Takeaways from a live conversation with Hamid Ghanadan, Elizabeth Chabe, and Chris Conner

Synopsis

On Wednesday, May 14, 2025 we recorded a live webinar, broadcasting from Boulder, Colorado, where our CEO Hamid Ghanadan was joined by Elizabeth Chabe (principal of High Touch Group) and Chris Conner (host of the Life Science Marketing Radio podcast). Our aim for the conversation was to provide a grounding on how the changes that our industry is experiencing will affect scientific tools and services companies in the short- and long term. There were a few key takeaways from our conversation: 

1.  Focus on Authentic Value and Relationships: Trust between entities is eroding so quickly and so completely that it’s no longer viable to take it for granted. Companies used to create brands as marks for why their customers should trust them. These brands are no longer in a position to assume trust in them, and companies need to re-imagine how to develop authentic relationships with their markets.
2. Your Scientific Content is No Longer Interesting. Your Thought Leadership Is: It’s no longer enough to show how your technology solves a specific problem for scientists.  Even if they cared about this during good times, most of them certainly don’t have the bandwidth to care about this now.  Differentiate yourself through provocative, forward-looking thought leadership content that solves specific customer problems. Stake out your thought leadership position during market contractions, when audiences look to align themselves with ideas, rather than be sold to. 
3. Reimagine Sales and Marketing Integration: If the interface between marketing and sales isn’t fully streamlined, then you’re wasting a tremendous amount of energy. Focus on the “and” between sales and marketing, creating seamless through-lines.  Even if the marketing team is doing its job in generating leads and even qualifying them, and sales teams are following up, but ultimately not able to extract value, then this is when you have to fix this interface. We’re seeing clients who are reimagining the interface, and empowering their sales teams to develop their own micro-markets. 
4. Experiment with New Commercial Models: Take advantage of uncertainty to test pilot programs and new approaches. As much as this sounds like a risk during such times of uncertainty, doubling down on ineffective efforts is definitely not the answer. Be willing to abandon old assumptions and find what truly resonates with customers.
5. The Leaders of Tomorrow Are Being Formed Right Now: Every company who is succeeding right now has three traits in common:  First they have a solid offering, either with differentiated technology or differentiated (and real) value.  Second, they are building a brand on the new rules of trust.  And third, they have a secret about their customers: a key insight about how their customers act, or react, and they use this insight to drive action. 

We hope the information shared will be of use to you as you navigate this unprecedented time. 

Below is a summary of the conversation.  

The New Funding Landscape: Challenges and Implications

Elizabeth Chabe opened with an assessment of recent funding changes: “We’ve seen over $1.8 billion worth of cuts just to the NIH. That’s over 684 grant programs that have just been completely wiped.” This represents a fundamental disruption to the innovation pipeline that could impact healthcare advances for decades to come.

One of the most significant but underreported consequences is the talent migration: “Countries like France, Germany, Singapore, China are inviting our researchers to set up labs there. They’re going to fully fund their labs, let their PIs come with them,” Elizabeth warned. “This is a massive talent drain from our country… a massive geopolitical issue.”

Hamid Ghanadan shared data showing this talent drain is already beginning: “18% of the people that responded to our survey said that one of the things that they’re considering… is really looking for another job. Whether that’s leaving academia altogether, whether that’s going into industry or moving geography… that’s one in five researchers.”

Despite these challenges, Hamid emphasized that substantial funding remains in the ecosystem: “The NIH budget is still in the multiple tens of billions of dollars… our collective market isn’t drying up. It’s still relatively large.” However, the investment pattern is changing dramatically, with investors “much more likely to fund a company with more money and pick a winner than to spread their risk across multiple companies that are maybe earlier on.”

The Paradox of Present Decision-Making

Hamid identified a critical paradox facing executives:

• “If you look at the fundamentals of the economy, everything looks strong in the long term”
• “Midterm, even, we’ll figure it out. Everything’s fine”
• “Immediate term, everyone’s frozen. No one knows what to do. People in marketing, people in sales, people in all aspects of the business, they can’t rely on anything to even bet on to move forward.”

