Prioritize Research Adoption Issues With the Laboratory’s Own Criteria

A biotech customer rarely brings you one problem. They bring a stack of them at once, a support ticket that is blocking a run, a batch of new users who need onboarding, a document that quality wants reviewed, and a steering meeting three days away. As a Customer Success Scientist, you are tempted to sort that stack yourself, based on what looks urgent to you. That instinct causes more harm than good, because you do not run the lab and you do not know which deadline actually matters to the people who do the work.

Why This Conversation Goes Wrong

When a customer says everything feels urgent, most reps respond by picking a winner. They guess based on ticket age, or by whichever issue sounds most technical, or by whichever person on the call speaks loudest. That guess is often wrong, and even when it happens to be right, the customer walks away without a way to make this decision themselves next time. It also puts you in the position of defending someone else's decision instead of your own recommendation, which is a hard place to argue from later. The other failure mode is the opposite problem, agreeing that everything matters and doing nothing to sort it. That leaves the customer with the exact confusion they started with, plus a wasted call. The goal is not for you to rank the research priorities. Your lab does not need a vendor telling it which science comes first. Your job is to build a structure the customer can use to rank the issues with their own criteria, run dependency, onboarding timeline, quality process, whatever matters to their operation.

How to Prepare Before the Conversation

Before you get on the call, pull together whatever you already know about each open issue. List every open item by name, note who raised it, and note any date already attached to it, a scheduled run, an onboarding cohort, a document review deadline. Do not try to guess the impact yourself. Your job in this step is inventory, not judgment. If one of the open issues involves a technical question about file formats or instrument output, review it before the call so you are not guessing live. The post on Review Data Format Compatibility Before a Technical Demonstration covers how to get that kind of detail straight in advance. If one of the issues involves a request to share data across teams or departments, flag that early too, since it usually needs a governance path rather than a quick answer, a pattern covered in Escalate a Request to Share Data Across Departments Through Governance. Walking in with this groundwork means you can build the review table live instead of stalling the conversation while you look things up.

What to Say During the Review

Start by naming the pattern out loud instead of jumping into any one issue. At a fictional institute, a program manager named Priya opens the call by saying, "Every one of these feels urgent, I do not know where to start." You respond, "Let us list every open item and ask one question for each one, what happens if this waits a week." Priya answers that a support case is tied to a run scheduled for Thursday, a batch of new users needs an answer before next month's intake begins, and a formatting question on a shared document is sitting with the quality team already. You reply, "That gives us three different owners and three different clocks. The run dependent case needs support today. The onboarding question has a few weeks of room. The document question is not really ours to resolve, it belongs with quality." Priya says, "So which one do I tell my director we are handling first." You answer, "That is your call to make, not mine, but here is what I can tell you, only one of these three has a hard deadline this week." That last line matters. You gave Priya the information needed to decide, and you named the deadline clearly, but you left the actual choice with the person who owns the lab's priorities.

Mistakes to Avoid

Do not rank the issues for the customer, even when you strongly believe you know the right order. You are not the one accountable for the lab's outcomes, and if your guess turns out wrong, you lose credibility on every future call. Do not let a document or data governance question get treated as a support ticket. Local review processes and cross department data requests move through different owners with different rules, and folding them into your support queue creates confusion about who is actually responsible for closing them. Do not close the call without writing anything down. A verbal agreement about sequence fades within a day, and the customer will remember the conversation differently than you do unless there is a shared record. Do not skip naming the accountable owner in your notes, since a table with issues but no names just becomes another list nobody actually owns. Do not use vague language like soon or when we can. Attach an actual date or a named owner to every item, even if the date is only an estimate you will refine later. And do not treat this as a one time fix. New issues will surface next month, and the same review structure should get reused rather than reinvented each time.

How to Practice and Score This Skill

This is a skill you can rehearse before you ever get on a live call with a customer. Set up a scenario where a customer names three or four unrelated issues in one breath and reacts with frustration when you ask a clarifying question instead of giving an immediate answer. Practice summarizing without ranking, using a line close to this one, "You have named one issue tied to this week's run, one tied to next month's onboarding, and one that belongs with your document review process, which owner should we contact first." Score yourself, or have a manager score you, on three things. Did you ask about impact and timing for every issue before responding to any single one. Did you avoid assigning your own priority order to items that belong to the customer's process. Did you leave the call with a written table and a confirmed next step for each row. DealSpeak's Biotechnology practice conversations include this kind of multi issue scenario, so you can run it more than once and compare how your questions and your summary change between attempts. A manager reviewing a recorded practice session should watch for the moment you hand the decision back to the customer, since that moment, not the table itself, is what separates a coordinator from someone quietly picking favorites.

The Result

A customer who leaves this call with a written table, a named owner for every issue, and a confirmed sequence trusts you more than one who leaves with a verbal promise that everything is being handled. Send the table after the call and ask the customer to confirm the order before you move on. That single follow up message turns a scattered list of complaints into a plan everyone can see.