How Strong Partnerships Help Companies Scale Smarter with Lance Black, MD, MBID

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[00:00:00] Lance Black: Champions are not found. Champions are made and it’s really a process. It requires deliberate consideration. It’s not something that I talk to 10 physicians and one of them really likes what I’m doing. And so that’s my champion and that’s the person that I’m going to spend the most time with when that person may not be as effective as somebody else who takes a little bit more nurturing.

[00:00:21] Lee Brumbaugh: There’s no silver bullet in sales, but on Sales Against the Odds, we’re here to give you the best shot at building a sales infrastructure that helps you scale. I’m your host, Lee Brumbaugh. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Sales Against the Odds. My name is Lee Brumbaugh, CEO of Sales Xceleration. Very excited to have Dr. Lance Black with us today. I met Lance many years ago at TMCi. For those of you who don’t know TMCI, it’s the Texas Medical Center Innovation Program where I’ve watched Lance firsthand help digital companies in the device space and on the digital side for really positioning how to grow their company. And I know Lance is doing a lot on the Texas A&M side, which we’re going to learn about today. But again, a leader who’s done a lot with helping businesses grow, helping companies accelerate Lance, thank you so much for joining us today.

[00:01:13] Lance Black: Thanks for having me, Lee. It’s good to see you again.

[00:01:15] Lee Brumbaugh: Yeah, always good to have another Houstonian on the podcast as well. For sure. So Lance, look, when I was looking through your background to get it started, everything from the Air Force to helping companies grow. Let’s start with what you’re doing today. My wife is a naggy, so very interested in what you’re doing with Texas A&M and bridging the gap between physicians and the engineer side, which I know is your background. So just tell us a little about your focus today.

[00:01:40] Lance Black: Sure. So just for some context, Texas A&M has a school of engineering medicine that’s located in Houston, just next to the Texas Medical Center. And our focus is an engineering based medical school. So it’s a new way of teaching medicine, teaching engineering. We combine two degrees in four years. So these students graduate with an MD and a master of engineering. And so it’s unique. It’s something that hasn’t really been done in this way before. So we’re just figuring it out just like any other early startup. My main focus today has been on collapsing the distance between industry and academia. How do we expose our students to what’s happening in the meaningful translation of medical technology into a commercial setting so that they can see in real world what’s going on, not in a sort of punctuated or project-based industry academic partnership, but companies are actually live-ins into the medical school.

[00:02:33] Lance Black: So we have an incubator. I’ve been busy finding the right tenants and members for that incubator. And now we’re at over a dozen companies who are participating in that. And it’s really exciting because they can give back to the academic environment through internships, holding office hours, giving guest lectures, you name it. But it’s really interesting to see how industry operates within the academic setting and vice versa.

[00:02:57] Lee Brumbaugh: Yeah. I know that was so much a part even when I saw a TMCi and how they grew and what happens at JLabs and those types of things. So if you’re a student, you’re going through this program, where’s the typical launch off of that? Are they going? Or is it a physician who wants to then be like you and understands the device side and growing a company? Where is that positioning for that student?

[00:03:15] Lance Black: Yeah, it’s actually multi-variable, I will say. We only accept those who have an undergraduate degree in engineering or computer science. So already we’re sort of sourcing an atypical medical student, if you will. In fact, it kind of reduces our application pool by 25% of the typical applicants for medical schools. So these are students that are sort of self-declared. “I want to be an engineer. I want to think about solving unmet healthcare needs, but I also want a deep understanding in clinical practice and I want to also practice medicine.” So these are the students we’re looking for. Those who actually want to be early adopters of technology, want to work seamlessly with industry to promote and advance the art of medicine, or they themselves want to consult or start their own companies.

[00:04:00] Lee Brumbaugh: Interesting. So tying to your path, right? So I know that there’s a journey. Can you give the audience a little bit, I know in the Air Force position, how did you go from medicine to really being so involved in business and helping company growth? Give us a little bit of your story and your backdrop.

