George James training in the US - Meet Jonathan Slasinski

In this  bonus episode of the Luxury of Choice podcast, host Steve Vaughan introduces Jonathan Slasinski, a new member of the George James training team based in the United States. Jonathan shares his diverse career journey from being a high school science teacher to a successful sales professional in the life sciences industry. He discusses his transition into training and enablement roles, emphasizing the importance of effective training programs. The conversation explores the benefits of local training, the collaboration between internal and external training providers, and the value of fresh perspectives in training. Jonathan also shares his upcoming training initiatives and highlights the significance of work-life balance.

Jonathan Slasinski LinkedIn Profile : https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-slasinski-449a655/

Steve Vaughan, Jonathan Cooper, Pru Layton, Christian Walter, Pascal le Floche and Jayne Green are Sales Trainers from george james ltd. You can email the show at: Podcast@georgejames-training.com

The trainers on LinkedIn:

Steve Vaughan https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-vaughan-salestrainer/
Jonathan Cooper https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-cooper-18716b1/
Pru Layton https://www.linkedin.com/in/pru-layton-b46a3528/
Christian Walter https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-walter-a1857b1/
Jayne Green https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayne-green-salestrainer/
Pascal Le Floch-Riche https://www.linkedin.com/in/pascal-le-floch-220ba46/


george james training website https://georgejames-training.com/

Transcript

Steve Vaughan (00:01.006)
Hello again and welcome to this bonus episode of the Luxury of Choice podcast, brought to you by the training team of George James Limited. My name is Steve Vaughan. I'm a Senior Sounds Trainer with George James and I'm also the host and producer of this podcast. Now, if you listen to us regularly, you know that we signed off for the summer a few weeks ago and we're planning to come back with the full team in mid September. However, we do have a new member of the training team that's joined us recently.

based excitingly in the United States. And we thought it'd be great just to get that new trainer on the first, onto one of our podcasts just to give him a chance to introduce himself, but also find out a bit more about his background and also what he's planning to do in North America. And his name is Jonathan Slasinski. Jonathan, how are you?

Jonathan Slasinski (00:46.729)
I'm doing great, Steve. Thanks for having me and just really excited to be joining the George James training team and bringing the great portfolio of trainings to be able to focus here in the States.

Steve Vaughan (00:56.134)
We're looking forward to having you and working with you. without sort of going into your sort of full LinkedIn career history, it would be great to still a little bit about yourself, your background, a bit about your career, and then I guess what's led to you eventually coming to join the training team at George James.

Jonathan Slasinski (01:14.067)
Yeah, so just briefly grew up in New York, spent most of my adult life in Washington, D.C. And that's actually where I kind of cut my teeth with sales. And I currently find myself living out in California in San Diego. From a career perspective, I did start off as a high school science teacher. So as a high school biology and an earth science teacher, did that for a few years and then made the transition to sales. A bunch of my friends were one was working for BD and other was working for a pharmaceutical company. And I was like, man, I think I could do this.

Steve Vaughan (01:22.348)
OK.

nice.

Steve Vaughan (01:31.654)
wow, okay.

Steve Vaughan (01:43.48)
Yeah.

Jonathan Slasinski (01:43.963)
kind of made that leap and from there I've worked for some pharma companies mostly in life sciences where I spent the most of my career and I've sold everything from you know eight dollar gels to reverse transcription reagents up to half million dollar sequencers. It's a career that's spanned working for Bering-Inglehime pharmaceuticals.

Steve Vaughan (01:59.928)
great.

Jonathan Slasinski (02:06.088)
Made the transition into life sciences working with EMD millipore Spent a vast majority of my time working for bio rad and that's where it kind of had that reagent experience as well as the capital equipment experience and then later on moving into You know 10x genomics and single cell and spatial which was kind of more the cutting-edge things that have been going on in the life science You know seen the last you know, probably five to ten years The last five years I found myself actually changing roles and which is something that I was always

Steve Vaughan (02:17.256)
Of course, yeah.

Jonathan Slasinski (02:36.182)
really interested in from the time of my pharmaceutical career where I got like the best training. was like, this training is just awesome. and as I, my career progressed through life science, I was like, there's no training here. It was just, Hey, here's a PowerPoint, go out and sell. Right. and I had the opportunity at 10X genomics, you know, as we were growing from 50 reps, probably, you know, up to 300 over a few years, to create an enablement program. was the global head of enablement there, created a global enablement program.

Steve Vaughan (02:50.289)
You

Steve Vaughan (03:05.39)
Wow. Wow.

Jonathan Slasinski (03:05.962)
instituted a sales process, instituted onboarding, instituted product training, and then I continued doing that similar job at my last career stop, which was Singular Genomics.