This creates what Elizabeth called a “huge freeze moment” where uncertainty about factors like tariffs (potentially ranging from 10% to 145%) paralyzes decision-making at all levels.

The uncertainty is creating psychological barriers even where business remains strong. Hamid noted: “I was at AACR two weeks ago… a lot of the people are surprisingly actually good, like, we kind of blew it out of the water… commerce is happening. Transactions are happening. Things are moving.”

Marketing During Uncertainty Requires Authentic Value Creation

The End of Traditional Marketing Approaches

Hamid delivered this provocative insight that resonated throughout the discussion: “The whole content marketing stacks… they’ve enslaved so many marketers and so many sales people in this machinery… and they’re not really producing the promise that they had… It’s time to unplug those because they’re just wasting money now.”

Elizabeth echoed this sentiment: “We talk a lot about… Eloqua. My biggest bear right now, sometimes, is with CRM management and just how different teams are utilizing it and running all of their business interactions out of CRM, as opposed to focusing on those interpersonal relationships with prospective clients.”

Building Trust Through Value First

When asked if empathy and effectiveness can coexist in the current climate, Hamid responded emphatically: “The only way. It’s the only way.” He explained that creating value builds reciprocity: “One of the best ways to get somebody to say yes to you is to create a sense of reciprocity… I am much more likely to say yes.”

This approach yields business results by inverting traditional transaction-focused marketing: “This stuff will sell if you just go about it counterintuitively, against the way that our commercial world is sort of normalized into thinking push, push, push.”

Elizabeth reinforced this: “You’re going to get so many more sales if you have that trust relationship that you’ve built over the last 12 months, and you continue it for the next 12 even if they’re not buying. That’s how you keep people from ghosting on you.”

The Content Opportunity

“Brands are built in times of market contraction, not in bull markets,” Elizabeth asserted. “If you believe that your brands could be a powerhouse in the space that you occupy or want to occupy, this is your time to stake out that thought leadership position.”

Her specific guidance: “Don’t go dark. Just maybe don’t buy so many PPC ads… This depth of educational and thought leadership based content is so important… thinking about how your products and services solve very specific problems for your customer set, focusing on those segments that still have budget.”

The opportunity is in differentiation through thought leadership: “I like the way Elizabeth said that, or I like the way he framed this problem. It’s the same for your scientific products… ‘this is how we think about doing this type of analysis, or why the old way isn’t what it could be.'”

Reimagining Sales and Marketing Integration

Finding the “And” Between Functions

Hamid identified a fundamental flaw in current practices: “We say sales and marketing… It’s the and that we focus on… No one is focusing on the and.” This creates inefficiency when “marketing comes up like this tidal wave, and then sales comes up this tidal wave, and you create this giant splash.”

The companies succeeding now are exploring “beautiful through lines” between these functions, including better sales enablement and training. “Empowering sales to be their own sort of hunter gatherers, so that instead of thinking about every customer being a market of one, you think of every salesperson being a farmer of one.”

Testing New Commercial Models

Forward-thinking companies are using this moment to experiment: “Is this an opportunity to actually envision the commercial function of the future?” Hamid shared. “We’re doing a lot of pilot programs… they’re giving us some money and saying, ‘Okay, take all those assumptions aside.'”

This testing yields surprising insights: “I was working with a group, and I said, ‘What do you want?’ And they’re like, ‘I want the customer to respond to me.’ And so I’m like, ‘Okay, why are you writing a blog and pushing it through Eloqua… and then asking them to click so that they can then schedule a meeting so that you can respond to them? That’s five steps. Send an email.'”

Future-Forward: AI’s Transformative Potential

Hamid made a bold prediction about AI’s impact: “Things are never, ever again, going to take as long as they are today, and are not going to cost as much as they are today. We’re kind of at the peak of doing things manually.”