[00:04:16] Lance Black: Sure. Well, it wasn’t planned. I’ve never been that kind of person to have a 10-year plan. I’ve sort of been an opportunistic type mindset, just do things that I enjoy and think are exciting and challenging. So I was a biological engineer as an undergraduate. We had a course called Capstone. Some people call it senior design where you sort of take your engineering principles that you’ve learned over the four years and you apply them in a unique way to an unsolved problem. And mine was in the area of orthotics, so biomechanics. And I helped working with a patient, helped develop a new leg brace for somebody who had struggled from post-polio syndrome. That one moment in time really defined what I wanted to do as a career. So I was on the hunt after that course to figure out how could I blend healthcare, engineering, and entrepreneurship.

[00:05:07] Lance Black: I went to medical school, really still not knowing what the career would look like, but knowing that I wanted a deep-seated understanding of medicine and really enjoyed medical school, enjoyed residency. I did failing medicine in the United States Air Force. Most of the reason is because I liked a little bit of everything about medicine. I really liked the general practice approach, the holistic approach. So I practiced in the military for about seven years as a family medicine doc and flight doc. So I learned a lot about occupational health through flight medicine, which is just looking at pilots and the air crew and the unique circumstances that they find themselves in and how that impacts their health. But once I left the Air Force or finished my commitment with the military, I really started to think, I don’t want to go down the traditional path of seeing patients day in and day out for the next 20, 25 years of my life as a felony practice doctor.

[00:05:54] Lance Black: I really want to infuse engineering and innovation into my practice. And I didn’t know what that looked like, to be honest. So I once again went on the hunt and I found a program through Georgia Tech called the Master of Biomedical Innovation and Development Program or Bio ID. And really it showed how to take something from back of the napkin through the entirety to product launch. It really exposed me to the startup world. That was the first time actually that I learned even what a startup was and how startups in the health tech sector operate and how they use physicians and engineers or how they work with those folks. And so that’s where I really sort of fell in love with this, what I saw as my capstone course, but in the real world and actually solving really meaningful problems, really taking a deep dive in that need and understanding it in a unique way such that you can solve it and then develop a business around it.

[00:06:48] Lance Black: And I really started to appreciate the entrepreneurial aspect of it. This is a third language for me. It was clinical, it was engineering, but now we’re talking about markets, we’re talking about go- to-market strategy customers, how to define those profiles. And that was all unique to me. And so the past now 13 years, I’ve been spending time working in startups in a variety of capacities and I love it. And InMed for me was a way to bring that knowledge set into training and give students things that I wish I had when I was going through med school, really open up their minds to what’s possible, not only to practice the art of medicine, but to advance the art of medicine. And so that’s what I feel like I’m doing today is really bringing that startup mindset or innovator’s mindset into their training so that they can at least have the option when they’re practicing to learn how to work with industry and engineers and others that are important in that process.

[00:07:41] Lee Brumbaugh: Yeah. Really cool. The evolution that you’ve seen of applying it from the medicine side to your own business to being helping business to now taking to the student side, great evolution of helping the journey. So let’s talk a little bit, I’ll go kind of the TMCi side, but when you’re talking about you meet that person like you, right? They want to be entrepreneurial, they have an idea, and it’s a pain point that helps a patient, helps alive, they’re seeing that need. What’s the most daunting experience for them to like that first step? What is the biggest hurdle that they need to jump to say, “I’ve got something here. I can start a business around it. “ What’s that toughest, first obstacle for them to get over?

[00:08:18] Lance Black: At TMC Innovation, one of our goals was to partner startups with large health enterprise systems. We have numerous ones within the Texas Medical Center and really trying to identify the right person within those institutions that understand the need and understand the opportunity for the solution. But really the most difficult first step to kind of your point is finding that first meaningful partner, the one that understands where you’re headed, not where you are today, but where you’re going in the future and can see that future alongside of you. Because as you know, health systems, especially those that are like large and enterprise are very risk averse. They want to see the results today before they adopt anything. And so it’s really difficult to find that person who sees where the puck is going and is willing to sort of take that journey along with you and devote time and effort and sometimes capital and a little bit of risk to getting you through your next milestone.

