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Today’s show featured an interview with Briana Horan, VP of Clinical Sales for Galaxy Diagnostics.
Find Briana on LinkedIn.
BRIANA’S TIP: “Consistency creates credibility. Whether that’s in developing yourself as a salesperson or in the salesperson of how you show up to your clients, be consistent.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: I’m really excited. We’re talking to the sales leader, Briana Horan, of Galaxy Diagnostics. Briana, many people who listen to the Sales Game Changers Podcast know that I also wrote a book on Lyme disease. I also host a podcast called the Love, Hope, Lyme Podcast, where I interview people in the Lyme community, advocates, medical practitioners. I interviewed the CEO of your company, Nicole Bell, who wrote an amazing book called What Lurks in the Woods. She was on the Love, Hope, Lyme Podcast, and I’ve gotten to be friendly with her, and I said, “Do you have a sales leader at Galaxy Diagnostics?” She says, “Yeah, you need to meet Briana.”
I’m excited to bring you here. We’re talking about two things that I talk about all the time, sales leadership, sales professionalism, and Lyme disease. I like to say I’m the only person on the planet who brings the two together, but I guess you bring the two together as well. We’re going to have a fascinating conversation. Tell us a little bit about yourself and tell us what you’re selling today.
Briana Horan: I’ve been in sales and specifically medical sales my entire career right out of college. I started at the College Overhire Program, a program that Johnson & Johnson offered way back when, where they hired recent graduates to come in and cover sales holes if somebody went out on maternity leave or medical leave. There was three of us that got hired, and essentially it was a race, a competition, and whoever did the best was able to be hired at the end of the year for a full-time position, which luckily that was me.
That was my first taste of getting into sales, and I loved it. Lots of positives out of that experience. Then it evolved from there. For different reasons, I moved into smaller companies and startup companies, but always remained within the healthcare space, but more from a broader market down to a very specific niche market with a startup company.
Fred Diamond: As you mentioned, your career has been in wellness and pharmaceuticals and medical diagnostic sales now. How did you gravitate towards that focus? When you were a teenager, was it something that fascinated you? Was a family member involved in health and wellness? Tell us how you got into this. Because on the Sales Game Changers podcast, we interview a lot of people who sell to the public sector markets or education or hospitality. How did you get into this particular set of verticals?
Briana Horan: I would say it’s a combination of two things. One, when I was in college, I was part of a program called INROADS. It used to bring on minority students into professional settings and train them to do interviews, write resumes, how to conduct yourself in a professional setting, and their paid internships through college, which was great. I was interning with Johnson & Johnson through college in their HR department, which then made me quickly realize HR is not for me.
That’s how I really got exposed to the company of J&J and the professionalism of that company. But I would say for sales, I worked in hospitality in college. I worked for the Fairmont Hotel brand in Boston, and I loved the people interaction. I was good at it. I was good at the customer service side. I enjoyed putting a smile on new people that would come to the front desk or first time in Boston and do little surprises in their rooms or things like that. Just providing service and being customer focused. I thought, “Hey, I really enjoy this.” The head of PR and marketing for that particular location offered me a position in sales, and that’s when I realized, “When I graduate, maybe I should look into sales.”
When I left my internship with J&J, a month after I graduated college Rutgers was having a career fair and J&J was there. I introduced myself. I’m sure it helped that I interned with them prior, but I really wanted a sales position, and that’s where we then connected into that Overhire Program for the sales team. That was my first taste into it.
Fred Diamond: You’re now with Galaxy Diagnostics. Are you a team of one? You’re the sales leader, but are you also the sales organization for the most part?
Briana Horan: I have two people on my team as well, who are more of a sales support role. The company has gone through a significant evolution in the last six months. The two people on my team are brand new to sales, sales operations, sales support. We’re developing, changing their job descriptions into better aligning this small but mighty team of three to bring what Galaxy is doing to the broader market.
Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about that and the sales process. As a sales leader there, what are your main objectives? Help people who are listening to the show understand who you’re selling to and what do they need from you and what brought you to Galaxy?
Briana Horan: Good questions. Who I’m selling to? I’m selling to practitioners that are considered functional or alternative, also known as holistic medicine. Different than the allopathic or conventional community of practitioners. This is more of the alternative medicine, trying to identify root cause of disease. They’re looking at patients not just from an organ system, just their head for neurology or joints for rheumatology. They’re trying to look at the whole system and identify the root cause of that person’s ailments and why they come to them. Their I-don’t-feel-good-itis, we say. That is my market.
Fred Diamond: How do you get to them? Do you knock on doors? Do you knock on doctors’ doors? What is the sales process to get to them?