Steve Vaughan (03:16.182)
Okay. Okay, great.

Jonathan Slasinski (03:17.864)
How I came to George James, you know as an internal, you know enablement trainer We often used external trainers to supplement some of things that we were doing and I had the great pleasure meeting Jonathan Cooper from George James We did an amazing negotiation training kind of hit it off kept in touch from there and late last year He rang me up and was like, hey, what are you doing? I'm like, you know what there could be an opportunity for me to come aboard and You know as things happen in this industry, there's always ups and downs with companies, you know, I found myself

Steve Vaughan (03:41.038)
Sure.

Jonathan Slasinski (03:47.771)
myself at a down, but I now find myself at a higher peak here as I joined George James and really look forward to bringing my experience not only from sales, but I was also a manager throughout that career, sales and management, and then bringing that experience I have selling the wide variety of products to the life science industry and being what George James specialized in. We've walked in these people's shoes, we've done this job, and just trying to sell these trainings to the life science companies that I know here in the States.

Steve Vaughan (04:03.351)
Sure. Sure.

Steve Vaughan (04:16.725)
And I think you make some great points there. First of all, Jonathan does that to all of us. Jonathan Cooper, is, by the way, that's how I ended up here as well. He was actually my coach in one of my jobs a number of years ago now. And I think the points you make is super important really in terms of the training we offer. We believe he's best in class, but as you say, we've done the job ourselves, across the team. We've all...

Jonathan Slasinski (04:22.032)
Hahaha

Steve Vaughan (04:40.481)
had a number of roles in both consumables and instrument sales and some senior roles like yourself really, but we kind of understand the industry. We understand the marketplace that we're training and the customers that we work with. We've kind of done similar jobs to them really. I think it's a really important point you make there.

Jonathan Slasinski (04:49.436)
Yeah.

Jonathan Slasinski (04:57.178)
It's what I really enjoyed about first meeting Jonathan and working with him. Cause I was like, man, this guy really knows what we're doing. He kind of gets us. And, I'd look back at, kind of where my career was, you know, where I'm sitting, you know, at in executive leadership, providing a forecast. You know, that's, that's something I did as, as a manager, but as a rep, I also had to build a funnel and provide my manager that forecast, which then went up the chain. So it's kind of cool having these experiences and, you know, seeing where you could be better at seeing where, know, you, definitely excelled that.

Steve Vaughan (05:03.403)
Hmm.

Steve Vaughan (05:17.773)
Yep.

Jonathan Slasinski (05:27.092)
and then just being able to bring that training to a whole new group of professionals is pretty cool.

Steve Vaughan (05:33.292)
So we've always done training in North America. In fact, I was only in California myself back in May, we a training course for a company. you know, we're not, we're not sort of new to the Americas in terms of, you know, offering our products and services, but you're the first permanent based trainer we have in North America. So where do you think or how do you think that will make a difference to both our customers, but also to our business moving forward?

Jonathan Slasinski (05:59.549)
Yeah, first of all, I think it's a great opportunity for George James just to see some more organic growth. You know, you're bringing on somebody else who's going to be going out there driving new business. But I also think the strength is the fact of the network that I've developed over the last 20 years and being able to reach out to these different companies, being able to get more, you know, whether it's locally here in Southern California or in Boston, there's all those biotech hubs that we have here in the States. Just being able to have someone who can really focus and penetrate those hubs, I think is going to be great.

Steve Vaughan (06:13.037)
show. Thank

Jonathan Slasinski (06:29.482)
You know along of course, you know, as I've said, you know my career span from a rep up to management a lot of my colleagues now are in management senior management VPs, know So it's gonna be great to ping them and see what their enablement needs are and see how we as a company can provide them You know the training that they need

Steve Vaughan (06:41.401)
Sure. Absolutely. Your network is vital in this job, And did I read recently that California is the fourth biggest economy in the world if it was a separate country now, something like that?

Jonathan Slasinski (06:53.262)
Yeah, fourth largest economy in the world, just one state, which is pretty amazing. Yeah, it's kind of Plenty. think that's driven mostly by the AI, but there is a very, very rich history of biotechnology in California and it's it is just ripe with with fantastic companies. Again, many of which my network works at. But, you know, whether it's California or the states, I really look forward to kind of just being able to drive some new some new business and really help George James grow.

Steve Vaughan (06:57.613)
Yeah, so plenty to go for, plenty to go out in that case, yeah.

Steve Vaughan (07:06.893)
show.

Steve Vaughan (07:13.271)
Hmm.