[00:09:15] Lance Black: So I think that’s the biggest challenge. And I see that being the biggest bottleneck because I think innovators and entrepreneurs can, in their minds, declare significant value for the health system, yet when it comes down to the rubber meeting the road, it’s really challenging to make that actually happen. And I think that first partnership is the log jam, quite frankly, to moving forward and then acquiring more partners ultimately, even on the pre-revenue side to get your solution somewhat validated externally and then using that momentum to build into your go- to-market and ultimately your market launch. And then of course there’s a whole nother slew of problems when it comes to building out your sales pipeline. But I think that’s one of the first big challenges. Yeah.

[00:09:59] Lee Brumbaugh: It’s really interesting. And for those listening, I’ve done a lot and again, got to know Lance through. I’ve worked with a lot of TMCi companies and is in the healthcare world, you talk a lot about that pilot of finding that large healthcare system that can pilot, that can help you find that need, scale it, get it right. And so it’s just a common formality in healthcare to take that path. Some do it well, some don’t. We know that. And if you bottleneck it too long, it can destroy your company. But it’s interesting for the SMB space that that same concepts don’t always apply. We don’t think about if you’re a machine shop, always finding that large, the next Boeing or that type of company where we can fit in and saying, look, we’ve got to take some risk to be able to pilot, learn things and be able to have a partner that we can build alongside.

[00:10:44] Lee Brumbaugh: But it is interesting of like how in healthcare we frame it to does this position with the healthcare system, building that customer and then expanding from there. And that doesn’t always happen in the SMB space. I think that’s an interesting kind of aha moment of there is some translation there for those listening, find a good partner and be able to bridge it out. Have you seen some of those concepts of like healthcare translating to SMB? Anything else that stands out to you in that area?

[00:11:09] Lance Black: Yeah, I think finding a good partner really, it stress tests your hypotheses. You have a hypothesis of how this is going to deliver value in a specific way, and then having that partner can really push back and say, “You know what? Think of it this way.” It helps you to make that pivot that’s necessary to make success in your business. So I think that’s certainly translatable. It doesn’t always have to be your first partner. It could be a partner in a new category, right? So as you’re exploring different types of customers, as you’re exploring different types of profiles, finding that first partner that’s going to help you expand into a new market or an adjacent market or into new customer segment, that’s the hardest because you’re so prepped for a specific line of thought, that partner is going to make that deviate and you just don’t know how that’s going to be just yet.

[00:11:55] Lance Black: So that’s what makes it challenging.

[00:11:57] Lee Brumbaugh: But it is cool that healthcare builds it around the customer needs. And I think that’s a good lesson for the SMB marketplace. And again, you won’t want to go to just where that one client, but you learn so much and you’ve got to pivot. So you’re going for that client, they’ve got this pilot, they’re starting to … I know teams work so much on your pitch of like concise messaging. And a lot of times, and I meet with companies and teams, and you can tell the good ones that get it in 30 seconds, I know exactly what they’re doing, what they’re solving for, and then others takes a little longer, right? So talk to us about how you’ve helped companies build or find that messaging. What’s really important to getting that pitch right so that it resonates with these healthcare systems and with those companies they can grow with.

[00:12:36] Lance Black: Yeah. It’s more about the conversation than it is about you pitching your value to them. You need to understand where they’re coming from, what are their needs. Not only does it need to be the right person, but it also has to be the right timing. Is this a priority for them? Do they really even care about this need? Is it a nice to have versus it a need to have? So all those things are only understood in conversation. They should not be assumed. And I think that’s part of the issue is a lot of times we assume those things and so we pitch towards what we think is their need or we pitch towards what we think is the right timing for them instead of taking the time to have a conversation upfront and then you’re sort of dropping within that conversation the value points that your product or your solution or your business can add.

[00:13:17] Lance Black: And that’s where the right message comes in so that you’re not talking past each other, you’re not using terminology or what your presumed value is when they really don’t understand their presumed value or their value. So I like the saying like, if it’s a successful meeting, if your potential client is talking more than you are, because what you’re doing is you’re listening and you’re understanding where to interject your value into their needs, as opposed to it being, let me push this down your throat and I can pitch it to you in two minutes and you understand everything, but it may not be the right timing for you. It may not be the right solution for you.

