are asking a lot, the sales cycles are long, there's a lot of people to meet with, a lot of work to do to build a business case, and here's the team I got, and we gotta figure out how to work with that.

 

Emily Nault (20:01)

Yeah, so living it every day. think the best thing that is I'm really as we grow and we look at our talent and who we bring in, we're really trying to bring in people that are also builders and hunters and are willing to wear a lot of different hats. So it's, you know, one plus of working at a startup is that

 

Caitlin La Honta (20:04)

Yeah

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Emily Nault (20:24)

You get exposure to a lot of things that you wouldn't have gotten exposure to at a big company, but it is a lot of work too. it's not, know, if, I have solely so many resources, it's not uncommon for me to pull from the product team, for example, to say, can you attend this customer meeting? You know, there's some additional technical questions versus, you know,

 

Caitlin La Honta (20:39)

Mm-hmm.

 

Emily Nault (20:46)

How many people are you staffed on your customer success team right now versus how much can you cross functional between your sales team and your customer success team? So that's something that we do every day, really just managing that and we are a team. That's what I say to my team all the time. Like when we look at who can attend conferences, who's available, what can we do? I do try to.

 

you're on the East Coast and it's an East Coast conference or it's in Europe, try to send someone in Europe versus East Coast. So looking at all of those dynamics, but again, we're a small team, but we're very agile and whoever has the relationship or has the support utilizing those appropriately.

 

Caitlin La Honta (21:30)

Yeah, and I think

 

it speaks to something that Abdul and I talk about a lot in these early stage or like startup, series A, series B companies. It's like the roles and definition of you are sales and you are marketing and you are product. Those don't exist in the same way. And like everyone's got to jump in and what sales and marketing looks like is so different. Everyone should be thinking about growth and revenue. And so that could mean a marketing person is helping with a sales workflow in some way or vice versa.

 

Emily Nault (21:56)

Yeah.

 

Every day. say to everyone, everyone's in sales, even if you don't like that, everyone's in sales, even if you're a software engineer and everything. If you're in an elevator with someone and they ask you what is Invert you should absolutely be able to answer that question. And you should be able to, you know, if you were a process development and now you're a software engineer, you should be able to say, what were my pain points and how am I solving those for you?

 

Caitlin La Honta (22:00)

Yeah.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Emily Nault (22:23)

I mean, I still think that that methodology should work when you're the bigger the organization as well, because you're all like, you all need to work together no matter what. you should be, I I'm probably a very, I try to use resources as effectively as possible because the last thing I wanna do is bring someone in and then let them go. Like that's not how I have spent my whole career. I'd like to.

 

grow from within, help people meet their career path, do what they need to do. So I think it's just really important that people can wear lots of different hats. Like back in my early days, I went on audits with the quality team. I did all of that stuff. I think that helps develop you so you understand and you're able to contribute.

 

Caitlin La Honta (22:57)

Mm-hmm.

 

Abdul Rastagar (23:08)

Absolutely. And as the organization grows, that makes you a much stronger team member, right? And it gives more opportunity for you to just move within the company.

 

Emily Nault (23:13)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

 

mean, again, you know, if someone had asked me my first three years at Genzyme, you know, when I'm building out bill of materials and putting spec sheets together that I would be selling bioreactors and software and different things later in my career, someone would said, really? How's that happen? Like, you know, I remember the first time I got to do a filter ability trial in a lab and I was like, I never thought.

 

I would be literally putting filters, testing media through filters, but you have to be able to learn and understand. And then it makes you understand your customers more too.

 

Abdul Rastagar (23:43)

Yeah.

 

Yeah, absolutely.

 

Caitlin La Honta (23:52)

I do feel like those types of personalities are attracted to startup life, especially in this space, because it's not only startup life, but it's startup life in a technical space. So it's like already challenging to be a startup, add onto that. Now I'm going to go in a lab and throw on a lab coat and sit alongside my customer

 

Emily Nault (24:09)

even when I interview people, I'm like, OK, what do you like to do? What do you want to do? Are you good being a builder? Are you good wearing a lot of hats? mean, even when I drew out the territory map for my salespeople, I'm like, well, you can have this one over here too if you want. So you have to be agile and you have to be good with that.

 

Caitlin La Honta (24:09)

Mm-hmm.

 

Abdul Rastagar (24:31)

And that resonates with some people, it's just their personality, others, less so, that's fine.

 

Emily Nault (24:35)

Yeah, and some people, I mean, I've had people on my team, they want to just have their one account. That's all they want to focus on. And they just want to do that. And but I still think you have to be changes, you know, have to be able to be flexible and have change because even at the very large companies, they they do a lot more mergers and acquisitions and you have to be able to adapt to even restructuring of their sales teams and how they do that.