Steve Vaughan (07:21.623)
Sure, fantastic stuff. So one of the things that I really want to explore with yourself really, you you've had an interesting career, long career in the industry and your last, I think you said five years have been in an internal training enablement role offering, you know, training and business skills and sales management skills internally within the company. You're now working for an external sales training provider.

And sometimes one of the pushbacks we get, I know I get from time to time when I reach out to a potential customer is, no, we've got our own internal training. So I'm interested in how you see external and internal training capabilities working together. Because clearly you did it when you got ourselves involved, you know, when you last job when you met Jonathan.

Jonathan Slasinski (08:10.768)
Yeah, I think...

If you're running an enablement shop within a company, if you're doing it the right way, you are incorporating a hybrid approach. You you are going to be using your own skills, your own people to do certain things. And then you're going to look to external providers like George James to be able to supplement what you can do. the biggest, I guess I want to say weakness, I guess the barrier that I had, you know, when I was building the enablement program at 10 X and then even at singular genomics, it's just bandwidth.

Steve Vaughan (08:41.399)
Hmm.

Jonathan Slasinski (08:41.618)
There's so much an internal enablement needs to do. They need to onboard. They need to run an LMS. And just running an LMS is kind of a full-time job.

product training, right? Now that's a huge part of an internal job is product training, features, values. How are we getting, you know, that messaging across? And then of course, there's all those sales skills, their sales process, their sales tools, and then later on leadership training. You know, the tentacles just keep going, going, going. And unless you have a team of a hundred people, it's kind of tough to get to, it's tough to get to everything, which is why we looked to external trainers. And it was such a huge benefit because

Steve Vaughan (09:12.981)
Unlikely.

Jonathan Slasinski (09:20.97)
because they bring in different skill sets that would take a lot of time to develop right out of the box. I think if most enablement teams are gonna wanna do their own thing, there's a cost to it, right? There's things that they're gonna wanna say that, hey, this is what we've got doing, but you have to be open to that hybrid approach. And again, it just comes down to that bandwidth about like, what do you wanna accomplish and what can you accomplish? And that's why being able to bring in people like us is so

Steve Vaughan (09:33.451)
Of course. Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (09:43.82)
Hmm.

Steve Vaughan (09:47.757)
show.

Jonathan Slasinski (09:50.843)
key and it was so key in building by the programs that I built by being able to bring in George James and help us with certain aspects that we needed.

Steve Vaughan (09:58.485)
Yeah, totally agree. And I think also what can happen when you do work, you know, for some pretty big companies as you have, and I have as well, is that you get in like a very much a kind of a group think almost, you know, the only way is our way. And sometimes getting somebody like ourselves in, George Ames in, can just have a fresh pair of eyes or a fresh perspective or even realize that...

Jonathan Slasinski (10:10.621)
Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (10:20.221)
help the company realise there's actually this big blind spot within the business or within the capabilities that they didn't realise. And just having those fresh pair of eyes can really make a difference there. Is that something you would do as well, do think?

Jonathan Slasinski (10:34.984)
I think that is something that resonates totally with what we did and especially what we did with George James, which was our leadership training. And again, it's, you know, this internal bias, I guess, you you have relationships as an internal employee, you have relationships with the managers, you have relationships with the sales reps.

does a bias come out when you're training them? I'm sure there is a little bit to that, but I will say when we had our leadership training and we had a fresh eye on it, there were some things that in our debriefs that I was like, ooh, I wasn't even looking at that. Or, I didn't see that from this certain person and kind of the way that they were engaging in it. And I do think you bring that up. It's this being able to bring in an independent perspective to your culture. Yeah, because within every culture, there's this group think, there's that kind of implicit bias that you have

Steve Vaughan (11:10.901)
Interesting.

Jonathan Slasinski (11:24.106)
the people that you like, the people that you don't like. And it's such a nice to have a neutral arbiter of skills, right? Like that's, it's just a great thing. And it was a really cool thing that we learned after our leadership of just getting another perspective of somebody of how they thought these people kind of, you know, my ranking would have been here, here, here. Then all of a sudden we have this is this and allows you to think differently.

Steve Vaughan (11:26.733)
show.

Steve Vaughan (11:45.993)
Interesting. interesting. So you've obviously gone through your training and onboarding with ourselves and you're up and running now in North America. What are the first things you're planning to do in terms of courses that you're planning to run? traditionally we always offer a mixture of what we call scheduled training courses and also the tailored training where we do a specific program for a particular customer. Where do you see your first focus to be?

