Life Sciences is in a period of hyper-change and uncertainty, creating opportunities for first principled approaches to gain meaningful market advantages. The principles popularized in Michael Lewis’ 2003 book Moneyball offer a compelling framework for transforming the way life sciences organizations manage commercial teams in the face of scarce resources and uncertainty.  Rather than relying on conventional indicators such as established networks or subjective assessments, a Moneyball-inspired approach emphasizes the identification and measurement of the unique insights that more effectively predict commercial outcomes. By leveraging advanced analytics, performance data, and predictive modeling, organizations and individuals can develop the insights that translate to operating with greater precision. 

Traditional sales metrics alone are heavily biased by self-reporting. Industry consolidation and common business platforms have created a generic set of indicators. Applying Moneyball thinking redefines success using evidence-based performance indicators, insights into a customer’s journey, engagement quality, adoption velocity, and long-term account growth. This data-driven approach also strengthens hiring, coaching, and organizational planning by focusing investments on behaviors and capabilities that create measurable value.

Ultimately, the lens of Moneyball shifts from intuition-based decision-making to a culture of continuous measurement, experimentation, and optimization.  The collective mindset of a commercial organization builds on the insights identifying hidden drivers of performance and challenge longstanding assumptions.  The efficiency of a shared understanding across the organization focuses on action rather than influence and alignment.  

The challenge is to disrupt the commercial inertia, moving past the WHEN and HOW to understand the WHY.

Johanne McGregor, Snr Director, Product Marketing – Reagents Solution Division, Bio-Techne

Priya Rangaraj, Snr Director, Product Marketing – Analytical Solutions Division, Bio-Techne

The vision was clear: create simplicity and clarity for customers by unifying four established life science brands under a single brand and consolidating three separate websites into one seamless digital experience. The ask? Deliver it in approximately twelve months. The challenge was not defining the strategy. The challenge was figuring out how to execute it while maintaining business continuity and supporting ongoing priorities.

With steady-state resources, an aggressive timeline, and a business-critical deadline, success depended less on the strategy itself and more on the ability to operationalize it. This session is a practical case study in executing large-scale transformation when time, budget, and people are constrained.

Attendees will learn how a cross-functional team spanning marketing, digital, product management, and commercial functions translated an ambitious vision into an executable plan. We will share the planning, governance, stakeholder alignment, content migration, and decision-making frameworks that enabled progress while navigating competing priorities, organizational complexity, and constant pressure to deliver.

Through real-world examples, we will discuss the approaches that proved most valuable, including ruthless prioritization, transparent communication, collaborative governance, risk-based tradeoffs, and a relentless focus on progress over perfection. We will share what worked, what did not, and the lessons learned along the way.

Attendees will leave with practical insights and repeatable approaches that can be applied to their own high-stakes initiatives, especially when the vision appears to outsize the available resources.

What if the conversations and connections from a SAMPS conference could continue long after the event ended?

What if you had a place to keep exchanging ideas, ask the community a question, reconnect with someone you met, or continue learning from peers throughout the year?

That is the idea behind the new SAMPS Community.

In this fast-paced introduction, we’ll give you a first look at how the Community helps life science sales and marketing professionals stay connected, participate in discussions, discover events and resources, and build relationships beyond individual SAMPS programs and events, without all the noise of LinkedIn or other broad social platforms. Just your peers, your profession, and the conversations that matter.

The SAMPS Community was built for you with feedback from members of the SAMPS community helping shape the experience along the way. The result is a place designed around how our members want to connect, learn, share ideas, and engage with one another throughout the year.

Welcome to the SAMPS Community

Most life science sales and marketing professionals can define account-based marketing. Far fewer could describe what a working program looks like day to day. What are the teams that consistently win with it doing differently? And with budgets tight and headcount stretched, does it make sense for your organization at all?

This session lays out how ABM works when it’s run well, from specific tactics and content to the KPIs that show whether it’s paying off. We’ll cover how standard playbooks need to adapt to the life science selling environment, including situations when selling into development programs, rather than accounts, may be the better approach. You’ll also learn when ABM is the right choice and when it isn’t.

We’ll share lessons from the launch of a first ABM campaign at a life science services organization, including what worked, where the gaps were, and how that initial campaign grew into a company-wide framework for go-to-market activities and commercial coordination.

You’ll come away understanding what ABM platforms offer, along with a formula for a first campaign that doesn’t depend on one: which tools to use without committing to a contract, how to choose a first segment, and what budget to plan for. Sales, BD, and commercial leaders will see how ABM changes outreach and pipeline, and how to work with marketing to get the most from it.

Life science commercial teams are under pressure to build pipeline and win more business without simply adding more tools, people or process. Yet most already possess one of their most valuable commercial assets: evidence from the buyers they are trying to reach.

The problem is that the buyer is rarely present in the room where positioning, campaigns, and sales narratives are decided.