[00:13:51] Lee Brumbaugh: Yeah. I mean, that translates so well. I mean, whatever sales model, you could do challenger sales model, whatever framework you have, you’re typically leveling some level of expertise of why you’re in the room, but then it’s at the end of the day, you’ve got to find out their aspirations, their afflictions, the goods and the bads of if they take your product or service and what can happen and then position within that. But if you’re just doing features and benefits, you’re not finding that linkage in. So I think that’s really well put. 100%. One thing that’s interesting to me, and as I think about TMCi, so many of the companies I work with, and in healthcare, we talk a lot about champion development, right? Because we’re talking about pilots and you may have a physician that’s really excited about it, but then they’ve got to go and they’ve got to take it to administrative, you’ve got procurement, you’ve got a lot … I think for the SMB space, the owners are listening here, champion development is critically important in the healthcare arena.

[00:14:41] Lee Brumbaugh: Talk to us about what building a good champion looks like. What do you need to think about when you’re looking down? Because I think there’s a lot of that that translates from healthcare to the SMB space and areas that they miss.

[00:14:53] Lance Black: Yeah. I like how you say development because I say champions are not found, champions are made and it’s really a process. It requires deliberate consideration. It’s not something that I talk to 10 physicians and one of them really likes what I’m doing. And so that’s my champion and that’s the person that I’m going to spend the most time with when that person may not be as effective as somebody else who takes a little bit more nurturing. So the things that I really think about is number one is frequency. So you’re engaging with them on a regular basis. It’s not a one and done kind of thing. And you make a determination after one or two meetings, you are taking the time repeatedly and building a pattern so that they sort of recognize who you are and that you’re going to sort of be there in their ear at all times.

[00:15:38] Lance Black: Number two, it’s the level of depth of that conversation, getting to know them. This goes back to the earlier point of like really understanding their needs, their inflictions, their pain points, et cetera. But I would even venture to go a little bit further than that, making it more personal, like getting to know what motivates them, what’s an incentive for them. Those kind of things are hard to flush out in the first couple of meetings because that’s like understanding their personality, right? It’s like understanding the background, like what’s subconsciously engaging for them. And the third piece I think is, and this is possible, is engaging them at different points within your business. So you may engage them early on to understand the unmet clinical need from the med tech side, but then engaging in them again when you start to design, I don’t know, your preclinical protocol, and then engaging them again when it comes to looking at the data from your human trial, because then what they start to do is feel like, at least in the pre-revenue stage, they start to feel like they’re part of the business.

[00:16:32] Lance Black: They’re being engaged at different milestones and they feel like they’re starting to see progress as opposed to, “I need you just for this thing and then I’m done with you. “ And I think a lot of, unfortunately, a lot of founders do that. I need you to do some quick voice of customer to validate this need, then you may never see them again. And even though they were excited about it, you don’t reengage them at different points. So I would say diversity and engagement is probably the third element. So I’d say frequency, depth, and then diversity of engagement is what makes champions and quite frankly flushes out the people that you don’t want to necessarily work with or you don’t necessarily want to target at the outset. Not to say that you don’t want to know what anti-champions think of you and how to work with them, but there are some people that you want to actually partner with and build the future together as opposed to those you just want to make sure you understand where they’re coming from.

[00:17:22] Lee Brumbaugh: Most companies don’t have the bandwidth to build a high functioning sales department to allow them to meet the revenue targets. With Sales Xceleration, they don’t have to. Our experienced fractional sales leaders consult and implement your sales strategy, infrastructure, management, and team development. Discover how we deploy these proven sales solutions to address your sales challenges by going to our website and filling out the contact form. We’d love to hear from you. Yeah. I really like how you teed up all those years, especially on the diversity of engagement, the timing, because I think when you think about champion develop, whether it’s healthcare or the SMB space, it’s a cycle. And obviously some companies listening have a two week sales cycle, some have a six month to a year long cycle. But if you’re going through it, you’ve got the approver, you’ve got the business driver, you’ve got the champion, you’ve got lots of different people that are going to be involved in that portion of the deal, they can kill the deal.