Briana Horan: It’s unique. I think it’s important to note that Galaxy, for the most part, is a startup all over again. We have been in research for a long time, for about 15 years, and they did a phenomenal job of putting a solid foothold into the research, into publications, and then the science behind the methodologies of what we’re doing in this very niche disease state.
When Nicole became CEO in June, and I came on in July, my job in the beginning, in the first six months, was first evaluating where we were as a company from a client-facing side. How was our process? The customer journey, what did that look like? How could that be optimized? Because it’s a startup, and coming in as a startup, it’s different than you’re walking into a sales role into an already established company. I would say step one is assessing what’s working, what’s not working, and really addressing the inefficiencies first, because you can’t go on bringing more clients if you’re going to bleed them out the other end, because it was a full of friction type of process.
The first few months was really identifying all of the opportunities to improve the process. That was one. We’re doing a really good job there. From there it’s, how do we go to market? What do we need? What tools, what systems? How do we set them up? Do we have the right people in the right seats to support the process along the way? Because when I’ve been a part of companies and startups before that, if you don’t have the right structure, the right foundation, you go to build and scale, and it is like a house of cards, pull one out and it will crumble.
I’m taking all of my experience in the last two startups that I had been with and really applying it here at Galaxy to really establish a strong foundation, because this is the first time that I finally feel I’m a part of a company where we are going to change medicine. That is really important to me because I left other companies voluntarily because it just didn’t feel right anymore. I’ve always been looking for something where if I’m going to leave my kids at home every day, let it be for actually making an impact in healthcare, and that’s what Galaxy is going to be able to do.
Fred Diamond: Help us understand what that means. What problem does Galaxy solve? Is this a problem that many people are looking for solutions for?
Briana Horan: Yeah, that’s a great question. Galaxy is a diagnostic company. What that means, for those of you who are not familiar, we run tests, we do lab tests, specifically in the tick-borne illness space. That encompasses not only Lyme disease, that many people may be familiar with, especially if you live in the northeast or in certain endemic areas, you’ve heard of Lyme disease. But we also have testing that will help to identify co-infections with other things that can be transmitted by a tick. The ticks are nature’s dirty needle, as I’ve heard explained before, and that really is true. Sometimes people only think of tick-borne illness from ticks, but also Lyme disease and other things can be transmitted also by biting flies, fleas, lice, cat scratch disease, is really what the Bartonella infection is. There’s a lot of different vectors that can transmit these things, but not everybody knows of it, and they live blissfully unaware until likely it affects them or their family.
A lot of my clients, the practitioners that I call on or that I work with, typically have their own story where they got sick. Because of the nature of the slow-growing pathogen, it takes a long time to develop symptoms and for patients to develop severe disease. They go to the doctors, they do standardized testing, it ends up being negative. The doctors say, well, maybe you need a psych evaluation or to go to neurology. In their defense, they are running tests. It’s just that those tests that are currently the standard of care do not have the sensitivity to be able to pick up these pathogens that are considered stealth pathogens, or also considered low abundance pathogens.
For the common person out there to understand what that really means, when you are infected with your common cold, it replicates incredibly fast. Or even with COVID, we can use that as an example. You get sick, you can do a rapid at-home test, and you know right then and there, if there was a high enough viral load for it to indicate positive. When somebody is infected with something like Bartonella, it only replicates every 24 hours. Then you have one DNA copy day one, two DNA in day two. It takes a very long time to build a viral load into your system, and these symptoms, they’re inconsequential in the beginning. It’s brain fog, which you might attribute to not sleeping well, or it’s some joint pain that you might say, “I did too much over the weekend,” or, “That hike really kicked my butt.”
It’s not until it becomes, for some people, neurocognitive issues where it’s more severe and you’re forgetting common things, as in Nicole’s husband’s story, where he couldn’t remember the four-digit code to the security system, and this gentleman is a brilliant engineer. There’s so many stories like this where it just seems benign until it’s not. What Galaxy is doing, and the problem we’re solving, is figuring out ways to lower the limit of detection or increase the sensitivity of being able to find these stealth pathogens. They do that in a couple of novel ways.
Fred Diamond: That’s a great example. I want to tell people, if you’re very interested in Lyme, go to my Love, Hope, Lyme Podcast. It’s on Apple and YouTube. We talk all the time about one of the problems is that Lyme disease, and you refer to co-infections, the average tick can transmit, some people say as many as three dozen different types of what they call co-infections, comorbidities in your body. Bartonella, Babesia, they’re the big ones, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, et cetera. They are very difficult to diagnose because Lyme is also known as the great pretender, where it shows up as something different, where it shows up as something maybe arthritic or a flu or other things. You may not necessarily think it’s Lyme. The problem is, it is Lyme and you’re being treated for other things, and then the bacteria and the various parasites in your body continue to perpetuate. By the time you’re officially diagnosed with Lyme or one of the co-infections, it’s too late. It’s all through your body and it’s very, very difficult to treat at that point.