The market is already recognizing this value: “In 2024 if there was AI in a pitch deck in the life sciences, on average, the valuation was up by 12%.” Research interest has skyrocketed: “It really went from fifth place in 2022 to first place in 2025.”

Elizabeth cautioned about infrastructure challenges: “We don’t currently have enough energy to power everything that we would need to truly integrate AI broadly… I see a lot of companies building technology on the backbone of technology that they don’t own, that they don’t control… if that pricing model changes, their entire pricing model changes.”

The Talent Equation: Quality Over Credentials

When asked about industry being “over-skilled” with PhDs, Elizabeth challenged conventional wisdom: “I do think that in academia, there tends to be this idea that in order to be quote, unquote relevance… you have to have a PhD… But that’s pedigree, that’s not actual traction.”

Hamid made a counterintuitive prediction about talent: “We’re actually staring at a talent gap… There is not going to be enough human beings to fill the jobs that we need to fill.” This suggests companies should focus on securing quality talent regardless of traditional credentials.

Winning Through Adversity: Hamid’s Powerful Metaphors

Hamid used several compelling metaphors that captured core principles for navigating the current environment:

The Uphill Race: “I do running, and I do road biking, and you never win a race on the downhill, because everyone’s flying right? You win it on the uphill, when everyone’s just kind of falling apart.” This perfectly illustrated Elizabeth’s point about brands being built during market contractions, not bull markets.

The Postcard from the Future: Describing pilot marketing programs, Hamid noted they’re “giving them a like a postcard from the future, so to speak, about how they want to evolve their systems.” These experiments provide glimpses of what successful commercial models will look like after the current disruption.

The Farmer of One: Reimagining sales roles, Hamid suggested “instead of thinking about every customer being a market of one, you think of every salesperson being a farmer of one.” This metaphor emphasizes nurturing relationships over transactional approaches.

The Tidal Wave Splash: When describing the inefficiency between sales and marketing functions, Hamid painted this vivid image: “Marketing comes up, and it’s just like this tidal wave, and then sales comes up this tidal wave, and you create this giant splash, and there’s a lot of inefficiency there.” The image perfectly captured wasted resources from poor integration.

Tactical Guidance for Executives and Marketers

For C-Level Leaders:

Elizabeth emphasized financial readiness: “Clean up your balance sheet… because you might need to get additional investment, you also might be an acquisition target… keep your balance sheet clean.” Cash reserves are critical “because we are seeing companies that are just getting paid later.”

Hamid presented his formula for future success: “The companies of the future have three things that they need to really either shore up or get. The first one is technology IP… They also need brand… If we’re no longer taking anything for granted, we also have to not take trust for granted… And then the third one is you need a secret that is not your IP—a secret about how your market acts and how they might react.”

He emphasized: “If you have all three of those, then you are one of the ones that are going to be spiking out, and you’re going to be a leader of the future.”

For Marketing Teams:

1. Invest in thought leadership: “This is a time when those marketers who are deeply invested in the science that their companies are responsible for and understand it at more than just the keyword level… are going to outshine the rest,” Elizabeth noted.
2. Revise event strategies: “Maybe you don’t get the 40 by 40 foot booth this year… Maybe you scale back, because foot traffic likely isn’t as important as having those round table discussions, bringing value at the podium and in the poster presentation.”
3. Focus on relationship-building: “A lot of sales teams are struggling right now just to get those responses back from people who they had good relationships with… really focusing in on what value does your company provide to that prospective client, beyond that transactional sale.”
4. Create genuine value: “Every company, even the smallest company, has a way of creating value on behalf of the scientists and academics,” Hamid noted. This reciprocity becomes the foundation for future business.
5. Experiment with new approaches: “The companies that are really putting on the gas today will be tomorrow’s leaders,” Hamid predicted. “We are seeing tomorrow’s leaders emerge today.”

As Hamid concluded: “Every part of your business requires innovation, and that is no less true than it is in sales and marketing. And I’m not talking about buying Eloqua or adopting AI, that’s using innovation, that’s not being innovative… you can’t not innovate now.”