Chris Morrison | Phone: 919-304-2760 | LinkedIn Profile
Chris has over 25 years of sales and business development experience bringing disruptive products and services to market. His principal expertise is the ability to formulate and execute strategic marketing and sales plans for new technologies and/or new markets. His domains of experience include pharmaceutical services, Medtech, healthcare IT and clinical diagnostics.
About Me:
Favorite quote of all time and pretty much my life’s mantra, from Helen Keller’s book “Let Us Have Faith” which was published in 1940 from the chapter titled “Faith Fears Not.”
“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.”
I love skiing, mountain biking, the mountains and adventures. I recently returned from six weeks working and playing – living life – in Utah hosting friends and family, skiing (downhill and cross country) at Park City, Deer Valley and my favorite, Snowbasin.
I have a great son, Evan, who graduated from UNC-Charlotte with a degree in Mechanical Engineering who is embarking on his first career job. I’m so damn proud as his Dad.
I’m passionate about life – work, play and intimate relationships with family, friends and my partner. I throw myself into my work. I received my degree in Management Engineering from the University of Vermont where I also played four years of intercollegiate soccer. Soccer was a great teacher of life lessons – the highs (ending my junior season ranked 17th in the nation) and lows (breaking my leg the fourth game my sophomore year), being part of a team where I was both an individual and part of the greater whole and dealing with great and incompetent coaches (bosses).
I’ve spent my whole career in healthcare and life science. Though in recent years I’ve started to advise and support companies outside of healthcare. Early in my career I managed ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) and a large medical practice and then I got into Medtech sales (orthopedic implants with Smith and Nephew Richards). In my second sales job, I found myself selling wireless networks (early WIFI) and handheld computers/devices into healthcare (circa mid 1990s) – my first startup. And I was hooked and have never looked back.
Over the years, I’ve discovered and distilled why I love startups. Part is the uncertainty of selling a novel product for the very first time. Doing something no one has ever done before. I’m pulled by my adventurous side – like a moth to a light. But it also engages the engineer. The need to assemble the puzzle to solve a complex problem – discovering the repeatable sales process – as quickly as possible. Using both sides of my brain – the rational and the creative – the divergent and convergent. Finding order in the early chaos. It’s challenging, exciting and just damn fun. So, ever since that day I was hired by Joe McCormack at Continental Healthcare selling the first wireless networks and handhelds computers into hospitals, I’ve never looked back. I’ve spent the last 30+ years launching and selling disruptive products, first as an employee and for the last 20 years through my consultancy, ViaVerus.
By the way, ‘via’ means road or path and ‘verus’ means true … TruePath.
Somewhere along the way, I started to notice that I did things differently than most other sales reps. I was wired different and over the years based on my experiences, I also did things differently. The biggest difference was my first step – gravitating to startups and selling disruptive tech (though I did not call it disruptive back then) and never going back to selling established products (my first orthopedic sales job). I found my domain. What I love to do.
Very few sales reps have ever sold the first of any product – much less two, three or well over ten products. And when I say the first, I mean the first – source the lead, manage it though the sales cycle, close the deal and then manage through the delivery and adoption – for the first time for a given product.
Once I realized what I was doing was different (the ah-ha moment circa 2010), I set out to find a sales framework my work – launching disruptive tech/products. I couldn’t find it. It wasn’t out there. So I started to capture my insights, learnings, principles and tactics that I’d discovered and developed over the decades, eventually consolidating into my Agile Market Entry (AME) sales framework for launching disruptive tech.
The same sales framework I use today to help companies launch new products:
- in less time – going from product launch to market scale
- with less cost – avoiding premature scaling, the #1 mistake for startups
