The Longer, Short Way to Sales Success

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22d ago 35:32

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When I invited Max Gilbert on the podcast, I suspected the conversation might go beyond sales tactics. Max is the founder of Tiferet Consulting, but he’s also a sourdough baker, amateur rabbi, armchair philosopher, and like me, a pretty bad golfer. Our conversation covered everything from startup struggles to spiritual identity and the joys of sourdough.

Helping Scientists Become Salespeople

Max works with founders selling into biotech or pharma that want to make sure their first sales hire works out. Spoiler: He has seen it go bad which gave him the idea.

One can imagine a founder with a science or engineering background thinking, “I’m not a sales person. I need to offload this to someone who can make calls, pound the pavement and hit a number.”

The early-stage sales role is fundamentally different. It’s about iteration and discovery, not just execution. So instead of trying to fit a traditional salesperson into a startup that was still finding its feet, Max found more success coaching fermentation scientists and bioprocess engineers to do the selling. They could speak their customers’ language and earn trust through technical credibility. Max helps them build the confidence and process to go with it.

Here is some good, if scary, news for those folks. As a scientist, you have skills that are useful in sales. Once again, your curiosity is a superpower. Sales, according to Max, is asking questions, looking at a problem from a lot of angles and figuring out how it might be solved. The challenge, as I see it, is that having developed a product or service, a founder might feel they have the answer in hand and they can’t wait to tell everyone who might be interested. They end up filling the silence with features and benefits.

Sales as a Scientific Process

Maybe a better approach is to think about your product or service as a hypothesis. And every sales call tests that hypothesis by asking more questions of the prospect about what they do. What’s this person struggling with? How do they think about their problems? When you listen that way, your product becomes a natural extension of the conversation. Then you can frame your product as a possible solution and let the prospect decide if they want to have another call to talk about it some more.

The process becomes a collaborative journey. Are we solving the right problem? Do we even understand the problem? Can we help? And if not, Max coaches his clients to say so and maybe even refer that prospect to someone who can.

Why Scientists Should Own the Sales Process Early

On top of all that, for the first few sales, only the founder can have the context to ask all the right questions as well as see how the answers might help refine the product or its positioning.

We like to say sales is about relationships, but that can mislead people. It’s not about charm or charisma. For early-stage companies, it’s about using structured conversations to gather data and test hypotheses. Max frames the process like an experiment: design, build, test, learn.

When you stop seeing sales as persuasion and start seeing it as discovery and iteration, it becomes a lot more accessible, especially if you’ve been trained to think that way already.

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Sales is a rollercoaster. Some calls go nowhere. Some start off promising and then you get ghosted. Founders have to keep showing up with curiosity and resilience even when they don’t feel like it. That’s where Max’s coaching comes in. (There is a theme here.)

Max’s secret sauce is that he lived the resistance. Like many, he didn’t start out wanting to be a salesperson. In fact, when a mentor suggested he lead sales, his first reaction was visceral rejection. (I laughed out loud as Max mimicked throwing up.) But going through that discomfort gave him a blueprint for coaching others through it. It’s the classic hero’s journey.

He told me his coaching isn’t about copying someone else’s process. It’s about helping each founder build their own. Picking the right structure, sticking to it, and having the mindset to carry it through especially when motivation disappears. More on that in a minute.

Coaching the Whole Person

I asked Max about this quote on his website: “When we ground ourselves in the identity that transcends our own contradictions, we’re tapping into our authentic self.”

Max named his consulting business Tiferet, concept of harmonizing seemingly opposite forces. In a sales context, that means acknowledging both the part of you that wants to help someone and the part of you that needs to hit a number. Instead of shutting one side down, you bring both to the table and accept the tension.

Disconnecting from the emotional side of selling and getting comfortable between the extremes is helpful and projects confidence.

Avoiding the Trap of the Shorter, Longer Way

We wrapped up with a story Max told from the Talmud about two roads: the short, longer way (full of obstacles and distractions like LinkedIn cheat sheets), and the longer, short way that actually gets you to your destination. TL;DR: You can’t hack your way to real progress. Shortcuts are tempting but costly. Where does success come from? Thoughtful, slow work. Daily practice. Making the process your own.

About That Bread…

Before we finished, we had to talk about sourdough. Max spends 10 hours a week baking bread. He grinds his own flour and employs some complicated fermentation processes (might be another episode), and thinks of bread as something primal and sustaining.

Max’s plan: feed the world with his bread and his wisdom when AI takes all our jobs.

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