 

Caitlin La Honta (24:40)

Mm-hmm.

 

Emily Nault (25:01)

It happens usually every two to three years. So have to be able to understand that and deal with that.

 

Abdul Rastagar (25:06)

Yeah.

 

So what's interesting is so on the one hand, you have to hire for people who are very flexible and have that mindset of constantly doing new things, right? At the same time, these sales cycles that we're talking about in this industry, we're talking often 12 months, 18 months, right? A long time. So you have to be able to find somebody who has that long run, the marathon patience, as well as the sprint ability. That's not easy. How do you kind of screen for that when you're doing your interviews?

 

Emily Nault (25:33)

Yeah, I mean, I think it's just also understanding their background too and what, where is their passion lie and what do they get excited about in the morning? So I used to say, even when I worked for some of the larger companies that they're very long sales cycles too. mean, we would have to focus on R & D with the hope that that would go commercial and then that would scale up. So there was many times you're putting, let's say, know,

 

Caitlin La Honta (25:56)

you

 

Emily Nault (26:00)

just a filter in a process and you're hoping you'll get the whole thing later and they'll be much larger. You have to understand that this is this industry. You're not gonna come in and sell 15 deals in your first month. That's not gonna happen. If it is, then great, but we need a bigger team and that's not gonna happen the next month.

 

Caitlin La Honta (26:19)

Mm-hmm.

 

What advice would you have for companies going through this similar kind of scaling from seed to series A or series A to series B and building out a commercial team or a sales team in this industry? And also, I mean, if you've seen any things happen, I've seen before companies over hire sales reps. They think that scale means I need to go hire a bunch of reps.

 

What advice do you have in general and what things would you advise companies to do to avoid those traps of growth that mismanage resources?

 

Emily Nault (26:50)

Yeah, so this is my second company that I've gone from series A to series B. So my thought process is I'm probably more conservative than some people. So my advice is really think about what they're going to, what you want them to do and what you need them to do within like the first six months and what is success to you in that role within the first six months.

 

So if you're going in with the expectation that this person's going to come in and sell, you know, $10 million in revenue in the first six months, that's probably an unrealistic number for where we are in the stage of the deals. But also understanding like, will they help grow the brand? Will they help? Do they have a strong network?

 

are they willing to, know, against, especially as I look for team players, do they know how to sell in this area into these customers? Do they have champions that they can pull from themselves? So really, I'm that I'm probably much more conservative. Like I think, okay, who do we need at this time? Because I would rather, like every job I've kind of looked at in the past, I've most likely have

 

grown territories and then been replaced by two or three people, I would rather see that mentality happen than have someone come in and be like, they're not six, I'm gonna hire 10 people. And with the notion that I'm gonna fire half of them, that's just not usually how I like to work. And I don't think that's good for the longterm of the company. I think I really want people who want to grow with the company and scale with the company.

 

Caitlin La Honta (28:10)

Mm-hmm.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Emily Nault (28:31)

So that's at least what I look for. I typically look for people who have experience in this field and then again, not necessarily selling software, but in this selling to these clients and especially within a PD environment, understand that and then also look for people who are naturally builders and enjoy that because I think I don't want people to be frustrated either. Like if they're used to much shorter sales cycles.

 

Caitlin La Honta (28:51)

Mm-hmm

 

Emily Nault (28:57)

they probably would be frustrated in this.

 

Caitlin La Honta (29:00)

Mm-hmm.

 

Abdul Rastagar (29:00)

Yeah, it's probably a very different personality and different type of...

 

Emily Nault (29:03)

Yeah,

 

I used to have to reward people when I worked for GE that they had to go spend time in R &D. And I would have to remind people all the time that you also do get a base salary. So you need to go spend time with R &D because you weren't getting the big, they weren't helping you meet your number of targets. So it's really important that you get people who know that I'm working with this with the hope that I sell within the next year or two.

 

Abdul Rastagar (29:26)

this has been very insightful. Really interesting. I to me, the biggest thing that kind of came out of the various topics we addressed is the whole idea of benefit versus risk, right? That discussion and really getting them to understand that, know, getting over the fear hump and understanding that once we check those boxes that we're secure, we are compliant, right? Then, hey, there's a lot of value to you for moving over off of all these spreadsheets into the software system with us.

 

Caitlin La Honta (29:28)

Yeah.

