Life science vendors, put your swimsuit on and keep swimming

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Biopharma procurement trends in 2023 — It’s not pretty

The biopharma industry is facing some tough market conditions, with inflation and drug pricing constraints having the biggest negative impact on the sector. In addition, there has been a decline in FDA drug approvals which poses further challenges for pharma contract manufacturers.

Due to these tough market trends, it is becoming increasingly difficult for biopharma vendors to maintain their sales pipelines and generate new sales opportunities. The current economic climate has led to a decrease in demand for biopharma products and services, as well as increased competition from other vendors.

Companies (especially small biotechs) are pausing or terminating their preclinical programs and focusing instead on assets that are already in the clinics. This shift can have significant implications for biopharma vendors who rely heavily on sales and lead generation from new products entering preclinical development.

For those working within the industry, it’s important to be aware of these trends so that you can adjust your strategies accordingly – particularly when it comes to marketing campaigns aimed at potential customers involved with early-stage research projects.

Staying informed about current market dynamics will help ensure you remain one step ahead of competitors while still being able to offer valuable services/products which meet customer needs even during times when budgets may be tight due to budget constraints.

How to work around tough market

However, despite these challenges, there are still plenty of opportunities out there for savvy biopharma vendors who know how to adapt to changing market conditions and navigate through the storm. I suggest tuning in to Jeb Blount’s exclusive episode on the Sales Gravy Podcast, as he shares an influential message regarding the strategies needed to surpass the current crisis in sales. Discover the reasons behind the effectiveness of adopting a squirrel’s mindset, the early actions taken by successful rainmakers, and the importance of facing reality by wearing your swimsuit.

Here we will look at some strategies you can use in order to address tough market trends in the industry:

• Eliminate Customer Success Bottlenecks: Focus on providing exceptional customer service by responding quickly to inquiries or issues that may arise with your product or service offering; this will help build trust among customers which can lead to more referrals down the line.
• Develop a targeted marketing strategy: In order to stand out from your competitors you need an effective strategy that focuses on reaching potential customers with relevant messages about your products or services. This could include using data-driven insights such as customer segmentation and performing focused campaigns to specific segments. For example, let’s say you just published a nice case study with an oncology-focused biopharma. Use that to approach other oncology-focused companies.
• Double down on outbound sales: Many companies rely on inbound lead sources and their network in bull markets and only start to consider outbound when top-of-the-funnel begins to dry up. The beauty of outbound lead generation is that it’s exhaustive if done right. You can literally deliver the message in one way or the other to most of your market out there and find that 2-3% of the prospects who are looking to buy today.
• Strengthen your brand: Create content such as blog posts or videos highlighting your expertise in the field which will help you establish yourself as an authority figure within your niche – this can also increase visibility amongst potential customers who may not have been aware of you before seeing your content online.
• Leverage digital channels: Making sure your brand has an online presence is essential if you want customers to find out about what makes you unique among other suppliers – having active and up-to-date accounts on LinkedIn for example helps build relationships with potential buyers while also increasing visibility around particular offerings.

By taking advantage of all these tips above, biopharma vendors should be able to take control over how they navigate through today’s market conditions while still growing their businesses successfully over time despite any headwinds present along the way. I’ll write some more thoughts on biopharma lead generation soon so stay tuned.

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Meetings.bio welcomes Matevž Poljanc as new CTO & co-founder

Although I have a PhD in computer science, I have long ceased to be a computer professional. In the last 10 years I have been much more interested in entrepreneurship, team building, business development and sales. Achieving Meetings.bio’s broader vision—to become the world’s largest provider of lead generation services and products—is only possible if we successfully solve a series of hard technological challenges. That’s why I see Meetings.bio primarily as a technology company, rather than a service company. I was aware from the beginning that sooner or later we would need to find a professional computer scientist to take over the technical function in the company. After more than 2 years, this is finally happening.