[00:18:18] Lee Brumbaugh: So you’ve got to be able to keep engaging with the champion because if the CFO doesn’t see the value of a $2 million price tag here, you’ve got to insert the champion to help bridge that gap. If the business driver is the CEO, there’s just so many people that you’ve got to insert that champion and they’ve got to be willing to keep doing that and that engagement. People don’t realize how many different people are going to be involved to take it from pilot to deal to expanding across an entire system. And it’s the same thing in the SMB space. How do you expand within that account, grow it to different departments? So I think there’s a lot of translation there. That’s really well articulated. When you think about technology, where are you seeing from everybody’s the buzzword’s AI of how that’s doing, but how are you finding that startup that wants to be efficient, they don’t have a ton of funding, but they’re taking the next … How are they using technology to better position their company, to do things more efficiently?

[00:19:11] Lee Brumbaugh: Where are you seeing technology fit in the healthcare space for entrepreneurs that are really looking for the next level of growth?

[00:19:17] Lance Black: Well, I think it goes back to the advantage of being small and nimble team because you can adopt technologies like nobody else, right? And as quickly as LLMs are changing, other AI platforms are changing, I’ve seen startups leverage the capability of like, “Okay, tomorrow we’re going to start using Claude to do X, Y, and Z.” We can’t do that at Texas A&M. You can’t do that if you’re a large company, right? It’s really hard to sort of embody a new software platform. Sometimes it takes months or years. So what I’ve seen early stage or SMBs do is they adopt this technology very quickly, they learn from it, they determine whether or not it’s a value and they move on or they continue to double down. And because the technology is changing so quickly, the fact that they can adopt technology at a rapid pace really gives them an unfair advantage.

[00:20:04] Lance Black: So I think that’s where I see it. It’s not like AI for X, Y, Z is where I see small business really taking it. It’s more about just the adoption curve. Them being the innovators, the early adopters on that side of the market has really proven to be an advantage when it comes to looking at other companies that are more incumbent or more stuck in sort of their older ways. I mean, at A&M, I think it’s a great university, but we’re just talking about our AI strategy and it takes a lot of stakeholder alignment. It takes a lot of meetings. It takes a lot of people to be on the same page before you can say, “Okay, you know what we’re going to start using is X, Y, Z LLM.” All the while startups like in the first three days have already adopted it, right?

[00:20:44] Lance Black: It’s a great advantage. So taking that to its fullest extent, whether it’s using it for regulatory submissions or using it to evaluate data, I think is kind of where I see the advantage.

[00:20:56] Lee Brumbaugh: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And that flexibility, that ability to pivot, and you need to have that type of mindset, especially in medical because you can run through a lot of money very quickly. And so you’ve got to be able to adapt, utilize your resource as well, because it takes FDA regulation, those types of things, it takes a while. So you’ve got to be smart as you’re taking the steps to grow the company. It makes sense.

[00:21:14] Lance Black: Yeah. It’s like this hubris versus humility. It has to be balanced against the fact that that’s not how fast healthcare moves. Because you can do it doesn’t mean you should do it or you can do it because AI is obviously a very useful tool and because it could expedite, I don’t know, clinical decision making doesn’t mean that the FDA is going to get behind that or physicians are going to get behind that. So that is the one sort of hubris that gets people in trouble is like, look, I can adopt this and look at … If I just show them the data, they’ll be convinced, but it doesn’t always work to that effect because these are large systems that are risk averse that take time. So that’s the one caveat. If you’re using things like AI to advance your internal functionality, it’s one thing. But when you think that that’s going to be adoptable or translatable to the enterprise system, that’s a completely different ball game.

[00:22:05] Lee Brumbaugh: Yeah, absolutely. Like you said, there’s so many hoops, red tag. Those are big shifts. That makes sense. So we’ve talked a lot about the positive, right? Companies that are developing champions, they’re doing things really of the early well of their pitch. I mean, look, startups in the healthcare world, some make it, some don’t. So there’s clearly you’ve seen those companies that weren’t able to take the next steps of growth. When you’re meeting with that entrepreneur and you’re, it’s like, “Oh, I don’t know if there is there anything that stands out of what they don’t do well at the beginning that some of those pitfalls early that you see when they’re trying to take that next level, albeit the company or even again at the entrepreneur level.”

