Breaking Into a New Market With a New Service
An established company providing specialist formulation services to the large pharmaceutical sector wanted to grow its business by applying its core capabilities to address new needs in the market. It had developed a reputation for solving formulation development and manufacturing problems but saw an increasing need amongst smaller biotechs for its trusted experience in developing workable formulation strategies, delivering new or improved formulations and providing small-scale manufacturing for early clinical trials.

This is a crowded market so it was critical to identify the company’s differentiating capabilities and to spell out how it could address the various issues facing the biotech industry. The sales team needed to have the new sales messages in their minds so that they could engage easily with potential customers.

Here’s What We Did

1. Identified New Sales Messages for a New Market
I sat down with the sales team and a white board for a day to help them understand their potential customers, what issues their customers were facing and how the company should effectively position their services in order to win business.

Firstly we identified 4 main types of target audience by industry sector and the nature of the drugs in their development pipelines. For each audience type we outlined the main issues that they are facing. This helped us to clarify how the company’s services addressed these different market needs.

As we developed the key messages we considered 3 important aspects, namely: positioning, differentiation and credibility in order to maximise their impact with the target audiences.

We ended up with 4-5 general messages that could be used to describe the company overall, a similar number of messages for each audience type and a set of service-specific messages to convey their value and relevance to the industry.

2. Developed a Guiding Sales Presentation To Help The BD Team ….
I’m not one for Powerpoint presentations in sales meetings, but they are the default sales tool of choice. I took the view that a new slide set should at least provide the sales team with a useful training tool and that it would enable them to open discussions even if they didn’t use the slides at all.

We constructed a new slide deck incorporating clear visuals and concepts to convey how the company used its differentiating capabilities and expertise to address the drug formulation and manufacturing issues.

3. Developed a Set of Introductory Emails
I used the key messages from the workshop to build some simple emails for the different target audiences, with the key aim of setting up introductory meetings. The key thing was to keep them short, including a compelling reason for engaging and a clear invitation to meet up. The sales team took them, added their own personalisation and ran their own territory campaigns using the mass emailing capabilities within Salesforce.com.

The outcome?
Using these new resources, the BD team were able to confidently and effectively reposition the company’s core capabilities and services and engage with its new market . The company is now winning contracts under its new core services.