Just curious, you mentioned Galaxy is a startup. You’ve worked at Johnson & Johnson. We did some interviews with Merck a couple years ago. Now you’re at a very small company. What are the differences working for Johnson & Johnson and then for a company like Galaxy Diagnostics?
Briana Horan: The biggest difference is the impact that you as an individual can make. When you are a part of a larger organization, they have a wonderful infrastructure. They have their systems in place. They have their marketing collateral. There’s not a lot of creativity that you’re really able to bring to the job and make an impact or to make change within the organization. You’re part of the machine, so to speak, for better or for worse.
In a startup, like I said, we’re here to first assess the company and see where we can do better. Then you make that change. You’re constantly being challenged to pivot, to be agile, to implement. As Nicole said, I remember in the interview, she goes, “We need to fail fast. If we’re going to fail, we need to fail fast.” How exciting and exhilarating that is, because you can try things and you’re outside of your comfort zone all the time, which at least almost 20 years in sales that I’ve learned is the biggest theme of sales, no matter where you are, is learning to be uncomfortable. Now I get to be uncomfortable, but make changes and create better processes, and create better messaging and collateral, and really listen to the marketplace and be able to cater to the needs of my clinicians and in the marketplace, and be able to shine honestly in this space, a light on the darkness of practitioners.
I think for the most part, the majority of them are not confident in the diagnostics of tick-borne illness. We need to meet them where they’re at, align with them, understand what they do understand, what they don’t understand, and be able to provide resources to get them on the right path of thinking so that we can educate them on how to suss out all of the different diagnostics. Because the truth is, you need a toolkit and not one company can do it all. When do you use what tests? What approach for what patient and what part of their journey that they are in, whether it’s just getting diagnosed or they’ve been treated a bunch of times and they’re chronic? I would say being at the startup is absolutely exhilarating, but it’s not for everybody.
Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about that for a second. How do you interact with the rest of your company’s leadership? We talked about Nicole Bell, your CEO. What do they expect from you as a sales leader? I’m going to guess that most of them aren’t sales professionals. You probably have engineers, scientists, financial people, because you got to manage the money, et cetera. You’re the sales leader. We have a lot of people listening to the show who might be working for tech startups, services startups, AI startups, et cetera. Where do you fit in that sales leadership role? What do they expect of you? How do you interact with them? Give us some of your insights into that.
Briana Horan: It’s interesting. Salespeople, I would say, we’re more emotional and attuned to feelings and things like that. Scientists, and I’m stereotyping, I’m not saying every scientist. Scientists are more what’s right in front of you and process driven and A plus B equal C and figuring things out. I think what they expect of me is through my experience, it’s not just the experience, but the instinct that that experience gives you.
I would encourage anybody as a sales leader, or if you’re in sales, look into how can you hone your instinct and your gut feeling. When you’re giving messages, pay attention to nonverbals and how you see people reacting to what you say. Try saying it different ways to see what resonates. Because it really is about your ability to connect with people, and through that connection, understand what is resonating and what is not. Because most people, at least in my experience with medical sales, I’m not talking to people that are going to say, “Well, wait up second, Briana, I don’t understand what you’re saying.” I have to use my experience and my instincts to see if it’s resonating or not. That’s hard to explain how to hone that, because it’s an intangible thing, and I think that’s the hard part of what sales can be sometimes.
Fred Diamond: One thing we talk a lot about on the Sales Game Changers Podcast, is the fact that if you’re a professional, look, what does a professional do? I love the way you answered that question. Professionals have instincts. Professionals know how to be creative. The ones who are really at the top of their game, they know how to shift. I like the way you said before where Nicole said to you, “You need to fail fast.” You got to be doing a lot of things, you may not be here in a year. What do we got to be doing today?
I want to talk again about Lyme disease for a second or two. Lyme disease is at epidemic levels, but it is a mysterious disease. There’s a lot of ignorance. I’ve interviewed Lyme survivors all over the globe. I’ve spoken to thousands about what they go through. You hear things a lot like, “Well, it can’t be Lyme disease because we don’t have Lyme disease in North Carolina,” or, “We don’t have Lyme disease in Texas.” There’s a lot of ignorance that’s being worked on, but it’s still out there. It’s a mysterious disease. Not everybody understands it, but the reality is it ruins lives and it destroys family, which is why I wrote my book, Love, Hope, Lyme: What Family Members, Partners, and Friends Who Love a Chronic Lyme Survivor Need to Know.
