Bill:  Hi again, it's Bill White for Testo Information Network. The Testo Information Network is designed to help educate the market, and today we're going to talk with a Tesco insider, Colleen Lester. Colleen is the Director of Pharma Solution Sales for North America. Colleen, welcome to the Testo Information Network.

Colleen, we're going to talk today about the world of Tesco from the customer point of view, which is something that you see out on the street as the Sales Director, the person that's responsible for taking this Testo message to customers directly. You probably have the best seat in the house. What is your official position with Tesco?

Colleen:  Yeah, I'm the director of pharma solutions sales.  Testo has several different verticals, and, we have a pharma vertical that I manage in North America. I'm responsible for the sales team, the regional sales reps who report in to me.

Bill:  OK, that's a lot of responsibility. How did you get there?

Colleen:  I started off needing a job with two small kids, and I ended up taking a job with the company, answering phones, and within 5 years, I was doing inside sales with them and then doing outside sales.

Colleen:  And I just kept learning as much as I could. I have a curiosity about a bunch of different things. My background is not in life science. I was an actor.

Colleen:  I have my MFA in acting from the University of Florida. I worked as a professional actor for a couple of years in New York and found myself in a situation where I needed a job and learned as much as I could about active packaging, which is what the company I worked for then did.

Colleen:  And moved on to temperature monitoring, which I knew nothing about as well. And learned a whole lot about that and then came to Testo.

Colleen:  And the rest is history.

Bill:  Yeah, I think sometimes not being an industry insider is a benefit, gives you a completely independent objective look at what you're going to be doing.

Colleen:  Yeah, and I think you focus on what's important for sales, meaning connection with the customer and you know, all of those things rather than wanting talk about how much you know about life science. I am never going to be the expert on life science, but I am pretty good at relationship management and, really listening and connecting with customers to get them what they need.

Bill:  And I'm sure you're quite comfortable giving presentations to massive audiences, sales meetings, and webinars, lunch and learns, things like that.

Colleen:  Yeah, there's a lot of crossover and it's been a wonderful surprise that I'm good at this. And I, you know, I had never thought I would do it, but here I am and I really enjoy it. I'm a very competitive person as well as, just a very results-oriented person, so I like to close deals. I like to provide solutions for my customers. I love to solve problems, and they're really the most important things that a salesperson needs.

Bill:  Well, it's a great stage for you as an actor turned sales manager, especially in a technology industry that requires more than a casual understanding of what it is you're selling and why and where. What do Tesco customers value most these days?

Colleen:  Well, I think beyond like the software and the accuracy of the instruments, I think Tesco has incredible customer service. We really try to partner with our customers and, really help them. I'll probably say this a few times, help them solve problems. And that partnership is really, really important to us.

Bill:  How do you earn their trust? I mean, you have to do that first before anything else happens. 

Colleen:  I think it's listening, right? It's listening to what they're trying to accomplish and then figuring out what is really important to them and then delivering on both those things. So it's not just one thing.

Bill:  Sure, the first rule of consultative sales is listening. It certainly goes a long way. I'm sure you've got some great stories along the way. What's one of your good ones?

Colleen:  Yeah, I mean, we had a customer that came to us with an inquiry, but it was a very kind of general inquiry, and I reached out to them. We started a conversation.

Colleen:  But they had never heard of us. They, this gentleman had never heard of Testo. He got our name through a colleague in the UK who was working with Testo, and he said, “Well, I was told I should call you just to see what you guys are about, but I've never heard of you”. And I said, OK.

Colleen:  So, we started there and did our best not to disqualify ourselves, as he said. So, we moved through the process and we ended up winning the project. It was quite a large life science project, 2nd largest in Testo's Pharma Division history. And it wasn't of course just me. I was the face of it, but it was my team behind me, the customer success manager, as well as my inside sales rep who ended up being the project manager.

Bill:  OK, you are part of the team. What was the tipping point for that customer, do you think?

Colleen:  It was, honestly, I think it was trust. He, he said to me at the end when we were down to the final, we knew we were in the final two for this project, and he said, why should I go with you?

Colleen:  And I said because I mean what I say, and what we tell you we're going to do, we do. And, you know, we're, they all laugh at me, but I actually did say this in the meeting. I said, we are solid as a rock. And we are there for you 100%.

Bill:  Well, that sounds like a great strategy. And it's a prerequisite to sales growth, market share increases, certainly, and to downstream brand awareness.  What major shifts are you seeing in the entire universe of sensor technology or data acquisition, the things that Tesco is bringing to the market? What's going on out there in that area?

Colleen:  Cloud data storage is a huge thing that's going on right now. It's kind of become the standard in the industry and, for cold chain, it's really monitoring in real time. So, they're really the big things that are moving forward and, you know, I can tell you that when I started in this industry in 2017, nobody wanted to talk about cloud.

Colleen:  They were like, no, we want to know where our data is, we want it on our server, we want to have control over our data. And in that amount of time, even by the time we got to 2021, they became much more comfortable with cloud. So ,it's been sort of this evolution with cloud, and now it's really become the standard in the market.

Bill:  And it's accepted and widely trusted, I'm sure, certainly that we have such technologies now that we can use in sales and customer service. What are customer buying behaviors? Where are they changing right now over the past year or so, if at all?