[00:22:43] Lance Black: There’s so many points, Lee.

[00:22:46] Lance Black: Where do I start? No, the most common thing I see is that they stop listening. They treat voice of customer as a one-time phase. Look, I’ve talked to 25 doctors. They all say the same thing. I know what they need and now I’m going to point in one direction and develop a solution and build a business around it. I make it a point to try to talk to a new customer at least once a week. And when I say customer, this is pre-revenue. We’re like eight years out from sales. This is more just really trying to understand their needs because not only do their needs change, but there’s such a diversity and variance in care in the healthcare system that assuming you understand how a thoracic surgeon operates is very, very risky. So speaking to the multitude over the period of time, even when it’s not convenient for you as a company, you’re in verification and validation, you’re paying money to get testing done on this product that’s ready to go in humans.

[00:23:39] Lance Black: You don’t want to learn something new that’s going to completely change the way that you think about the clinical setting, but you should force yourself and practice patients to do that. So I think those founders, those entrepreneurs that stop listening are the ones that are going to be the ones that aren’t successful in the long run because they don’t take advantage of having their ear to the ground, which is actually the one big advantage that a lot of these companies have is that they can continuously engage with customers.

[00:24:06] Lee Brumbaugh: Yeah. And I see that with some of, again, some of the TMCi companies I’ve worked with. And I think that’s well put of ear to the ground because there’s so much more than just having the new device. It’s how does it go into the hospital system? How does the reimbursement side? What is the flow for when that device refills and all those things that capture around it. And you can learn so much on the patient pull through, the system pull through.That’s the stuff that also can bottleneck. You can have a great product, but is it easy for the hospitals, the physicians to use it, you’re dead in the water, right? And those are the things you can keep learning and expanding upon and testing out because that’s so much of healthcare is just, is it easy for a physician? Is it easy for a nurse?

[00:24:45] Lee Brumbaugh: Does it fit within their model? Is it easy for procurement? You got to think about all those things and wrap that around.

[00:24:51] Lance Black: 100%. And I’ve been in startups and I’ve worked with startups who’ve been around for three, five, six years, and you are learning brand new things about the unmet clinical need that you thought you had solidly locked away. It can be very disruptive in the way that you think about your business. However, it can also be hugely instrumental in how you’re successful. It’s a little bit scary to ask fundamental questions to a physician when you’re five years in, right? You’ve already made a lot of assumptions and you believe you validated. So it’s a little bit nerve-wracking to continue those conversations, but I think it’s a necessity.

[00:25:25] Lee Brumbaugh: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. So you’re that company, you get through the first few years, right? You get through the three years, you’re making it, you’re doing a job, you’re to the ground, you’re learning from your customer. How do you go from that company that’s just making it, you’ve got that first million of revenue to really scaling it to the next level. And I know this because I get this question all the time, right? It’s like, do I build in my own Salesforce? Do I hire, do I find a distribution model? There’s just so many paths. How do you help companies get that right? Because there’s so many different options they can go, right? They can sell, they can-

[00:25:58] Lance Black: I wish I had a good answer for you, Lee. I really do. There’s not one thing I can point to and say, “This is how you think I should think about it. “ The reason being is because I think that it really depends on your business. It depends on your team. It depends on your team’s capabilities. And so there’s probably not one good answer to think about and without really going deep into that business’s experiences and understanding and their solution. In fact, this is why I think we get tripped up a lot is we sort of adopt practices from other businesses that are in a similar market and we think that because it’s successful for that company is going to be successful for ours without really making a customized strategy. So I’m reluctant to come in and say, “Make sure you have this, this, this, and this.

[00:26:39] Lance Black: “ I mean, there’s some basics, of course, but to declare that I know what it’s going to take to scale this company successful, it’s more of a, you only get to know the company better and then find the gaps, find where they haven’t really spent time and see whether or not this is something, as you said, needs to be outsourced or this needs to be internalized. Do you have the right personnel to internalize something like this? So that’s a really tough question. And I don’t know that there’s a great answer for that.

