Describe the challenges that Michelle encountered when trying to establish a customer connection with student researchers at an academic biotechnology laboratory. Are these challenges uniq

CASE

If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try and Try Again?

Negotiating Skeptical Customers and Bridging Cultural

Differences as a Sales Rep

Abstract

Michelle Tamura is a newly-minted sales representative at a U.S. biotechnology company specializing in portable benchtop electronics. Hired to tackle a potential expansion into the academic research market, she is given an opportunity to pursue a client with potential ties to Japan, her home country. Michelle’s new boss trains her to approach academic researchers with confidence and provides her with a number of strategies to connect with new clients. He warns her that academics are difficult to establish contact with and can be reluctant customers. When Michelle visits a university laboratory to promote a new product, she is only able to meet with student researchers who seem too busy to talk to her and avoid any productive interactions. After multiple unsuccessful attempts, Michelle is unable to make in-roads on a potential contract or approach the elusive principal investigator who is the key decision maker in the lab. Finally, she decides to put to use her knowledge of Japanese culture and negotiation strategies she learned in college to tackle the challenge at hand.

Watch Out and Hide: The Rep Is Here!

Chris and Ted had a long morning work session ahead of them arranging a

complicated experiment they needed for the upcoming conference in Japan.

They worked in a prestigious university laboratory and their principal

investigator Dr. Saito was a renowned specialist in molecular diagnostics of

colorectal cancer. He had extremely high standards for his graduate student

researchers and failure was never acceptable.

Ted was the meticulous one. He was tasked with pipetting minute amounts of

reagents into rows upon rows of plastic vials he had labelled impeccably and

obsessively with his even hand. Chris was never patient enough with the details

and instead fiddled with the thermocycler settings, gathered together an army of

chemical bottles, and read over the experimental protocol over and over to

make sure everything was in order before they began testing the samples. They

only had enough time to run the experiment once and it had to go well.

Suddenly, Ted looked up with alarm and gave Chris a long meaningful look. In

the quiet of their laborious activities they both heard the unmistakable clickety-

clack of heels purposefully walking down the corridor and an interrupted whir of

a wheeled bag just outside their lab. Ted dropped his pipette and started ripping

his gloves and lab coat off as he ran toward the back room, “I can’t do this now,

man. I talked to her last time.”

Chris opened his mouth to protest, but immediately realized he did not have the

time for a long discussion. He had to think on his feet about how to best avoid

dealing with the sales rep who was about to walk through the door. He looked

around for any undergraduate lab assistants who he could rope into this

unpleasant task, but no one was around. He sighed and decided to go with the

tried-and-true method of pretending to be hard at work. Maybe he would be

able to get out of a long conversation if he looked industrious enough.

As the door opened, in walked a young woman in a dark suit and an ever-

present stack of flyers under her arm. Even if Chris had seen her before, he did

not recognize her. Sales reps all looked the same to him and they all meant

delays for the urgent research he was trying to accomplish. Chris privately

marveled at how the reps always managed to come at the least opportune

moment. He put on his best make-believe busy face and pretended to be deep

in thought over his upside-down notes that he hastily grabbed from the table.

The woman looked around tentatively and then spotted him. She started walking

towards his work bay.

“Hi there!” she said brightly. “My name is Michelle. I am a representative from

WestGene and I am here to speak to you about your possible western blotting

needs,” she proffered him her hand but noticed he was wearing gloves and

awkwardly waved it away. “Do you have a minute to chat?”

“Urgh,” Chris said unhelpfully. “I am kinda in the middle of something right now,”

he pointed toward Ted’s tell-tale vials and open reagent bottles lined up in

orange plastic racks on the bench all around him. He silently thanked his lucky

stars that he did not take his gloves off.

“Oh, ok, I understand. Then can you perhaps point me in the direction of

someone who I could speak to today? I just need a few moments to introduce

our new machine and perhaps schedule a demo for your lab.” Michelle held up a

flyer with a colorful photo of a sleek new processor, like a shield in front of her

face. This interaction was beginning to feel very uncomfortable.

“Urgh,” Chris said again, annoyed even further. Clearly, his busy face was not

working on the persistent rep. “Nobody is around right now. They are in a

meeting with Professor Saito.”

Michelle perked up at the mention of the professor’s name. “Is it all right if I

leave you a couple of flyers and come back another time?”, she asked hopefully,

“and, what is your name?”

“My name is Steve,” Chris said quickly. “Sure, you can come again, but I have no

say in purchasing for the lab, so I don’t know how helpful I would be.” He

shrugged as she placed a few of the colorful leaflets on the work bench.

“No problem, I will try another time then, Steve. Maybe I could catch Professor

Saito some time, if you think he would be a better contact point,” she said with a

smile, and turned to leave.

“I sincerely doubt it,” Chris mumbled under his breath, but she did not hear his cheeky

remark. As the sound of her heels faded, Chris swept the flyers into the nearby trash bin and

called out to Ted who was still hiding in the back room. “Dude, it is safe to come out now.”

Big Plans for Reluctant Customers

Earlier that morning Michelle Tamura checked her reflection in the hallway mirror one more

time before entering the office suite of WestGene headquarters. Even though she was on the

job for a month already, she was nervous. The first few weeks were a blur of paperwork,

faces, rules, and presentations. Her new manager did not waste any time in getting the new

employees to work in the field.

One the way to the office, Michelle has been playing Shaggy’s “Strength of a

Woman” on repeat. She needed the extra energy and encouragement before her

first solo assignment and the uplifting beat and lyrics of her favorite song

brought her comfort. Michelle put on a well-tailored suit and spent extra time

making sure her hair was impeccable. She checked and rechecked her new sleek

rolling bag that was meant to look extra professional and be roomy enough to

hold the necessary promotional materials. She nodded approvingly at her

reflection—she looked like a picture-perfect sales representative, the one she

had always dreamed of becoming. And it was that much easier to be confident in

your skills if you looked the part.

