From the Lab to Sales: Heather Javier Made the Leap

·39 min·2 clips

Heather Javier left a decade in labs after realizing sales reps were already doing the work she wanted to do.

1. Life Science Marketing Radio talks with Heather Javier about moving from lab work to scientific sales. 2. Chris Conner hosts, and Heather Javier is introduced as a genomic sales specialist at Roche, a sales coach, and the host of Transition to Sales. 3. The episode asks how scientists and science marketers can transition into sales without losing their technical background. 4. Heather starts with a biology degree from San Francisco State and her first job at Genentech in translational oncology. 5. She describes two and a half years in the “mouse house,” including studies with 300 to 500 mice per study and about a thousand mice a day. 6. Heather then moved into clinical trials at the UCSF Diabetes Center and later City of Hope, where she wrote FDA documents, SOPs, and quality-testing procedures. 7. She says stem cell research required hours like 3 a.m. to 3 p.m. on harvest days and weekend or night lab work when cells were ready. 8. Around 2015, Heather says she was a first-time mother and first-time homeowner who was missing time with family. 9. She explains that she was most energized by networking with biostatisticians, other laboratories, and vendors like VWR, Charles River, and BD. 10. Heather says a LinkedIn search, resume revisions, and a year of back-and-forth led her into sales after nearly a decade in the laboratory. 11. She frames networking as resourcefulness, not just socializing, because her UCSF team used vendors, papers, and internal colleagues to move regulatory T-cell work from 96-well dishes toward patients. 12. Heather says the energy you bring matters because people want to help when they see purpose, and she describes networking as “the vibe” that speaks for itself. 13. She links sales to scientific thinking by saying scientists already solve problems through variables, customer personas, and questions that uncover the right solution. 14. Heather names Miller Heiman and conceptual selling as tools for understanding what matters most to the customer before trying to close a deal. 15. She says her speed comes from connecting the dots across people, data, and workflows, and a manager once told her, “you need to slow down.” 16. Heather says the best salespeople in life sciences speak to the scientist, not just the feature set, and she has won business because customers trust her reliability and follow-up. 17. The tone is conversational and practical, with Chris Conner using examples from his own lab background to keep the exchange grounded. 18. The format moves from career story to tactics, then into sales-marketing alignment, confidence-building, and startup coaching. 19. Women in life sciences considering sales roles. 20. Listeners wanting theoretical marketing strategy without sales examples.

As heard by us

A scientist-to-sales story that treats listening as the real competitive advantage.

Heather Javier presents the shift from scientist to sales as a lesson in listening, context, and restraint. She moves from biology at San Francisco State to Genentech's translational oncology work, including the exhausting mouse-house grind, and uses that path to show why…

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Why you'd press play

If you want a scientist-to-sales playbook, this one keeps the advice concrete, usable, and human.

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