# Not all brilliant people are natural team players - **Episode:** [213](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/213.md) (2025-07-10) - **Type:** interview - **Tags:** teamwork, scientists, engineers - **Time:** 18:57–23:28 (start 1137s) - **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/213?t=1137](https://truthliesandwork.com/213?t=1137) --- [18:57] Steve Roest: I mean, I'd even go further, is like, we have scientists, we have tech engineers, and then we have other people, if that makes sense. So it's not just tech sales. We have a whole scientific group as well. So there's a huge amount that has to come together there. But all of that would be useless unless we had understood from the beginning And obviously this stuff, it does move around. I'm not saying it doesn't, but at the beginning we had a very clear idea about what our product needed to do to solve a real customer problem. And we hung everything, all of our design decisions, our innovation decisions, our technology decisions were hung off of that thesis. So they came after, we knew what our technology roughly could do conceptually, But we developed it to solve customer problems. We didn't develop the technology, then try and use it to solve customer problems. When I started in health, there were a few things that really struck me as really odd. One of them is referring to sales as funding and growth or revenue growth as adoption, right? I think those are almost like codes that some groups of people, some tribes of people prefer to use to distance themselves from the nitty-gritty of actually selling. And sometimes that might be because they're not familiar with selling. Sometimes they're not comfortable with it. Sometimes they view it like a black box and someone just making it rain and things like that. But I think those kind of distinctions are super unhelpful. So my background is purely in what was really deep experience in and around commercial B2B sales. So I really understand this area deeply. And that sort of forms some of the stuff that I help other entrepreneurs with, particularly in technical companies. So I think the way that we've built things at PocDoc from day one is that there's no barriers between the groups, first of all. Obviously sales, for example, can't sell something that doesn't exist. So particularly in medical devices. So you can't, history's littered with examples of companies that have salespeople out there selling vaporware that never materializes. So that's pointless. So we've been very clear that they're only able to sell what's actually available. Now, there might be some things that they talk about, oh, this is coming, this is coming, but that's a very clear rule set fundamentally. The second thing is, is I'm a huge believer, and this is the way I came up, is that the best salespeople are the people that understand the product the best. The really great elite sellers really understand every aspect of the product. So to your point around, do we let the scientists talk to the salespeople? Well, actually, the salespeople sit at the center. So if you think about our tech stack, we've got physical microfluidics, we've got AI diagnostics, we've got a digital infrastructure that integrates back up with the patient record and integrates with risk assessment tools and does all kinds of other bells and whistles, connects people to treatment. Salespeople in our organization actually sit at the center of that and understand all of those aspects. Whereas if you're a specialist in R&D, you're desperately every day trying to solve 100 hard things that day. You probably don't have a lot of exposure to how we integrate backup with the patient record. But if you're a salesperson and you don't understand that element, then you're not going to be able to go and talk to the healthcare system about how that works. So actually, they're in this very privileged position to get a really good overview of how all this stuff fits together. And then the final piece, if we go back to what we talked about before, businesses, not just PocDoc, businesses exist to solve customer pain. If you can't solve a pain for a customer, then I don't quite know what the longevity looks like for your business. And so actually, salespeople are really that frontline. of listening to customers, ensuring that the great technology that we've developed solves those issues for those customers, and then feeding back any new problems or new things or new opportunities back into the business. So I'm a big believer, and I sort of write about this on LinkedIn quite a bit, about how we need to move past sales being this sort of quote unquote dirty word. And that's why I don't like the use of funding instead of revenue or adoption. It sort of makes it a bit more childish