TLDR Biotech sat down with Hamid Ghanadan, founder of LINUS and a strategist who has spent 30 years studying how scientists, doctors, and other technically trained professionals actually make decisions.

He recently published Not Buying It: The Art of Selling to Scientists, Doctors, and Other Professional Skeptics, and we unpacked the psychology behind why traditional sales and marketing keeps falling flat in technical markets, and what the research says you should be doing instead.

Disclosure: Science 2 Sales & TLDR Biotech has not received any monetary compensation from LINUS or Hamid Ghanadan for the publication of this article, and we will receive no referral fees if you purchase the book through any of the links therein.

Hamid Ghanadan likes to tell the story of how his new book came together. During the tail end of COVID, he was listening to an exit interview with outgoing NIH Director Francis Collins, who admitted that the agency had fundamentally underestimated human behavior, that he never would have guessed 66 million Americans would refuse a life-saving vaccine during an active pandemic. It’s a fascinating, if not terrifying, thought about human behavior and decision-making.

But how is this relevant to scientists making decisions? Aren’t we different people than those that refused the COVID vaccine? Ghanadan isn’t inclined to think so.

"This is what I've spent my entire career thinking about," Ghanadan says, "human behavior in technical settings. How do scientists make decisions? How do scientific findings work their way into theory and become truth?"

Collins' admission is not a uniquely public health communication challenge, as Ghanadan sees the same blind spot playing out every day in life sciences sales. If you work on the commercial side, you might read that 66 million figure and think well, obviously, those people weren't scientists, they weren't formally trained in evaluating evidence. But that reaction is exactly the problem. What do those 66 million Americans have, deeply and fundamentally, in common with the scientists and technical leaders you're selling to? They are all human, and as humans, regardless of how objective we consider ourselves, we start all decision-making from a place of emotion.

The neuroscience backs this up. Antonio Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis demonstrates that emotions initiate and guide decision-making, meaning that patients with damage to the brain's emotional processing centers can't make even simple choices despite having fully intact logical faculties. Jonathan Haidt's work on moral psychology took this further, arguing that human reasoning typically operates more like a lawyer arguing a client's case than a scientist seeking truth. You make an emotional decision, then build the logical back-rationalization for why it was "right."

So whether you have a PhD or you're a plumber (or you have a PhD in plumbing), the underlying psychology is the same - you're making decisions from the same emotional starting point, even if the input information is different.

As Ghanadan puts it: "our actions are not governed by understanding. Our actions are governed by our desires."

This brings us to the deep issue facing any company selling into a technical space: you've likely built your entire commercial strategy around a "logical" scientist buyer, and this approach is likely costing you a lot of money and opportunity.

Everyone in life sciences commercial circles has heard this counter-narrative by now - you can't just let the data speak for themselves, you need to tell a story, you need context, blah blah blah. It's a cliché that gets trotted out at every marketing conference and sales kickoff, yet it refuses to die. The data-forward (data-only?) approach persists across biopharma despite everyone knowing it's insufficient. 

Ghanadan explains why we as sales and marketers keep relying on data to persuade through the idea of priming: he cites a study where young students were given math tests, but before the test they were given an article to read. One group read an article that reminded them of their gender, another read one about their ethnic heritage, and a third group read something neutral. The results tracked perfectly with the stereotypes each group had been primed with: girls in the gender-primed group underperformed relative to the control, while students of Asian descent in the heritage-primed group outperformed. The different priming led to different outcomes. "Priming is an incredibly powerful force that we all act on," Ghanadan says.

The direct implication for sales here is that when a salesperson walks into a lab or hops on a call with a PI, the salesperson unconsciously adopts the persona they believe a "sales rep" is supposed to inhabit (features, benefits, data dumps), while the scientist adopts the persona of the "skeptical evaluator" (arms crossed, show me the evidence, I'll be the judge). Both parties are performing roles that social norms have been cueing them towards their entire careers, and those cues are far stronger than any logical understanding of what should happen.

"Even though we understand that data by themselves are not driving decisions or even creating understanding, we still act that way," Ghanadan explains. "Because that's what we think is expected of us. It's almost automatic."

This myth around “let the data do the talking” persists precisely because priming overrides the memo. You can intellectually agree that storytelling matters and then walk into your next meeting and lead with a specification comparison anyway, because that's what "a good sales rep in life sciences" does.

Here's a scenario that will sound familiar to anyone who has ever carried a quota in life sciences: you walk out of a meeting with a PI or a lab director feeling great, because the conversation was substantive and the intellectual exchange felt genuine. They seemed deeply engaged and were asking insightful questions. You’re already setting up next steps in your head and envisioning the close.

Then you get ghosted.