In the autumn of 2021, I posted an invitation for programmers to join us as co-founder and CTO. 20 candidates applied, 14 of them were very interested. 5 candidates were asked to work on an extensive homework. 2 of the best candidates were invited for a technical interview. At this point, I would like to once again thank everyone who responded to the invitation and invested their time and energy into interviewing with us. You all know who you are.

Finding a co-founder, especially if they are joining existing founders, is an extremely challenging task. Many things need to fall in the right place. It’s not enough to be a person of superior competence, hard work, integrity, and all that goes with it. The key is that you feel great working with this person, and that you quickly build the necessary trust, that you will always be able to find common ground through discussion. Also, it is great if the new co-founder complements existing founders with their personality traits.

Today, I am very happy to announce that we have found such a person. Matevž Poljanc is joining the Meetings.bio team as CTO and co-founder. I am pretty sure we could hardly find a better partner than him.

When Matevž sent me his CV, I couldn’t understand how a 25-year-old computer scientist could have achieved so much in so little time. As a high school student, he and a team of classmates had already won the American Computer Science League (US) international programming competition twice. After studying Computer Science at the prestigious University of Cambridge (UK), he worked as an intern for JP Morgan & Chase developing web applications. Soon after, he co-founded his first startup, LendOne as CTO. He then worked as a full-stack developer at one of the best Slovenian startups, Ehrana. For the last 3 years he has been leading the development team at Spin, a Slovenian company that develops accounting solutions. He is proficient in backend (Python, Django, PostgreSQL), web (NextJS, React, Typescript, Chakra UI) and infrastructure technologies (Kubernetes, Helm, VMware, Terraform, AWS, Google Cloud).

Matevž, welcome to Meetings.bio! I am very excited about you joining us and can’t wait to build a great company with you on board.

P.S. for software engineers: Later this year we plan to expand our engineering team. If you might be interested in working with us in the mid-term, I invite you to email me at nejc@meetings.bio, and I’ll be happy to let you know when we’ll be looking for new team members (of course, under strict confidentiality).

Building a Viable Sales Funnel as a Preclinical or Clinical CRO

At Meetings.bio, we have helped a variety of life science companies find the right pharmaceutical partners to grow their business. Over the years, we have refined our methodology for generating sales leads so that our partners no longer have to rely on blind, shotgun approaches to find their customers.

If you are trying to build a viable sales funnel for your CRO, you have probably discovered that it involves a great deal of nuance. Below we have highlighted some important lessons that should help you fill the top of your funnel with more high-quality opportunities.

Timing is key

Timing is crucial for any successful sales effort, but even more so for CROs. Biopharma companies typically have narrow timeframes in which they are open to start working with new CROs. Roughly 65% of biopharma executives report they’d terminate their partnership with a CRO over a lack of quality, or a significant failure to meet contractual obligations. However, in reality, once collaborations are established, the cost of switching is relatively high. This means it’s absolutely crucial to actively probe the market not only to try and find companies that have an immediate need, but also those who will be ready to partner in the next 3-12 months. Many of the prospects we match with our CRO customers are in different early stages that they would never find using inbound marketing approaches alone. Below are a few examples of actual responses we got from our lead generation campaigns for our CRO customers:

We believe these are invaluable pieces of information, which need to be diligently recorded and acted upon when the time is right. This is how you build the very top of your sales funnel.

Finding the right partner at the right time requires constant monitoring of your prospects. Drug pipelines are a fantastic indication of where things stand within your target organizations. If their drugs are in active clinical trials, you should regularly follow their progress on ClinicalTrials.gov. Press releases are also a great way to hone in on a rough timeline for the perfect pitch. Conferences, webinars and academic events can also give you an insight into your buyer’s objectives, pain points and needs.