Colleen:  Customers are, especially with larger customers, they're not the sole owners of the projects anymore. We're really having a lot of external partners that are brought in. So, you know, they might outsource procurement. They may outsource on-site, taking care of the alarms on site. They are outsourcing a lot more stuff and that was really prevalent. When we went to the CPHI show, we saw a lot of CROs and CDMOs and, you know, a lot of these large pharma companies are not wanting to keep everything in-house any longer. They want to outsource that. 

Bill:  That's definitely a change. They used to be so proprietary about everything that perhaps the security issues have been improved to a point where they're good with that. And speaking of that, technologies, in the entire business of sales and certainly in pharma, are increasing but some are more exciting than others. What do you think might be the most fun to talk about?

Colleen:  I mean, AI, right? We're all talking about that and how we can use it. Predictive modeling, I think, is very interesting for customers. And using our data to do that, it can help with asset maintenance. It can help in cold chains certainly with using digital twins to predict different parameters on routes and kind of getting an idea of, OK, this is what that route's going to look like, and we've already mapped that out, and then the shipment goes, and as long as it goes to plan, they feel comfortable with what package they've used, what, what logger they've used, all of that. But I think that even beyond that with the on-site.

Colleen:  You know, this kind of idea of, OK, I put a bunch of data into AI and it tells me what my external temperatures are going to be, how my HVAC is going to operate. All of that data is being kind of merged together now, which did not happen, of course, because it wasn't possible years ago. But yeah, I think that that's a lot of what's going on. I mean, there's this idea of a one-stop shop for data also where they can stitch together data from different areas into kind of one cohesive picture.

Colleen:  Which, you know, Severis1 does a great job with that. We have the world map on our homepage in the cockpit. When a customer opens that, they're able to see all of their locations in one setting, and they're able to see if they have an alarm in India or that everything's fine in Germany. They can really look at all of that in one, in one view.

Bill:  Sure, and you have, you mentioned Severis1; tell us about that real quick, what that is.

Colleen:  That's our proprietary monitoring solution where we're really monitoring just about any asset or any area that the customer needs monitored. We're taking all of that data and we're putting it into our solution, our software, and then they would get notifications via WhatsApp or Teams or email or even Slack. They can, we can, figure out a way to get them the notifications however they need it, but yeah, we're able to monitor stand-alone assets as well as warehousing and things like that.

Bill:  So as far as Testo making really great sensors and quite a broad range of them, the ability to aggregate all that information, certainly the communication to the Severis1 system, is pretty critical going forward.

Colleen:  Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah, I mean, the software is very easy to use. It's very… the user experience is really top notch. They're able to kind of cruise around and see all different things and see their ultra-lows, what the temperature is, they can see the warehouse, if there's a relative humidity issue or a temperature issue, they're able to see all of that.

Colleen:  And the great thing is that we have the CFR compliance, and so with the CFR compliance, we have a full audit trail. It's really bulletproof from the audit trail perspective and so anybody who does anything in the system changes anything, makes any kind of a change to a temperature range or anything like that, or even acknowledges an alarm, they have to put their credentials in so that that audit trail is complete and anyone who goes into the solution can look at the audit trail and say, oh, John Smith acknowledged that alarm, you know, at 2 o'clock in the afternoon on this date. So it's pretty cool.

Bill:  You've seen a lot of change in your short, relatively short career with Testo, but it sounds like it's a great stage for you and certainly for Testo. Let's, let's go back real quick on the AI subject. I'm sure it's changing how they work, your customers, the market's changing every, everywhere, my life and yours, but does it change how you work?

Colleen:  Because, I mean, you know, it makes some things much easier. So, gathering data for us, like if we're looking at a particular customer and we want to know, what are the new sites that they're building or, you know, anything to do with competitive landscape, anything like that, we're able to kind of plug that into AI.

Colleen:  But, you know, the thing it can't do, and maybe that was going to be your next question, but the thing it can't do is it can't connect with the customer and this kind of connection-based selling that we do at Testo.

Colleen:  It can't do that. If I ever see emails that are that are going out that are AI generated emails from sales reps, I'm always like, dude, like that doesn't sound like you. You, the customer knows that you need it to sound like you, and

Bill:  it's very easy to spot anymore. Yes, we're getting smarter there.

Colleen:  for sure, yeah,

Bill:  Colleen, when, when someone hears this podcast and they want to take advantage of what you know and your experience and the bridge between their situations and the test of solutions, what's their first step and next step?

Colleen:  Yeah, I mean, you know, you can certainly connect with us on LinkedIn, um, and uh Testo Global or Teso North America, um, and Teso Pharma. So, you know, you can catch us anywhere on LinkedIn just about if you put Testo in, and you can certainly connect with me there. Also, you know, info at Teso, that's an easy way to get a hold of us, info at Teso.com, and then, your information would be sent to the appropriate salesperson, including me, if you would like to speak to me because I certainly do have my own customers. Obviously, I'm a player coach with my team, so. I think that's the easiest way to get a hold of us.

Bill:  OK. We're on the Teso Information Network with Colleen Lester, who's the director of pharmaceutical solution sales for North America. Colleen, we're going to come back to you later. We've got so much more to talk about, but I want to thank you for your time today.

Colleen:  No problem. Thank you so much. It was really fun.