Biotech Insider

E-newsletters - you should subscribe

I'm pretty picky when it comes to newsletters in my in-box. If they don't have the ./ mantra of 'more signal, less noise' then I'm frankly not interested.

If you are interested in what is going on in the world of Life Science then Genomeweb is a must. They will rent out the email list on occasion, but it is still a very worthwhile read. There are print editions of their bi-weekly newsletters, such as BioCommerce Week or BioArray News, but you have to be prepared to shell out a few hundred $/year.

Another newsletter I subscribe to is the Biospace Genepool, if only for the jobs that are posted there. They do put on local career-hunting events, which may be of interest should you be in the market for a new employer.

A pretty short list - only two newsletters - and there are many others you can subscribe to that are whittled-down versions of trade publications, such as The Scientist, and for a while I subscribed to Nature and Science Alerts which can be useful if you want their Table of Contents delivered weekly.

General marketing newsletters I subscribe to are 'Go-to-Market Strategies' Resource newsletter, the McKinsey Quarterly newsletter (free content articles are available) and stuff from Perry Marshall regarding advertising via Google Adwords.

A  hint about newsletters: simply set-up a free email account such as Gmail by finding an 'unused' invitation in this thread. (With over 70 pages of invitations, at least one of them should be still valid!) That way all your newsletters are in one place, and any commercial email will go to that address keeping your inbox clean and tidy.

Hint number 2: Reserve your own domain. I use this service for something like $10/year. (For example, www.lastname.com, if not taken already.) Then you can setup a personal webspace via a web hosting service (I use this one, only $30/year) and have it auto-forward everything sent to [email protected] to [email protected]. This way if and when you move or your ISP goes out of business or you switch from AOL to DSL to another DSL and then to cable (or whatever), your email address stays blissfully the same. Of course you have to keep track of two email accounts, the personal one you guard jealously and the one you give out for commercial purposes, but once you set it all up life is good!

'Toastmasters and You'

For many years I would wonder about organizations like the Kiwanis or Rotaries or others that serve as good examples of civic volunteerism, and mistakenly grouped the Toastmasters as one of them.

When I relocated a few years ago to a new area I figured that I had a chance to get involved to meet new people in this new location. It was something by happenstance, a training on Project Management had an excellent instructor who mentioned in passing a joke she heard at her Toastmaster's meeting, and it reminded me that I had wanted to check it out for a while. So I did what any web-savvy person would do, which was to find a local meeting and checked it out.

I went to probably 10 8 different meetings before I found my 'home'. And it was so interesting to see each small club (some only had 7 or 10 people in attendance the day I visited) had so many similar procedures, and each club made me feel so welcomed. As one who used to teach (in a prior lifetime) I had a fair amount of public speaking experience, but the Toastmasters group obviously knows a tremendous amount about public speaking and is highly recommended for career advancement.

I have not had much experience working with people who earn serious six-figure incomes (like the CEO who is $500k+ and the VP of R&D above $250k), so naturally I get a bit nervous around them. And when making presentations to the Senior Management group (as I was upon occasion), it is public speaking at its best - or worst. And this is where Toastmasters comes in - you learn not to say "umm" or "ahhh" and you learn how to be humorous and relaxed, in addition to gaining great confidence and ability in public speaking.

The group I found is an amazing resource - like-minded folks who want to improve themselves and improve their careers. A great place to meet great people and learn a lot.

If you want to advance your career work on your public speaking and presentation skills. It gives you the confidence and 'voice' that you need to advance right on up. If you don't believe me, show me any successful executive in any business who speaks poorly, either in person or in front of a group; it is something definitely to consider.

Some favorite links

As the first entry to this Sales and Marketing blog, here are some of my favorite links to online stuff.

As the life science business is young, there are only a few places where scientists (customers) and commercial folks (sales reps, marketing folks, business development people) hang out online. One good place is Biofind's Rumor Mill, which is now officially for sale, so any of you who want to try an commercialize rumors can go give it a try. A little history, though - there was a ton of controversy to make this rumor site a paid-subscription site, complete with online polls, that caused no end to the level of noise, what with endless strings of posts that were nothing but complaining, whiny people too cheap to pay for information. Ah, the wonders of the Internet. Note: this site is difficult to navigate, as there is only a filtering function by biotech discipline, so be prepared to wear out your 'back' button, and regularly start over from the home page. Also some companies are represented much more than others, which has little relationship to market size, growth rate, number of struggles, amount of politics, or relative level of happiness. About that last comment - there might be a correlation to relative level of happiness to number of posts, but I don't have enough information at the present.

For another source of company-specific news where customers meet online with sales and/or marketing people would be the stock message boards at Yahoo! Finance, but the level of traffic may be hit-or-miss, depending on the company. And if you are looking for insider news about a small privately-held company online, good luck!

One of my trade magazines in my 'must-read' pile is Genetic Engineering News, but a lot of its content is not found online. Their website was recently revamped, now much easier to read, even with a discussion forum that is currently empty. If you are currently 'behind the bench' (say in an academic lab somewhere as I was for many years) and would like to find out more about the real business of biotech suppliers, this is a must-read, and do what you can to get a free or paid subscription if you don't get it already.

Another site that is well-worth bookmarking is GenomeWeb. They publish Genome Technology, and if you don't have a free subscription you can get one easily. Back to GenomeWeb - they have a twice-daily email alert service that is invaluable to me - another item on my 'must-read' list. It can often take the place of subscribing for 'investor alerts' from the websites of your competition. :)

For academic life-science literature, I'd be remiss not to mention NCBI (in particular PubMed), Stanford's Highwire, or Google Scholar. And the PLoS (Public Library of Science) is an interesting experiment in 'open-source' scientific publishing. But often as a busy Sales person you aren't going to do a lot of this footwork yourself - that's what Marketing and Technical Support people are for - and often a well-timed complaint will get you what you need.