Dale Harrison has been consulting in life sciences for seven years now, but he's been an executive in biotech for 16 years. Dale started his career as a physicist.

In this episode, Dale shares how he’s able to not make biotech products a commodity as he tells us the stories on how he gets inside the minds of both their customers and competitors.

 

Why you have to check out today’s podcast:

• Understand the importance of stepping outside the product and the company when it comes to making a product stand out in the market;
• Discover why it’s a must that you get inside the head of both your buyers and competitors, especially with seeing where your competitors are blind in their framework;
• Find out how to get inside the mindset of your buyers and competitors through stories of tricks that worked

 

“Pricing has little to do with analysis. Analysis is a supporting role, but only supporting. The real issue with pricing is getting inside the head of the customer, and equally importantly, inside the head of your competitor.”

– Dale Harrison

 

Topics Covered:

01:02 – Dale’s work around commercial development and its relation to pricing

01:45 – Why Mark despises the word commodity + selling products in the synthetic DNA business back in the 2000s

04:28 – Not making the products a commodity by trying to get into the mindset of the buyer

09:25 – More about the story; The “Got Probes” T-shirt

13:01 – Merging the company with a larger partner and becoming the VP of Sales and Marketing

14:10 – Telling the story about getting inside the heads of the competitors

17:08 – Were they able to charge a higher price because of the red cap?

21:14 – The challenge of keeping customers continuing to reorder and focus on you and not be looking elsewhere

24:05 – Dale’s pricing advice for the listeners

 

Key Takeaways:

“Commodity is a mindset. It's not about the product. It's about a failure of imagination around the product. But there are products that are much more commoditized than others.” – Dale Harrison

“Again, these are very boring products, so if you talk about the product, no one's going to be interested because everyone already knows it. Nothing's changed and there's literally nothing to talk about. So, you have to talk about something different than the product and then tie it back to the product.” – Dale Harrison

“The deal is whatever market you're in, every competitor imagines that they have some highly rational pricing process, and the fact is they don't. What they have is a framework – a mental framework – and their framework is their blindness. And if you can understand what their framework is, you understand where they’re blind. When you know where they're blind, you know how to work around them without them even seeing you.” – Dale Harrison

 

Connect with Dale Harrison:

• LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/dalewharrison/
• Email: [email protected]

 

Connect with Mark Stiving:

• LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/
• Email: [email protected]