'Sales Is a Very Emotional Process'

If you want to lure customers away from your competitor, you can't just focus on your product. You need to understand their psychology. That’s how Element Biosciences went from being an underdog startup to an industry-disrupter bringing in 25 million a year.

-  LIZ BRODY

Maybe we don't even need salespeople. As Molly He prepared to launch her company's first product, that thought actually crossed her mind. "We believed it would sell itself," she admits.

He and two cofounders had created a startup called Element Biosciences, which made a DNA sequencer positioned to be cheaper and better than anything on the market. Why wouldn't everyone buy this? they thought. And at first, when they released it in 2022, it really did sell itself.

"Then reality hit," says He. Sales slowed to a trickle. By that moment in her life, she'd already solved more than your average person's worth of challenges. She'd grown up in the destitute boondocks of China, made her way to Los Angeles with $20 in her pocket, and rose to the top of the biosciences industry. Along the way, she'd learned to trust her instincts. But this time, clearly, she'd missed something.

With the wisdom of hindsight, He can only explain her problem with an old Chinese saying: "The newborn calf is not afraid of the tiger"-too naive to even know what to be scared of.

So what was this danger He had overlooked? She and the other two founders knew they had a major competitor; they'd all previously worked for it. But they hadn't understood the true nature of competition.

Element Biosciences was going up against Illumina, a company with $4.5 billion in annual revenue, whose DNA sequencing technology has become the industry standard.

He's team thought they could compete on product alone, by selling customers with numbers and data. But He's team was discovering that wasn't enough: People stick to old buying habits like gnats to flypaper.