Between the customer conversation and the approved message sit several review cycles, and each one can move the work closer to internal consensus and further from the person it was written for. This session names that force — organizational gravity — and shows how it creates friction in commercial decision-making and ultimately costs pipeline.

The frustrating part is that the evidence needed to counter it often already exists. Interview transcripts, win-loss notes, survey data, and other customer insights sit in folders nobody has time to synthesize under a deadline. Evidence that cannot be used at the point of decision effectively becomes absent.

Drawing on The Buyer in the Loop and real-world work with life science commercial teams, this session shows attendees a practical way to put that existing evidence back to work: the grounded synthetic customer.

Built from your own customer evidence and the language your market already uses in public, a synthetic customer gives commercial teams a way to bring the buyer into the everyday decisions that shape marketing and sales. You can question it. It argues back. It sits in the review when the real customer cannot.

Instead of another source of data to manage, existing customer evidence becomes part of the workflow.

The buyer stays in the room from brief to close.

Warren Buffett is widely credited with saying that successful people say no to almost everything. Every yes costs you something. That is true in any part of a business, but in sales it can make or break a year.

Ask a salesperson how things are going, and you will often hear, "Busy. Crazy. So much going on." Effort is rarely the problem. Too often I see salespeople chasing anything and everything, hoping something sticks. They pursue opportunities that aren't real, aren't qualified, or simply don't fit what they sell. The result is predictable: wasted time, missed targets, and disappointed customers. You need to know exactly which problems your solution solves, what your product can and cannot do, and which customers are most likely to have those problems. That is your Ideal Customer Profile, or ICP.

An ICP describes organizations, not people. The buyer persona handles the people. The elements that carry the most weight are the workflow and use case, how badly the customer needs a fix, what event forces a decision now, and whether the account is worth the effort to win and serve. Firmographics, technical fit, and buying readiness round it out. Just as important is the negative ICP: the accounts you decide not to pursue. That is where "say no" moves from a slogan to a written rule.

Determining the ICP is not for the salesperson to decide, at least not alone. It should be built from what your wins, losses, and churn actually show, and it needs owners across Product Management, R&D, Quality, and Operations. The test is simple. If the ICP doesn't change which accounts your team pursues next quarter, it isn't working yet.

Key takeaways from this presentation: 

• How to identify and define your ICP 
• Developing training on who your ICP is and how to market and sell to them
• KPI’s to measure whether your salespeople are selling and “saying no” where they should

Productivity conversations often start with tools: another AI platform, dashboard, subscription, or workflow system. But tools only create value when people have the skills, role clarity, and confidence to use them well. What if the real constraint on productivity is not the technology available, but the capabilities people need to do their work?

In Bio-Rad’s Life Science Group, approximately 500 employees assessed the skills required for their roles, identified strengths and development gaps, and used those insights to write more meaningful development goals. In this practitioner-led case study, Lia Vosti will share how that role-based skills framework was built and translate the approach into a practical framework attendees can use themselves.

The SHIFT framework helps individuals: Scan the skills that matter for their role now and next; Honestly assess their current capabilities; Identify the one to three skills that would make the biggest difference; Form a plan to build them through learning, practice, mentorship, exposure, or stretch opportunities; and Take the first step.

Learning isn’t about fixing a gap—it’s an unlock: a way to expand what you’re capable of and stay ahead as work continues to change.

Attendees will leave with one priority capability they want to develop, a concrete development goal and strategy for building that capability, and a first action they can take immediately—along with a question they can continue asking themselves and their teams: What do you want to learn next to expand what you’re capable of?

I’ve watched sales and marketing act like rival tribes for most of my career. Marketing builds campaigns that sales doesn’t trust will have an impact. Sales closes deals marketing never hears about. When numbers miss, everyone points fingers instead of looking in the mirror.

When I was CEO of Vector Laboratories, I decided I was done with that. I would not hire “lone cowboys or cowgirls”. I knew I needed to avoid talent who wanted to win alone instead of together. Under my leadership, sales and marketing contributed equally to strategic decisions, no exceptions. And I asked one question, over and over, until it became automatic for the leaders and their team members: “Who did you run this by?” That’s it. That’s the habit that turned two functions into one team.

Here’s what worries me now. As sales and marketing each rush to adopt their own AI tools, I’m watching teams risk undoing years of collaborative work as each team gets more efficient inside their silos while quietly rebuilding the walls between them.

Come prepared to be a little uncomfortable. I’m going to ask you to actively participate, not just listen. I promise it will have nothing to do with public speaking or testing of your AI know-how. Because human connection isn’t something talent or leaders should delegate to efficiency. It’s the thing that actually makes sales and marketing work as one team. It’s the one thing AI will never do for you.

I’ll share what building that culture really took, the good, the bad and the messy. My bet on the teams that win in an AI-driven market won’t be the most automated teams. I’ll bet on the teams that are the most human and the most unified.