anvajo: Hi Çağlar! Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions! Would you like to introduce yourself?
Çağlar Balın: My name is Çağlar Balın, I studied Chemistry at the Ege University and have been the Sales and Marketing Director of Prizma since 2014. After joining the company in 2002 as a Sales Rep, I worked as the Izmir area manager between 2006 and 2014. Beside my experience at the job, I also had the opportunity to join many sales and application trainings about different laboratory products during the last 18 years.
anvajo: What tasks do you particularly enjoy in your job?
Çağlar Balın: I really enjoy many of my tasks because I have a diverse work field, but I think my favourite task is interacting with our sales team and discussing new projects. I also enjoy short product trainings, both with our sales team and end users. Of course, discovering new innovative laboratory products to add to the Prizma portfolio and meeting new manufacturers is a task I like to do as well.
anvajo: Could you please tell us more about Prizma, the company you work for?
Çağlar Balın: Prizma Laboratory Products is one of the providers of consumables as well as equipment for a wide range of laboratories for molecular biology and cell culture focusing on life sciences and pharma customers in Turkey. The company has been established in 1993 and was founded by Mr. Ayhan Uçkun, Mr. Ercan Ölmez and Mr. Engin Bilgen. Our headquarter is in Istanbul, but we also have offices in Ankara and Izmir and one colleague in Adana. We have a total of 28 employees including a strong and successful sales team and an experienced technical service team.
anvajo: Who are your customers and what do you offer them?
Çağlar Balın: Prizma is a "complete solution provider" for the customers in the life sciences market. We provide consumables such as plastics, kits, enzymes, etc. for molecular biology and cell culture customers and as well equipment for a wide range of laboratories for example life sciences, food & beverage, industrial paint etc. We also provide after sales support for the equipment we sell, supporting our customers wherever they need it.
anvajo: What is your long-term vision for the market and your customers?
Çağlar Balın: The Covid-19 pandemic showed the importance of R&D in biotechnology and life sciences. During last year, many start-up companies joined the market with diagnostic kits. Also, pharma companies accelerated their research for vaccine manufacturing. I think bio-similar drug manufacturers became one of the major industries that drive the laboratory products market. Cell-culture research are also increasing significantly. Our long-term vision is to meet our customers with new and innovative products and improve customer satisfaction, while providing the best equipment for their important research.
anvajo: Speaking of your goals, how did you end up becoming the company you are? How did you build up your company network?
Çağlar Balın: Our founders came from a laboratory product sales field. Our company network is based on their strong customer relations starting from 1993. In addition to our 2 offices in Istanbul and Ankara, we opened another office in Izmir in 2002 and were able to increase our ability to reach more customers directly. We are trying to maintain and improve this network. Currently we are in contact with almost every university in Turkey. We also have good relations with major pharma companies, especially bio-similar drug manufacturers. Up to today we are trying to enlarge our network with customer visits, attending and supporting scientific events as well as joining lab related expos.
anvajo: Why have you decided to make the fluidlab R-300 a part of your portfolio? How do you advertise it?
Çağlar Balın: The anvajo fluidlab R-300 is one of the most interesting and innovative instruments I have seen in laboratory products market. It matches perfectly with our product portfolio. As our core customers are cell culture laboratories, life sciences labs and molecular biology departments, the fluidlab R-300 is a perfect tool which combines 2 technologies, that our customer need in their everyday applications. We started advertising the fluidlab on our LinkedIn account first. Then we uploaded the fluidlab R-300 teasers to our YouTube channel and shared them on all social media channels simultaneously. We also started reaching potential cell culture customers via direct mails. anvajo offers a wide range of revealing marketing materials such as flyers, keyword lists and content for the website. Furthermore, our demo instruments will be available in the beginning of March and we are planning to perform demos in Q2.
anvajo: How do you like working with anvajo?
Çağlar Balın: I really like being in contact with the anvajo team. The team is bigger than I imagined in the beginning. I believe anvajo will be very successful together with this young and energic team. The speed of communication is also very high between our two companies. We work together very well. Recently we almost completed the translation of the user interface into Turkish, making the fluidlab R-300 the first automated cell counter with a Turkish user interface.
anvajo: Thank you very much for those insights!