Ghanadan has seen this play out hundreds of times. "I've talked to many, many salespeople who work in life sciences, and they come out of a sales meeting going, it was great, me and that PI, we were vibing. I was throwing all the science. I've got the sale." And then? "The scientist ghosts the salesperson. They were having fun in the moment."

The scientist in this scenario was sharpening their analytical skills and engaging with interesting data because that’s what data bring out in them: a chance to interrogate. They were doing it for sport, not because they had any intention of buying, and at no point during that conversation did the scientist connect what you were showing them a problem they personally needed to solve, which means you failed to hook them emotionally. As Ghanadan says, "impulse buying is not a thing in the lab."

Ghanadan's decision-making model starts with a deceptively obvious sounding premise: "the vast majority of scientists, doctors, consumers, everybody, they don't care about me or you or a brand or a scientific instrument or a new technique or a medicine. They just get up in the morning and they go to work."

But then something happens to jolt them out of their routine - they encounter a problem, or they see an opportunity, and if it resonates with them personally and emotionally, they experience what Ghanadan describes as a "what if" moment. What if this could work? What if I could solve this?

That creative thought triggers a dopamine release. "There's a burst, there's a flood of creative thoughts that go through your mind. And that's actually related to a dopamine release. And so it feels good to have those thoughts, even if it's scary for them." That dopamine is what hooks a scientist into going to the lab every day for a decade, failing over and over, because they had an idea and they want to see it come to fruition.

If you lead with data before your prospect has had that creative thought, the data are just noise. Interesting noise, maybe, but noise is inherently directionless because the person receiving it has no personal reason to act on it.

"Data are important," Ghanadan says, "but they have to come in at the right act in the story. And that's in act two."

So what belongs in act one? Getting your prospect to that creative thought on their own, by you surfacing the problem or the opportunity and letting them arrive at their own "what if."

Once they're hooked, data earn their place in act two (in storytelling parlance usually referred to as ‘the struggle’), as they have to answer four specific questions for the scientist in sequence. Ghanadan lays them out: "Is the problem or opportunity real? Is it relevant to me? If I do something, can I fix this? And if I do, will I succeed?"

Skip ahead and you've lost them. Jump to the persuasive close before walking through the full sequence and you haven't earned the right. "Once you have all of that," Ghanadan says the final act of the story starts, "then you've earned the right to actually deliver the persuasive message or give them permission to take action.”

Ghanadan tells a story about a fast-growth startup that brought him in to help launch their inaugural product. The CCO had assembled a dream team of experienced commercial professionals from across the industry, folks who had all launched products before at large, well-known companies.

But then almost immediately the team began to struggle because everyone brought their last company's orthodoxy and assumed it was universal. As Ghanadan puts it: "Everyone was on the same page, but they were all reading different books."

This, he argues, is the state of life sciences commercialization broadly. "The commercial endeavor in a lot of life science and healthcare companies, they're largely run on anecdote and past experience. And who knows if that past experience was the right experience."

His hope for his new book (Not Buying It: The Art of Selling to Scientists, Doctors, and Other Professional Skeptics) is that it provides a shared baseline - a grounding in how technical decision-makers actually work, so that teams can build on common principles rather than inherited playbooks from whoever happened to hire them last.

We’ll end this with a fatal flaw that Ghanadan sees constantly in life science and biopharma orgs - mistaking tech for a solid commercial strategy.

He asks a company what their strategy is for reaching customers, and the answer comes back as a tour of their tech stack, covering targeting, intent data, marketing platforms, sequencing tools, AI-powered personalization etc etc.

"But if we have no strategy that exists from a tool agnostic place, all we're doing is just creating noise," he says. "All we're doing is creating more distance between us and the people that we're trying to help."

This is also why the book is deliberately not about AI. "The book is very intentionally constrained to be not about technology, but about strategy." AI is changing the buying journey for scientists, but the psychology of how technically trained humans make decisions doesn't change quarterly, and strategy needs to transcend whatever technology is currently in vogue.

"Companies deserve to have their own strategies that transcend what's in vogue right now," Ghanadan says. "This is the only way that you can operate in a world where it's just constant change."

The thread running through all of Ghanadan's work is a singular insistence to understand the human first.

It's the same lesson NIH’s Francis Collins learned the hard way during a pandemic. You can have the best data in the world, and it won't matter if you don't understand human behavior (and in this example, it ended up costing human lives).

In life sciences commercialization, the stakes are measured in ghosted emails, stalled pipelines, and that sinking feeling when a "great meeting" leads absolutely nowhere. The psychology is the same, and the fix starts with acknowledging that.

Hamid Ghanadan's book, Not Buying It: The Art of Selling to Scientists, Doctors, and Other Professional Skeptics, is available now. You can learn more about his work at LINUS.

Thanks for reading! -Anis