Jonathan Slasinski (12:09.628)
Yeah, there's the schedule trainings I think are very, you know, they're appealing to me and it's a way that I think.

we can really draw in different people from different companies. know, prospecting has been a huge thing that I've been doing since I've been here, just reaching out. And a lot of companies are saying, Hey, we don't really have the bandwidth for a full 20, 30 person training, but I've got three people that I want to send to this, you know, the sales skills training. So I'm really, really excited for the launch of wind selling and to be able to hold a schedule training probably mid October, you know, maybe early November, excited for that. But my other passion lies in EQ and leadership training. So I, I was,

Steve Vaughan (12:47.158)
Okay.

Jonathan Slasinski (12:47.206)
a big proponent of emotional intelligence training. We ran it with probably 50, 60 people over 10 acts, brought it to singular.

What I love about it, it's just a way, you know, when people think about emotional intelligence, they're thinking, my God, I'm going to hug somebody. I'm going to love somebody. I'm going to cry. It's not about that. It's about harnessing your emotions to be more effective and efficient in your work. And I think that once people get that side of it, it really empowers them to be better, just better people. Right. If I'm a better person at home, if I'm a better person at work because I can handle my emotions, it's something, you know, that I've seen such growth.

Steve Vaughan (13:11.082)
Right.

Jonathan Slasinski (13:27.268)
from and I'm really excited to you know start bringing that you know to the masses as well. So really excited for the launch of wind selling I think there's some fantastic things within that and then you know EQ is another thing when we focus on along with you know the core trainings that we offer mastering the customer conversation prospecting and all that good stuff.

Steve Vaughan (13:45.774)
Great stuff, great stuff. And you get a little teaser there, something that we've been working on as a team, more to come. I won't say any more on that because we haven't, when the podcast goes out, we'll just be on the cusp of going live. It's something new and exciting for ourselves. So watch this space on this one. When you're not delivering training, you're not prospecting for business, what else do you get up to? What do you do in your downtime, Jonathan?

Jonathan Slasinski (13:53.552)
Hahaha

Jonathan Slasinski (14:11.9)
Yeah, there's always got to be that work-life balance. mean, you know, as you've known in your career sometimes, especially in sales, right? It can be so intense. It can be so time, you know, such a time sync of I have to get to this. I have to get to my funnel. I have to get to my emails. And I will say throughout my career, I've learned you have to have this balance and you have to really kind of take care of yourself. Huge snowboarder. know, I live my...

Steve Vaughan (14:15.591)
Completely.

Steve Vaughan (14:37.834)
wow, California, I would have thought that was, I guess in the mountains, yeah? Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Jonathan Slasinski (14:41.138)
Well, in the mountains, you know, we in California, we drive to our weather, right? So we don't have weather. We drive to our weather. But my wife and I are very big snowboarders. I live for the winter, you know, doing that. But during the day, it's getting to the gym. It's going for walks. It's just, you know, trying to trying to eat is clean and be just be the best person I can be, you know, outside of, know, what's going to always encompass, which is work, right? You know, trying to get that balance in. If it's not snowboarding, it's during during the kind of spring, fall, summer.

mountain biking. So we do like to get out as much as possible but you know as we're here try to be as active as possible as well you know in the things that we do.

Steve Vaughan (15:14.124)
show.

Steve Vaughan (15:18.89)
That's super important. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Jonathan, it's great to have you on your first podcast. You'll be coming back, I know, more often when we get up and running with the series three of the Luxury of Choice, which will start in mid September. and you've already contributed great amounts to the team with some fresh ideas and some thoughts already. So great to have you with us. I will put your email address and your LinkedIn profile in the show notes so people can reach out to you already if they want to make contact with you.

Jonathan Slasinski (15:44.603)
Excellent.

Steve Vaughan (15:46.694)
and talk to you about some training capabilities in the States or anywhere else, I guess, in the Americas as well. But thanks for coming on today. Appreciate your time.

Jonathan Slasinski (15:54.397)
Yeah, no problem. I really look forward to taking part in this podcast as we move into season three and so excited to be with George James and bringing these great trainings to the network that I have here in the States. So thanks so much for having me today.

Steve Vaughan (16:06.774)
Fantastic. Great stuff. And just to finally wrap up on the series three. So we will start again with the series, the third series of the luxury choice around mid September. So we're looking at sort of September the 18th, that kind of time window. And we've already got some topics that we're planning to work on. So in no particular order, some of the themes that we're going to discuss include why the sales call starts before the call. Hold that thought. Why the demo or the demonstration?

isn't the sale, the dangers of the corridor conversation, which is an intriguing headline and why rejection isn't personal. So make sure you subscribe to the show and you also follow us on your favourite podcast app and you'll get all of those coming into your podcast feed mid September. We'll be back then with our series three. Until then, happy selling and we'll talk to you soon.