Selling lab products and instruments

Different again: account management of a territory — a defined geography (a typical UK patch might be Oxford, Wales & the South West) containing universities, biotechs, pharma sites and hospitals, with a quota (a revenue target) built mostly on existing accounts.

An account manager (AM) here runs a repeatable operating rhythm rather than a few whale deals:

• Territory routines: planning which accounts get visited when; regular lab presence; tracking the instrument install base (an installed instrument generates years of consumables and service revenue — the razor/razor-blade model).
• Share-of-wallet growth: most revenue is defending and expanding spend in accounts that already buy something — cross-selling categories, displacing a competitor's consumable, upgrading instruments. Prospecting (finding wholly new customers) is the minority motion.
• Academic procurement: universities have their own public-style purchasing rules — above certain values they tender, and many buy through regional university purchasing consortia and frameworks. Grant funding creates its own rhythm: money must be spent within the grant window, so knowing who just won funding is real intelligence.
• Distributor channels: much lab-product volume flows through distributors; an AM works with channel partners on some accounts and direct on others, keeping pricing and relationships coherent across both.

The sale is faster and more transactional than enterprise software — but discipline (CRM hygiene, call planning, funnel maths) separates quota-hitters from the rest. In interviews, showing you understand the routine is the job beats product knowledge.

8. Pharma field sales: its own world (brief)

Therapy-specialist roles at large pharmaceutical companies belong to a distinct tradition: the rep-to-clinician model, where a representative promotes prescription medicines to the clinicians who prescribe them — in secondary care, typically consultants and specialist nurses/pharmacists in a therapy area (oncology, haematology, cardiology and so on). Three things make it its own world:

• The ABPI Code of Practice — the industry's self-regulatory code governing how medicines are promoted (claims, hospitality, samples), enforced by the PMCPA. Breaches are published and career-relevant; reps live inside the Code.
• The ABPI exam — medical representatives are required under the Code to pass the ABPI examination within a set period of starting (historically within their first two years). Interview move: state the requirement unprompted and commit to it early.
• Formulary access. A prescription medicine isn't truly "sold" until it is on the local formulary — the approved list of medicines a trust or area will routinely use, decided by drug and therapeutics committees informed by NICE guidance. Much of the role is local market access — evidence to committees, pathway positioning — not just call frequency on prescribers.

Treat this as a parallel career track with its own norms; don't blur it with software selling in an interview.

9. Building domain credibility without sector experience (honest edition)

Everything above is learnable knowledge; interviews are won by attaching it to your evidence. You cannot conjure sector experience you don't have — but you can build assets that do a similar job, and the market's legibility (section 1) means the raw material is publicly available. Four kinds of asset work, each wielded credibly:

A science degree — at any level

A-levels through PhD, in any life science or adjacent field: what it buys you is translator-level fluency with scientific and clinical audiences, not clinical or regulatory experience. Framed as "I can hold a credible first conversation with a consultant or a scientist in week one rather than year two", it lands; framed as expertise, it invites a question you can't answer.

No science background at all? The same fluency can be built deliberately — the references at the end of this module are a syllabus, and stating honestly that you built your knowledge from the primary sources is itself a credibility move.

Healthcare-adjacent work or projects

Anything that put you in contact with clinical stakeholders and their problems — a research project with a clinician, voluntary or care-sector work, a student consultancy piece for a health organisation, even sustained shadowing.

This is proof you seek out clinical stakeholders and understand their world — not proof you've sold to them. Framed that way, disarming; overclaimed, deflatable with one probing question.

A self-built project tracking the market

The highest-leverage asset available to a newcomer, because almost nobody does it. The public procurement record (Find a Tender, Contracts Finder) publishes who bought what from whom; a spreadsheet — or, if you have the skills, a scraper — tracking awards in your target category converts "do you know NHS procurement?" from a knowledge question into show-and-tell: what award notices contain, which buyers bought what, where deals in your target market really came from.

It makes you unusually well-researched, not experienced. Keep that distinction, and use the asset early in any process.

Published analysis

A LinkedIn article, blog post or short report analysing something real — a procurement trend, a therapy area's market-access landscape, why a category of pilots stalls. Publishing forces rigour, gives interviewers something concrete to probe (far better than being probed on claims), and signals the homework habit this market rewards. One good piece beats ten thin ones.

The master-frame

The honest master-frame for every interview in this market: name what you lack in one sentence, then prove the preparation nobody else did. "I haven't sold in healthcare — so I've spent six months learning how healthcare actually buys, and here's the evidence."

Overclaiming is the one unforced error: every asset above works precisely because it is presented as preparation, not experience, and a single probing question exposes the difference.