Segment the market in detail

Number of Employees and Geographic Location are the most commonly used attributes to segment the biopharma market. However, in our experience it is essential to segment the market in more detail to generate high quality leads. Some of the attributes we use in our campaigns for our customers include:

• Stage of Development: If your business is preclinical, it is important you understand and consider the nature of your prospect’s R&D efforts in your messaging. On the clinical side, clients could require everything from scaling up manufacturing to trial monitoring and data analysis. If you’re a clinical development CRO, it wouldn’t make sense to reach out to preclinical stage companies too early.
• Disease Area / Indication: Complex, idiopathic diseases such as cancer or Alzhiemer’s disease have confounded researchers for decades. It is essential to consider your own operational and technical expertise as it relates to your prospect’s pipeline for the highest chance of success. For vast fields of study such as oncology, it may be prudent to narrow your search even further by indication.
  
• Drug Class: Cell therapies may require an entirely different analytical skill set than small molecules, or biologic drugs. For example, in vitro potency assays for small molecules and biologics are commonplace. Cell and gene therapies, however, are much more challenging to characterize due to their complex manufacturing process and mechanism of action.
• Funding: For biotechs, considering funding information in your campaign can make a huge difference to your success rate, especially if you combine information about the amount (last) raised with the date of the last financing round. For companies that haven’t raised financing recently, you can use the date of their last raise as an indicator of when they might raise their next round. This way, you can catch some companies that are in the middle or towards the end of their fundraising process, which means budgets are (or might soon be) refilled even though the financing event hasn’t been announced yet.

For example, your target segment could be an intersection of three different segments, as illustrated below.

In our experience, following the guidelines above will make CRO prospecting campaigns significantly more cost-effective and successful, even though the preparations take a non-trivial amount of work.

If you’d like to share your thoughts or learn more about us, feel free to reach us at info@meetings.bio.

How to fill up the top of your sales funnel?

Creating a constant flow of new deals and revenue month after month is challenging for most companies, especially in the life-sciences and biopharma market. Sales teams often struggle to meet their targets for surprisingly similar reasons. Prospecting is done in batches, typically ahead of major industry conferences and meetings. This is followed by a steep decline in prospecting, which inevitably leads to a sharp drop in meetings before the next pre-conference sprint. Irregular flow is bad, but irregular flow in sales strains business development teams with unpredictable workflows which dramatically impacts performance. While some quarters are understandably more taxing than others, more often than not, the blame lies squarely on inconsistent lead generation.

To optimize your sales funnel, the goal is to find something that works and then do it regularly. As Aristotle put it, “we are what we repeatedly do.” Excellence doesn’t come from a single act of distinction, but from practice and consistency.

Let’s jump in and review a few approaches we’ve discovered over the years to filling up the top of the sales funnel in the life science industry.

Conferences and events

Conferences and other types of meeting events have been, and still are, the backbone of any sales funnel even though it’s usually a tedious (and expensive) endeavor for small teams and startups. You have to decide which conferences to attend, prepare marketing materials and then wander the halls tirelessly all day. We’ve all been at the booth, hoping the prospects that stop by aren’t just there for another freebie. While I’d argue events are a mainstay for sales teams, they won’t offer much in the way of ROI if you don’t plan ahead and expect your booth to miraculously generate high-quality leads. 

1-1 matchmaking

This is something more and more event organizers have begun to offer, ostensibly to help vendors approach the biopharma industry. This can work well at times, but it requires really well written and highly personalized introductions for busy pharma-execs to respond. The quality of the match-making systems also tends to vary a lot between events. If you’re looking for a predictable, recurring inflow of new leads, this likely isn’t your best bet.

Inbound marketing

Inbound marketing is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the fuel of every great marketing engine. Inbound marketing can be extremely effective in filling the top of the funnel over the long run. This means valuable content, typically offered to customers for free. Thinking back to grad school, I distinctly remember the units-conversion table poster in my lab, and it still reminds me of the lab-scale manufacturer that provided it. Of course, content doesn’t necessarily have to be physical, but anything that your potential customers find valuable (and will hopefully share with their friends/colleagues). Publishing useful content won’t fill your sales funnel instantly, but it will help you build brand recognition in the long term. So don’t wait! Start that newsletter, podcast or whitepaper today. 