Michelle’s supervisor Bill is an “in-your-face” kind of man. He is loud and

garrulous and very easy to talk to. That is, if you had a chance to slip in a word

in-between his long soliloquys and ponderings about the benefits of

international contracts with Japan. Michelle was to be part of his pet project, it

seemed, as he hand-selected her from the pool of applicants based on her

knowledge of Japanese, French, and Spanish, from having spent considerable

time living, studying, and working in different countries. Michelle’s resume must

have impressed him with her experience in contract negotiations and sales stats

from her previous job in her home country of Japan.

That day he finally assigned her the difficult project he has been talking about so

much. WestGene has had a long history of developing compact benchtop

machines for commercial bioengineering research labs. With the laboratory

equipment and disposables market size expected to reach USD 37,872 million by

2025 (Sumant et al., 2019), the company was optimistic about the future. Their

technology was reliable, sleek, fast, and very advanced. However, their most

important selling point was that their tech improved the day-to-day activities of a

standard lab so fundamentally, that the nontrivial amounts of consumables

required for each machine’s routine operation were easily and eagerly

overlooked by the long list of companies they dealt with. The machines were

simply that good.

Recent conversations among management teams have started touching upon

strategies for an international expansion. There were no concrete plans just yet,

but Bill liked to keep three steps ahead of the game and come up with ideas that

nobody else thought of. He easily made connections with top professionals in

the field because one never knew where a profitable opportunity might arise.

A few months back, Bill had been scouting a biomedical engineering research conference in the Greater Boston area for the latest and greatest in academic research. He happened to sit at the same lunch table with Professor Saito, who ran an impressive research enterprise at the top university that West Gene’s marketing team has been trying to target for a while now. After exchanging pleasantries, Bill learned that Professor Saito had considerable connections in his home country of Japan, including both academic and commercial sectors. Bill was also acutely aware that Asia Pacific was poised to reach the highest growth rate in the global laboratory equipment services market by 2024 (Singh, 2019). Professor Saito explained that there was an increased demand for pathological testing owing to the prevalence of cancer in the region (Singh, 2019). Regrettably, Dr. Saito seemed like a reserved kind of man and was evasive about setting up a teleconference with Bill’s sales team. That is how Bill got his idea.

While Bill was not worried about marketing the new western blot processor they affectionately called “Westie” for commercial use, the company’s recent run-ins with several academic labs proved to be an entirely different beast. Nobody on his team was able to get through to the researchers at the universities. Targeting professor Saito’s lab would accomplish not only getting their foot in the door with the local academic market but also establishing their first connections abroad. Excited to learn that the new associate Michelle had experience with negotiations and was originally from Japan herself, Bill sent her to the laboratory of the venerable professor to try to get an appointment for a demonstration of the new device.

“Find me when you are back,” Bill told Michelle after his pep talk over aromatic coffee in his

office. He chuckled encouragingly and handed her a pile of promotional leaflets. “These are

the most unwilling customers you will ever encounter, but this could be our biggest chance

for expansion yet. I have done a lot of research and I think this could be it. Do not let me

down”. He ran through the main talking points for showcasing Westie and gave her a few tips

about being confident and forceful in her interactions. Michelle tended to be too reserved in

his opinion. Then he sent her on her way in anticipation of good news.

Talk Is Cheap

Three weeks later, Michelle was still no closer to landing a contract. Every time she came by

the lab, she felt that the student researchers scattered and avoided talking to her. Bill grew

increasingly impatient as he gave her incessant advice about new things to try. Privately,

Michelle made a list of all the strategies she attempted based on Bill’s advice and the

outcomes she received in response:

• 1.

Show up at different times of day and week. Outcome: Students kept irregular hours and were difficult to track down. She was unable to speak to the same person more than once.

• 2.

Try talking to different people. Outcome: Talking to different people made no difference. Each person insisted that they had no say in how things are procured for the lab.

• 3.

Be persistent with leaving her contact information, sending e- mails, and leaving voice messages. Outcome: She never received any replies.

• 4.

Offer free lunch. Outcome: Several students indicated they would be interested but had to check if they were allowed to accept a promotion liked that. She has not heard back yet (same as (3)).

• 5.

Offer freebies with the purchase of their product. Outcome: Same as (4).

• 6.

Distribute a variety of promotional materials. Outcome: Materials were accepted, but she never saw any about the lab when she returned for repeat visits.

• 7.

Contact Professor Saito directly via e-mail. Outcome: Professor’s assistant replied that the professor was traveling abroad at the moment. She was not able to obtain his direct phone number.

So far, nothing seemed to have worked. Michelle considered her options. She had grown up in Japan and her father was a businessman who negotiated important contracts for his company. He often told her about his work when she decided to get her own degree in international marketing. At school, Michelle learned that U.S. businessmen were very different from Japanese and different approaches were needed for contracts where cultural differences might come into play (Cateora et al., 2019). Michelle thought long and hard remembering everything she was taught about Japanese sensitivity and emotion management, institutional loyalty, group spirit, value of friendship, aversion to arguments, decision delays, bureaucratic issues, and avoidance of the word “no” (Van Zandt,

1970). She even called her dad and had a long conversation about key sales and negotiating tactics he employed in his work. Finally, she decided to put together a proposal for Bill that would include concrete strategies for tackling this difficult situation. Come Monday morning, she would be ready to try something new.