 

Emily Nault (29:52)

And

 

I also like to show customers too that, okay, let's say your worst fear is, and you want the data back, this is how easy it is to get it back. So that helps to reduce their risk, that you're not putting something in that you're embedded to the point where you're so reliant. Here, you want it, you're done, can have all your data back and you can go back to your offline spreadsheets if you want.

 

Caitlin La Honta (30:17)

I think it also

 

just speaks to, know Invert has AI and machine learning functionality as part of the product. How quickly we're seeing that space evolve in other sectors. And when you think about life sciences, use cases, like, it really does come down to so much of the same social proof, evidence, compliance and risk mitigation. So it can only move at a pace that those groups are comfortable.

 

moving at for good reason. And so it's interesting with all of that growth and hype happening that it's still going to move at a pace that it needs to move at for this industry. So always just something interesting, just thinking about the space more broadly.

 

Emily Nault (30:53)

And it's really interesting to even, I mean, even myself, I've been educated on all the new tools, cause the tools just keep changing. you we can do this and you can do this now with modeling software. Okay. I hadn't seen that in the last five years. Like I think just that's part of like getting it out there in front of customers and participating in conferences and being at talks just so people know, because if we're living this every day and this is,

 

Caitlin La Honta (31:02)

Mm-hmm.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Emily Nault (31:22)

hard for me? Like, I can't imagine when you're in a lab and your focus is to run your upstream process. How focused are you on AI tools and different modeling? And especially if you're at large companies, there's a whole department for digital, but they don't know what they're doing every day. So connecting those dots is really hard.

 

Caitlin La Honta (31:37)

Mm-hmm.

 

Yeah, I feel like the script flipped so quickly from, we're using a spreadsheet and there's not a lot of tools to, now there's so many tools and we don't even know what to use. It feels like it was overnight. It was not overnight, but it's pretty crazy how quickly that has changed. So pretty crazy stuff.

 

Emily Nault (31:58)

No, I it

 

in my day to day life. Like, I mean, just even from a lead generation standpoint, like how many more tools there are out there that I'm like, that's not how I did it before, but sure, if it's right, I'll take it. ⁓

 

Abdul Rastagar (32:10)

Bye.

 

Caitlin La Honta (32:11)

Yep. Yep.

 

Abdul Rastagar (32:14)

I did

 

what you said about being flexible in your career and your mindset.

 

Emily Nault (32:17)

Yeah,

 

you have to be adaptable and you have to be able to go with it and say, okay, we'll try it out. Let's see if works.

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Episode FAQ

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Q. What are the biggest barriers to selling enterprise software in the life sciences industry?

A. Life sciences software sales cycles are long and complex. Buyers include process development, finance, legal, IT, and compliance. Each department has different priorities: technical users care about usability, while finance evaluates ROI and budget impact. The challenge is not just finding a champion but enabling them to navigate internal procurement networks and risk frameworks.

 

Q. Why is the “build vs. buy” debate still common in bioprocessing?

A. Many process development teams default to spreadsheets or build internal tools due to legacy norms or lack of awareness. They often don't realize integrated platforms exist that can aggregate and structure data across instruments. The absence of category awareness makes it harder for vendors to map to existing budget line items, further complicating adoption.

 

Q. How can vendors help champions inside pharma companies build a business case?

A. Effective strategies include piloting small-scale integrations, mapping current workflows to future-state efficiencies, and quantifying resource savings (e.g., reduced headcount or manual work). ROI communication must be tailored to each stakeholder—technical, financial, and operational—using language and metrics that resonate with them.

 

Q. How do modern B2B buying groups behave in enterprise healthcare software?

A. B2B buyer centers in healthcare have grown more complex, with siloed departments often unaware of each other’s workflows. Even teams using the same equipment may have different data flows. Selling requires connecting internal dots across upstream and downstream processes, which is often part of the vendor's job.

 

Q. What role does brand awareness play in enterprise sales for life sciences startups?

A. In conservative sectors like biotech and pharma, brand trust reduces perceived risk. Buyers prefer proven vendors and peer validation. Lack of awareness can increase friction, while high-touch service, domain expertise, and social proof (e.g., case studies) help counteract brand unfamiliarity.

 

Q. How do startups manage long sales cycles with small teams?

A. Startups often rely on cross-functional collaboration. Sales reps, product managers, and engineers may all participate in meetings. Team members must be “builders” comfortable wearing many hats, especially in Series A and B companies where resource constraints and high personalization are the norm.

 

Q. How do life sciences companies evaluate AI-powered software?

A. Despite growing AI use in modeling and automation, pharma buyers remain cautious. Compliance, data security, and risk mitigation remain primary concerns. Proof points, transparency in how data is handled, and the ability to extract data if needed are all important for de-risking the decision.

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