Webinars

Webinars have been around for a while. In principle, this is just another piece of content in your inbound marketing arsenal, but we believe webinars deserve a special mention. While the initial investment to create and distribute high-quality content is rather steep, and thus typically more affordable to larger vendors, webinars are perhaps the best way to turn your customers into advocates. If you can afford it, make sure the webinar provides real, tangible value to listeners and isn’t just another sales pitch. We highly recommend inviting your customers to talk about their science and the applications of your services and products. You can approach attendees with more sales-focused messages as a follow-up.

Introductions and referrals

These are rather obvious. You probably know a guy who knows a guy. Customers can often introduce you to someone facing the same pain that led them to you, so get in touch. Send an email, arrange a lunch meeting and close that deal! One interesting tactic to systematize this approach is to download CSV files of your team’s/advisors’/board members’ LinkedIn connections, carefully select potential buyers, and ask them for warm introductions. Using this approach, we managed to put one of our customers in touch with C-level executives at Thermo Fisher!

Outbound sales 

We’ve already discussed why email marketing should be an essential component of any outbound sales strategy here. While writing a good outbound campaign seems easy, what you really need to make it work is a list of prospects who are a genuine fit for your business. High-quality subject lines drive up your open rates, and of course, personalized email content with a clear call to action makes sure you engage the prospects you write to.

Whatever approach you end up using, nothing matters more than meticulously measuring your results, learning from them, and continuously iterating your approach. Analytics, sales, and marketing are the same science in many respects. If you don’t measure it, it doesn’t exist. It’s important to know what works and what doesn’t. Measure. Improve. Repeat. 

At Meetings.bio, we’ve found outbound prospecting to be the most effective way to consistently get our customers’ sales reps in front of new prospects, for a fraction of the cost of other approaches. 

Need help or simply want to share what works for you? Schedule a quick call with us and let’s chat!

Is email still a relevant prospecting channel in 2020?

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Email is dead. We’ve all heard it. It’s often suggested most B2B communication today is channeled via other types of media (LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and even Facebook). Most companies already have a chatbot on their website. Customers expect prompt answers and immediate results. In a world of instant communication, this makes sense. In fact, this has been predicted before:

“I’m predicting that a new communication channel will replace email by 2020.”

— John BrandonContributing editor, Inc.com, 2015

However, empty predictions are a dime a dozen, and like many others, this one doesn’t quite hold up to statistics either. According to Radicati group, 4 billion users still rely on email in 2020. That’s over half of the world’s population. What’s more, according to HubSpot, a staggering 86% of professionals prefer to use email when communicating for business purposes.

Essentially, this suggests, at least in the initial stage of every deal, email remains the preferred mode of communication. This is especially true in the biopharma space, as buyers typically like to determine if the solution fits their needs before sharing sensitive information and committing time to meet in-person. I would go so far as to say email is the primary lead generation channel for biopharma and life science sales in 2020.

Now, this obviously doesn’t mean every email you send will be greeted with the same enthusiasm as you had when you wrote it.

So now that we’ve established email is still alive and kicking, the real question is does spending all that time composing emails really pay off, or do most emails get deleted as soon as they land in someone’s inbox?

In our experience, prospects really do engage with emails. In fact, I’d argue they do so more than they do on social media, where most users just passively scroll through a never-ending stream of content.

There are some really interesting statistics on this topic that corroborate our findings. According to Campaign Monitor, you’re 6 times more likely to get a click-through from an email campaign than you are from a tweet. A message is 5x more likely to be seen in an email than via Facebook (Radicati, 2017). What’s more, B2B organizations report a whopping $46 return on every invested dollar in email marketing (DMA, 2019). If these numbers tell us anything, it’s that you’re missing out if you’re aren’t leveraging email as a communication channel to reach your prospects.

