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By: Teasha Cable, CEO & Co-Founder CModel Data, Inc.
You walk into a room full of scientists or physicians. You've got stacks of data. You've got the validation studies. You've built a solid, evidence-based case. But, the more you talk, the more arms cross. The more eyebrows raise. The more, sometimes aggressive, questions fly.
This is where good sales intentions go to die...in a stack of data. The surprising truth? Your data isn't the problem. It's how you're using it.
Back when he was still a biochemist Hamid Ghanadan watched a sales rep bomb a pitch in his own lab. Poor guy, had no idea what he was doing there. That moment sent Hamid on a 30-year journey into the psychology of how technical people, scientists, doctors, engineers, make decisions. He's now the founder and CEO of The Linus Group, and the author of Not Buying It: The Art of Selling to Scientists, Doctors and Other Professional Skeptics.
When you dump data on a skeptical buyer, you don't win them over. You activate their inner peer reviewer. Hamid makes a distinction that should be printed on every sales deck ever made:
“Data convinces. It does not move people to act. There is a difference, and that gap is where deals go to die.”
Suddenly every number needs a source, every claim needs a control group, and you're not having a conversation anymore, you're defending a dissertation. You've put yourself across the table from them, and that's exactly where you don't want to be.
So what works?
Can't beat 'em? Join 'em. Get on their side of the table—and you do that with empathy.
Here's what Hamid noticed that others miss: every skeptic is also, at their core, a curious person. They have to be. If scientists only ever rejected things, there would be no discoveries. No experiments. No breakthroughs.
“Skepticism and curiosity are two sides of the same coin.”
The way you flip it? Ask a provocative question instead of leading with a claim. Give them the answer and make them guess the question. Let them form their own hypothesis before you hand them yours.
When you do that, something lights up. They lean in instead of crossing their arms. That burst of curiosity Hamid describes? It often sparks a burst of creativity too, and that is when real conversations start happening.
“The goal is never to give them the answer. It's to give them enough information to create the question for themselves.”
That's a total mindset shift for most sales and marketing teams, and it is wildly effective.
Okay, this one is going to sound counterintuitive. The scientists and doctors who seem like the most purely logical buyers on the planet? They're not suppressing their emotional side.
They've just rebranded it. They call it intuition. They call it gut feeling.
And that gut feeling drives an enormous amount of discovery, diagnosis, and decision-making. Think about a doctor connecting symptoms from two totally different sources to land on a diagnosis nobody else saw.
That's creativity. That's emotion. That's a human being trusting their instincts alongside the evidence.
When you sell with empathy, you're not bypassing the logical brain. You're inviting the whole person into the conversation.
“That is when beautiful decisions get made.”
When Teasha asked Hamid for his single piece of advice to leaders trying to transform their commercial strategy, he didn't pause for even a second.
"Empathy."
Not a framework. Not a funnel. Not a technology stack. Empathy.
He calls it "magic fairy dust," and watching it work across three decades of life science clients, from early stage startups to global giants like Thermo Fisher, he has seen it do things that no data deck ever could.
Hard-nosed executives become collaborative. Defensive prospects become partners. Stuck deals start moving.
And here's the thing about values, which Hamid weighs more heavily than any other factor in his own decision-making. If the data is pointing clearly in one direction and someone still isn't acting, it's almost always because the decision conflicts with what they believe in.
Empathy is how you find that. And once you find it, everything else gets a lot easier.
Take a hard look at how your team is showing up in front of technical buyers right now. Are they leading with slides full of evidence? Or are they genuinely curious about what their prospects are experiencing, what they're worried about, what would actually make their lives better?
The data will still matter. It always does. But data in the hands of someone who actually gets their customer? That's when it becomes unstoppable.
Start with empathy. Everything else follows.
Catch the full conversation with Hamid Ghanadan on the #DynamicDecisionsPodcast.
His book, Not Buying It, is available on Amazon now.