[00:27:04] Lee Brumbaugh: I think the great answer is that there is no great answer. Because I agree with you. I’ve given four different … I’ve told companies that you’ve got to get it right, start in Houston, small team, grow out there. I’ve said others like, let’s regionalize it. Others, I said distribution. There’s four to five different answers every time, but it does depend on their growth trajectory, what their customers are telling them, how that initial pilot went, what other systems … There is not a cookie cutter model to that, which is really what makes it fun. And I think that the business owners that come in, the ones that I’ve seen as the most successful is saying, “All right, we’re not putting all our eggs in one basket.” We know how to sell it. I as a founder can go out and talk to systems that this resonates, but I’m going to try a little bit with a sales model, a little bit with the district.

[00:27:45] Lee Brumbaugh: Those that are willing to trial and then pivot off that and make sure that it’s working, get some traction before they take next steps are the ones I’ve seen be most successful. Totally agree. You’re a business owner, you’re listening today, even outside of the healthcare along your career was an aha moment. So you’re a $5 million company today. They’ve been stuck at that $5 million number, they’ve started to scale. Anything that stands out of what they should be thinking about to do differently today, be it voice of customers, customer success, anything that stands out to you?

[00:28:17] Lance Black: I’ve learned so much from deploying new technologies into first in human, and it really slaps you in the face and often becomes this aha moment is clinical workflow. It’s human behavior. It’s how people act day in and day out. These things are really hard to predict, especially when you have a novel technology. So how are they going to treat it? Who are they going to refer to? How is it going to disrupt their workflow? There is very, very few technologies, very, very few solutions that we’ll just plug seamlessly into the workflow, which is what a lot of founders like to say. My push is always like, move quickly to first in human. Get it into the hands of people that are going to use the device, use the technology, because that’s where you’re going to have the biggest learning impact. I feel like startups are … We always talk about them as roller coasters, but really the rollercoaster to me is this influx of data at different moments.

[00:29:07] Lance Black: Maybe it’s a pre-submission meeting you had with the FDA. Now all of a sudden, you’re rushing to figure out your strategy as it applies to this new information from the FDA, or it’s this new preclinical trial result, but the first in human is a huge influx of data and it’s very overwhelming. These peaks of data flow are separated by this stagnation of data where you’re trying to work really hard to move things forward, but the information is super valuable. So I’m always thinking about how do we move it into the clinic quicker. A lot of it comes back to not the technology, whether or not you got the right results. A lot of it comes back to the workflow and how it’s going to be integrated and therefore adopted. So that’s kind of the aha moment that I sort of push people towards just thinking through, put this in people’s hands and see what they do with it.

[00:29:54] Lee Brumbaugh: There’s so many translations here too, because you said it earlier, right? If you’re even an SMB company and you’ve got so Something established, but you want to do a new service line or a new product. And so many times I see, I don’t know if it’s ego or it’s like, we’re already a $4 million company and customers love us and now we have a new service line. And so we’re going to price it really high. I’m like, why? If you need to do it at cost, you will learn so much more by getting a customer to trial and give you feedback versus waiting six months, put it in your pipeline. All you’ve done is waste six months of time. If you need to do it at break even, do it at a break even. You’re going to learn so much from your customers. And then when you expand to that ideal customer profile, and half the time you’re going to learn that’s not even the right target audience.

[00:30:36] Lance Black: Exactly.

[00:30:37] Lee Brumbaugh: But speed and learning I think are the key things that resonate today that are my takeaways. So this has been excellent, Lance. So thank you so much for joining us, Lance. Everyone, I think a lot that you can learn of translating for finding the right champions and really being able to pivot your business to hearing and adapting with the voice of your customer. Thank you so much for joining us. In two weeks, we’ll have another business owner that talks about ways to help you grow your business. Thanks everyone for joining Sales Against the Odds. You’ve been listening to Sales Against the Odds. Be sure to hit that follow button so you never miss an episode. And if you want more resources on scaling sales, check out our website at salesxceleration.com.