But of course, not all emails are created equal. We’ve all come across emails that wind up straight in the trash. This is typically due to a lack of (or insufficient) research, and not really understanding your (potential) customers. There are three basic guidelines that you should follow to personalize your emails:

1. Segmentation

Segmentation is the division of potential clients into smaller tranches in order to ensure your content is personalized and relevant to each and every recipient. In other words, you wouldn’t want to market reagents to a bioinformatics company, would you? Or offer clinical trial management services to a preclinical biopharma company? There are many ways to approach this, and even basic segmentation, such as by industry type, leads to a huge improvement in response rates. According to Mailchimp, recipients are 75% more likely to read emails from segmented campaigns than non-segmented ones.

2. Mobile

We use our phones everywhere and for everything. Take one look around and chances are you’ll see a majority of people glued to their screens. Phones have become our payment systems, navigation devices, source of news, and even entertainment. It’s not surprising then that almost every study on email open rates concludes at least 50% of all emails are read on mobile devices (Campaign Monitor, 2018). This means one, and only one thing. Your email has to look as good on mobile as it does on a computer screen. Period. Bite-sized sentences organized in clean, readable stanzas.

3. Iteration

Rome wasn’t built in a day. See what works and what doesn’t, starting with the subject line down to the CTA. Use well-defined metrics, and some good old fashioned statistics to continuously measure and improve response rates to ensure your customers find your content valuable. Everything else will follow.

If you’re feeling stuck, or worse, your emails often wind up in the spam folder, we should talk. We’re happy to discuss our experience with email marketing and share our insights. You can get in touch with us.

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Send your sales into the stratosphere!

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In September 2019, my friend and now second-time co-founder, Klemen, and I had just boarded our flight to the ESMO conference in Barcelona:

“You know, I was thinking…” I said to him while fastening my seat belt, “Why don’t we offer this to other companies?”

We always enjoy traveling together for business—it’s such a great opportunity to just go on and on playing with wild business ideas, bouncing them off each other.

He looked at me, a bit confused, “What do you mean?”

“The lead-gen process we’ve built over the past couple of years. I really think other companies would find it valuable.”

“You mean getting meetings for others? Maybe.”

Over the past several years at Genialis—the first company we helped found—we have developed and refined a methodology for sales outreach that works too well to keep a secret. With Genialis positioned as an industry leader in computational precision medicine, and a recognized expert in gene expression based biomarker development, Klemen and I both felt it might be time to start thinking seriously about taking on a new commercial challenge.

At Genialis, we built a repeatable process that enabled us to go from chance meetings at expensive conference booths with low ROI, to consistently scheduling 15 exploratory meetings per month with biopharma executives, using capital-efficient targeted email campaigns. Getting this to work well in the biopharma market was tricky, required tons of experimentation, and no small amount of persistence. Eventually, though, we emerged with something reliable, reproducible, and more than a little bit exciting.

Our approach combines two key elements: First, a meticulously annotated database of biopharma prospects, which we built ourselves. None of the existing databases provided sufficiently detailed information for targeted and sophisticated email campaigns. And second, a highly-customized copywriting process considering several different prospect dimensions at the same time—e.g. roles within target companies, stages of drug programs, disease indications, etc.

Today, four months after our flight to Barcelona, Klemen and I are excited to announce the launch of our new company, Meetings.bio.

Meetings.bio is a sales consultancy that delivers a constant flow of business meetings to companies serving the life sciences & biopharma markets.

“We could become a turn-key lead generation company for the life science industry”, Klemen suggested as we feasted on tapas on Las Ramblas.

“Exactly! That’d be tons of fun.” I nodded with a smile.

“Well, let’s make it happen then!”, he said raising his glass for a toast. “Cheers! To our new adventure!”

We are over the moon about this new endeavor, and can’t wait to apply our skills and resources to help life science companies with lead generation. Genialis will remain our customer, and we’re grateful to our co-founders and senior leadership for their encouragement with Meetings.bio. Thank you!

If you work in sales or business development at a life science company selling into biopharma, let’s talk! There’s a good chance we can help you consistently bring in new business.

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