How often is this a challenge? Do you have to spend a lot of time educating people on what Lyme disease and co-infections are before you get to the diagnostic conversation? Or because of who you’re interacting with, they get it. They understand. I love the way you’ve been explaining it, by the way. Help us understand that. Is there a lot of education eliminating myths, and then you talk about the diagnostic challenge, or are you able to, because of who you’re talking to, go right to the diagnostic challenge?
Briana Horan: The answer is, it depends. When Galaxy started, and I said we were in that whole research and establishing the science part of it, they did a really great job of penetrating an organization called the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society, the ILADS community. It’s a small community, about 500 practitioners, and they did a really good job. They knew who we were. These are the people that are studying this. They probably have their own story. They’re in endemic regions. They know about it, so that wasn’t an issue. With those guys, I’m not going to say it was easy, but I don’t have to explain too much of the backstory of what we’re trying to do.
As I am now just starting to penetrate in that broader functional medicine community, which is now more about 40,000 practitioners, there, it depends. I do still have practitioners in that space, depending on where they live, that might not believe in it, but they had a patient that did their own research and found Galaxy, and they want a Galaxy test. Now I begin to interact with them. If they are a functional medicine provider, they do understand the general concept of how infections can cause chronic illness. It’s not too much of a stretch. I just need to teach them about what a stealth infection is or a low abundance pathogen is, and why the diagnostics that they might know about might not be meeting their needs.
Now, I also have patients that do their homework, but they go to their traditional primary care or hospitalist or a conventional or allopathic practitioner. Not to put those types of practitioners down, but when they’re asking for these tests, I’ve experienced where I get on the phone with some of these practitioners, and that is where I’m getting the, “But Lyme doesn’t exist in North Carolina,” or, “Lyme doesn’t exist in Arizona.”
My first step is to challenge them to think a little bit broader than just what’s right in front of them. The first thing is, is that how many of us just are born, we live, we raise, and we never travel outside of our state? That’s not really true. People travel for work, or they move for their family reasons. They could have been exposed in other areas. Now we have to first think, well, one, this is an illness that is a thing. You might not feel that it is in your area, but that does not mean that that patient might not be exposed.
The other challenge I want them to think about is that ticks are not the only vector that can transmit these things. Cats are a reservoir for some of these co-infections like Bartonella, and cat scratch disease is a thing. Cat scratch fever is a thing. Trench fever, these are things. Sometimes you can’t just go through the front door, you got to go through the window a little bit. If I can get them to agree with some other pearls that are well studied and well established, then I can help to start bridge the gap into getting them into thinking the way I need them to think in order to open their minds of what else it could possibly be.
Luckily, I’m a part of Galaxy and one of our original founders, Dr. Ed Breitschwerdt, is a pioneer in establishing the importance and the relevance of Bartonella in the early ‘90s. All of the peer-reviewed papers are significant. That does help me in sharing the story of this being a very real thing. Then we also use case studies to help them think of patients like, “Hey, let me share with you some case studies of patients. Does this resonate with you? Have you had any patients that have came to you for fibromyalgia, or all different types of chronic illness where you’ve tried to treat them and you have no answers? Some of these might have infections at the root cause, so I’d love to be able to help you with some of those patients.”
Fred Diamond: One of my favorite sales books is written by a woman named Lisa Earle McLeod, and it’s called Selling with Noble Purpose. Lyme destroys lives. I’ve spoken to tens of thousands of people. I’ve had people who’ve reached out to me after reading my book, and God bless me for writing a book like this to help their family members understand. Do you believe what you’re doing serves a noble purpose?
Briana Horan: I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t. I left a very comfortable position at my previous company, and I did very well there. But it didn’t feel good anymore. I recognize, when I made the decision to come here, the history has been, for me, it didn’t feel good anymore. I was a pain management specialist at J&J that didn’t feel right anymore. I worked at a compounding pharmacy that ended up switching to do generics instead of oncology solutions. That didn’t feel right anymore. Then at my last company, which is also a diagnostic company, it was just a lot of different lab tests that were being developed every single month. It didn’t feel like we were really advancing medicine. I finally feel, yes, here, it feels right, and we are going to change medicine.
Fred Diamond: That is great. It’s such an imperative thing to do. So glad I got to meet Nicole and have you on the Sales Game Changers Podcast. Thank you so much. You’ve given us a lot of great insights. Give us a final action step. For people listening to the show or reading the transcription, give one bit of advice that you’d like to impart upon them, an action step they should do right now to take their sales career to the next level.
Briana Horan: Whatever you decide that step is going to be, be consistent. Consistency creates credibility. Whether that’s in developing yourself as a salesperson or in the salesperson of how you show up to your clients, be consistent.
Fred Diamond: That is great advice. Once again, I want to thank Briana Horan for being on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast. My name is Fred Diamond.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo