I loved this story from yesterday’s Independent newspaper about a couple of insane (got to be) self-employed Danish engineers who’ve built their own space rocket.  Costing £41,000 in total, roughly 0.02% of average cost of a Nasa space mission, this rocket will allow them to see the Earth and experience weightlessness for about five minutes before it falls back into the Baltic Sea.

Their quest has been made possible from the donations of between 10p and £2000 from members of the public and sponsors. It kind of reminded me of the yawning gap that exists between the marketing budgets of small biotech and lifescience companies compared to big pharma.  But I’m funny that way.

So.  Let’s say you’ve got about 12p to spend on marketing your lifescience business.  Well, maybe a bit more…but not much.  What could you do to launch your product or service into the stratosphere?

Here are some (relatively inexpensive) initial suggestions.

1.  Launch an online questionnaire or poll, perhaps with a prize draw. I saw one by Salesforce this week, offering an iPad for all participants – only thing that stopped me was the time it would take (30 mins – too long).  Think of what you can do with the outcome: you can gain valuable insight into your market needs and wants; you’ll have a list of people who are interested enough to take part so you can grow your network; you can publish the answers in a blog/tweet or a discussion on LinkedIn (see below) and you’ll raise awareness of your company in a positive, and not annoying, way.

2.  Answer questions and take part in group discussions in LinkedIn. This is something you can just pop in and out of but if you consistently interact with your network and reach beyond your immediate contacts, it’s a great way to break the ice and give you some free credibility in your sector.

3.  Set up a series of direct email campaigns. You can do this yourself via www.mailchimp.com or if you have a Salesforce account, use a free third party app to bolt on a direct mail service, which connects with your database.  Use clear and enticing language though – it has to be immediately compelling.  See www.copyblogger.com for tips and DON’T cut and paste from your papers.

4.  Conduct a webinar.  Use your connections on Twitter/LinkedIn/your contacts database and talk about your technology and how it will help your audience.  You can raise awareness via tactic (3).

5.  Attend a relevant scientific meeting and present a poster. I’m strongly in favour of making sure that any scientist attending a meeting goes with a poster at the very least, and knows how to use that to gain contacts and meetings with potential clients.  I think the distance between the business development and scientific teams has to diminish and this is one way to narrow the gap.  Nobody can afford to send scientists on jollies any more – there has to be some tangible benefit for the good of the company.

6.  Build and nurture your Twitter account. You might not like the idea now, thinking perhaps that this is the realm of Lady Gaga and not Serious Biotech.  There are already a ton of pharma/biotech editors there and an increasing number of investors, senior level directors and researchers gathering in the Twittersphere so I’d strongly argue that it’s already relevant to this sector so why wait?  It takes time to build your following and make valuable connections with otherwise total strangers in your field and you’d be missing another free way to make important connections.

7.  Make sure your website is optimized for search engines. There are some low cost tools available to help and the investment in time will be worth it.  Otherwise you’ve got to wonder why you should bother with a website at all.

8.  Pay Per Click advertising using Google Adwords.

9.  Post a video on YouTube.  See Inkspot Science’s example here – simple, inexpensive and a highly effective way to describe to potential clients how your product will help them- in less than a minute, which is all anyone has these days.

O.K, so the tools might be free or cheap, but the time it takes to learn and use them to the best advantage is by no means trivial.  I know of a couple of small companies who have highly active blogs and Twitter accounts, posting daily on the topics related to their sector, and they manage this by sharing the blog posting and tweeting amongst a team.

With some upfront delineation of the company policies regarding social marketing, (see Roche or Coca Cola for leading examples of this), you’ll set the entire company on the path to business growth and that in the very least, has to be fun whilst it lasts….

How many times have you seen this scenario: the end of the month is approaching, the revenue forecast is looking decidedly shaky and your business development team are grappling for a lucky last-minute break so that everyone can relax for another few weeks?

Then it happens: Panic.  Remonstrations.  Blame.  Job insecurity.

Horrible.  And it’s happening everywhere.  But it’s not necessarily inevitable (even in this climate).  The thing is, short-termism seems to be a common disease that infects  commercial teams because setting up (and maintaining) information systems and monitoring tools is something that is deemed “nice to have” when folk are resource-strapped and over-stretched.

When you’re not just selling widgets….it gets complicated very quickly

When you have a product and service portfolio that incorporate things like professional services, consultancy and niche expertise in combination with proprietary technology, your sales process isn’t going to be straightforward.  For lifescience companies servicing big pharma and biotechs, there’s a great deal of scientific discussion and due diligence in addition to the contractual issues.  Keeping track of where you are in the process of lead-to-closure will be close to impossible if you have more than one sales person on the road and even a meager line-up of potential customers.

Luckily, there are some off-the-shelf web-based resources that you can subscribe to that mean you can keep an eye on your early prospects as well as the late stage deals and understand a lot more about what’s going on in between.  The sooner you do this in the development of your business, the better.  It only gets harder to incorporate your contacts, accounts, deal information and your current and historical conversations.  Plus, you can start to build an unbiased database of information to inform you of business trends and missed opportunities.

Help is At Hand: Online Tools

I’ve had a lot of success with the sales and marketing resources in Salesforce.com over the past few years.  The tools they provide can be readily customized to suit most needs and there is a growing community of third party application providers for anything more specialized (such as direct email campaigns and sophisticated sales monitoring tools, for example).  I’ve certainly no hesitation in recommending it for any business development team (and I’ve no affiliation to them, in case you’re wondering).

Stuff That You Need To Do:

1. Have clear visibility on your early business development pipeline, not just the stuff that will close this month or this quarter.  This will enable you to see whether business development directors have enough in their pipelines to support your growth projections – so you can provide marketing or other support early, when you can actually do something about it.

Break your business pipeline into simple stages and allocate each of your potential deals to them.  Make these stages self-explanatory so you don’t have to look up the definition each time you do something to your potential deal.

2.  Understand where your deals are coming from, so that you can have a better idea of where to concentrate your marketing budget in order to bring in new business.  No more shooting in the dark, wasting money – put the effort in where it yields results.  See trends in the uptake of new product offerings.

Add a picklist of lead sources and make this field compulsory in your database.  It may not matter to your salesperson where the conversation started, but it will matter to the person in charge of your future commercial strategy.

3. See where the hold-ups are. Are the leads of inadequate quality?  How old are your leads; are there hold-ups in the process due to legal/scientific involvement/operations?  How well are you progressing your leads through to closure and do you need help?

Set up monitoring tools (in Salesforce, use the dashboards and set up some customized reports that you can run on a regular basis) to include a chart of average age of leads in each stage, for each BD director.  You can also set up a graph showing number of leads by stage this month versus last month, so you can see at a glance where the recent movement has been in each sales territory.

4. Understand why deals are lost- so you can develop an unbiased understanding of potential issues that may be hampering business development and long-term growth of the business.  It will reduce the subjectivity, give you some numbers to go on and help you to put in place some remedial action.

When you move a potential deal to closed/lost, have a compulsory drop-down list of reasons for losing the deal that’s specific to your customer base.  These may include: lack of budget, competition, de-prioritisation of project, company restructure (sound familiar?).

5.  Make it transparent to everyone – encourage a bit of healthy competition amongst the BD team and see how different territories are performing, at a glance.  You’ll be able to see (again, in an unbiased way) where you need to place more resources; to the sales territory with the heavy early lead pipeline perhaps, in order to help close the deals that are on the table.

In Salesforce you can set up a dashboard that’s visible to your entire BD team and others who may have an interest such as your CFO or CEO.  Include charts such as:
-       bar chart of number of leads by stage for each BD director
-       bar chart of value of leads in each BD director’s pipeline
-       leaderboard of closed/won deal values

Lastly: if you set up monitoring tools…use them!

It’s all very well setting this up, but if you don’t keep a watch on these, it’s a bit of a waste of time and a lost opportunity to put in place corrective action on the basis of good data.  I’m not in favour of just presenting the graphs in their entirety at each weekly BD meeting, but if one of the team takes the time to look at the charts, take down some conclusions and bring those to the table, it would be worth the discussion.

The aim of all of this is to remove the defensive arguments and subjectivity that creeps into BD meetings whenever the numbers look a bit dicey.  Get the data and see where you need help.   It’ll remove the blame game and make everything a lot fairer and lead to a more pleasant working environment for all.

Having achieved its Series B financing and validated its technology with collaborating pharma partners it was ready to take the next step to become a fully commercial screening company, providing screening reagents and protocols for screening both small molecule and antibody drugs.   As is typical of companies at this stage in development, the budget was small and the timeline, tight.

Development of the Brand and Identity

Firstly, we got to grips with the company’s scientific background and its product and service offerings so that we could develop a strong and recognizable brand that would effectively reflect its values and technology.

PharmaDiagnostics’ technology exploits a long-known unusual property of gold whereby any molecular interaction at its surface causes a change in the way it refracts light.  It turns out that this change is quantifiable and occurs in the visible spectrum, making it ideal for use in pharmaceutical screening applications.    The team at PharmaDiagnostics has developed gold nanoparticles in solution form that can be attached to any type of molecule – protein, peptide, chemical fragment or compound.  These can be tested for their interaction with other molecules in high throughput 384- or 96-well formats by a simple “mix and read” protocol, using an off-the-shelf absorbance plate reader to obtain the results.  As a result, pharma and biotech customers can take the solutions into their own labs to screen their compound libraries without having to procure new equipment or adapt lab space.

As it turns out, gold nanoparticles in solution are not sparkly and gold in colour as I had imagined, but a sort of burgundy red (pink when diluted) and it turns a shade of purple when there’s a chemical interaction taking place.  This was the basis for the logo design.

Before:

old logo

After:

New logo

Gold nanoparticles in solution, simple protocols, simple product and service offerings are reflected in the logo design.  An inordinate amount of time was spent in getting the colours to match the bottles of gold nanoparticle solution.  I am glad that it didn’t end up being yet another blue logo (is it me or is this the default colour for all pharma service companies?).

As for the product and technology branding, we prompted for the name “SoPRano™” which is derived from Surface Plasmon Resonance with nanoparticles.  Some gentle, dry sense of humour was involved but actually it was surprisingly easy to use against the product lines and gave a hint of the elegance of the technology.

Website design

From this:

old tech-focused website

Technology-focused, science-heavy content, no clear product/service definitions or positioning.

To this:

new website and branding

Bright, clear navigation concentrating on clearly defined products and their applications within pharma/biotech early discovery.

To see more, visit their website.

Key messages – keeping them simple, clear and honest

The company was refreshingly pragmatic and honest in its approach to key message development.  They wanted to be known as the experts in label-free screening and that’s all.  It is a small company with clever, unique technology that will fit easily into mainstream early drug discovery so it is likely that they will be acquired at some stage by a larger establishment servicing the same target market.  There was no need for grandiosity as is common in this sector so phrases like “partners in drug discovery” etc were not used.

We identified key words and messages and constructed the website using these in headers and in page descriptions.  As a result, we were able to write the web copy with search engine optimisation in mind, rather than “retrofit” SEO, as is the norm for most company websites.

The finished product took a few weeks to perfect but it gave the tools and templates for the rest of the company’s branding – from the exhibition stand, letterheads, slide templates, sales product sheets to e-newsletters.

The result: distinctive and consistent corporate identity and strong branding for a clever company which now has the tools to do business.

It seems that most biotechs are seriously behind the curve when it comes to considering publicity as part of their aim to raise customer and investor awareness.   They often gauge their level of PR investment purely by the number of press releases they send out a month.

Directors will ask for evidence that their PR effort is working by the number of online news services or trade journals that have picked up their piece.  Perhaps they’ll check out their website visitor stats during a PR push.   New tools such as Twitter Trending seem far out in the distance.

The issue is: have you really got an interesting story to tell, one that your customers or potential investors might actually want to read (and pass on)?

Before you start, maybe you should consider this piece of wisdom.  For a small start-up or biotech writing a press release, sending it to the newswires and selling it in to the editors takes time, money, effort that could be used elsewhere.

Good timing doesn’t cost anything but can make a massive difference

Last week’s proposed shake-up of the banking system by President Obama came on the same day that Goldman Sachs announced it had made $13bn (£8bn) in profits and that its staff would enjoy average pay packets of $498,000.  A coincidence?  Unlikely.

The clever timing added weight to the surprise punch.  The result:  populist approval following the Massachusetts battering and the UK government clambering to catch up now that its own remedies were looking decidedly weedy in comparison.

Not just a press release – a story

Let’s say you’re a small tech start-up and you’ve got another round of investment following commercial validation of your technology.  You want to raise your profile amongst future customers and investors.  You might think that your service offering or technology is “cutting edge” or “innovative” (see here for words to avoid) but your aim here is to get the story printed or circulated online.  For that you need a newsworthy “hook” and good timing.

It helps to put your announcement in context – tie it to a global conference or emerging issue, regulatory change, competitive landscape, or common problem.  Spell out why your news should matter.

Starting out?  Some useful resources:

Communications Agencies Specializing in Lifescience/Biotech/Pharma :

Kapler Communications

Tudor-Reilly

College Hill

Online PR submissions:

Biotech online news release service

PRweb.com online distribution service

It’s worth noting that all the biotech trade press and news services are on Twitter these days, so it’s worth tweeting your press release with a grabby headline.

For a handy list of things that you should consider when writing a press release, see here.

This two-dimensional porcine character has successfully captured the minds of two- and three-year olds throughout Britain. She exists, along with her little winy brother and long-suffering parents in a substantial detached family home perched on an impossibly shaped hill. Nothing bad ever happens and they do really boring stuff. Her astute musings, questions and petulant attitude have been adopted widely by her target audience. Her cartoon strip and associated merchandise has made someone extremely rich.

I’m in admiration for this little pig not because her play-doh stamp figurines keep my little ones amused for minutes on end, but because of the time and care that her creators have taken to really “get” their audience.

A book entitled “Peppa Goes Recycling” is a case in point. Peppa and co sort their rubbish into plastics, paper and the like and take a trip to the local recycle centre. Utter banality. Yet it kept my fidgety three-year old enraptured to the extent that when I suggested that we sort out the recycling and take a trip to the local dump, she squealed with glee. Never would I have thought that such a grimy and frankly, boring activity would have appealed to my otherwise anything-pink-and-purply-with-sparkles-dolly-loving daughter.

And that’s my point, really. You may think that you know your target market, but really, you don’t.

Many a time I’ve enjoyed brainstorming new product and service concepts around the water cooler, or by a white board the size of a wall with extremely clever people, coming up with unique product ideas that should have served a pre-conceived unmet need. Not until we talked to honest and freely-speaking potential customers did we discover the reality.

If your innovation requires customers to adopt a new approach, a change of mindset or the creation of a whole new market, beware. Just consider what Peppa would have done.

Becoming “more commercial” in approach is typically something people think about after Series A funding when new investors put on the pressure develop more rigorous business practices, or if the founder decides to exit the business through retirement or a management changeover.

From “tech-led” business development to commercial best practices: a great opportunity

First of all, the advent of a new commercial way of thinking and doing business should be a great opportunity.    It’s a time to rethink the business offering, perhaps examine new applications of the technology, explore potential new markets and services that may have been overlooked in the past.  As you establish and grow a small biotech, there is enormous pressure to stand behind a single idea and ignore other potential avenues – through single-minded dogged determination to prove your personal beliefs or simply as a result of the shear focus that you need to put into creating a new market for a new innovation.  Not to mention the limited budget that precludes spreading yourself too thinly.

Secondly, it is pretty risky for a small business to be so heavily reliant on one person for a prolonged period of time.

So how can you effectively replicate what the founder has done so far in terms of building the business?

1. Define what you’re actually selling: your products and services. Sounds funny, but until this point many start-up biotechs don’t actually do this.  Business is built out of peer-level consultations and each “deal” is a result of piecing together the scientific components to meet the needs of each client on a case-by-case basis.  The idea of defining the “product” often only comes afterwards.
2. Capture the key messages that are inside your founder’s head.  Don’t just take his/her slides.  They are usually useless without the anecdotes, statistics and personality that your founder uses to accompany them.  You need to capture those – in note form to start with and distil them down to a set of key phrases that describe the business offering and benefits.
3. Think about your different audiences: the financial community, potential acquirers or partners, your customers.  Develop a set of key messages tailored to each of your different audiences and assemble the case studies, data, statistics, financials and competitive comparisons that will support each statement.    Your founder probably does this on the fly but your next team of business developers won’t have the background to do this.
4. Carve out your commercial budget. In the past, your founder/CSO might have attended conferences, given talks, attended networking meetings etc.  They will have flown here and there to meet clients.  Similarly, other technical staff members may have presented posters.  Make no mistake: this was your marketing effort.  The costs for these activities may have been distributed over different budgets so you may have little idea of just how much you have been spending on marketing to date.  Now you need to carve out a budget that enables you to go out and achieve more in order to feed the business development pipeline.   You will need to assess your return on investment for your marketing efforts – hence the need for a consolidated budget.
5. Develop a communications plan. You need to assemble your case studies and supporting data so that you can develop a fresh set of materials for new white papers, editorials, blog posts, press releases and posters.  Third party agencies or freelance technical writers can write all of these things in future.  Don’t think that you can rely on the founder’s publication archives forever.  If you’re not fresh, people think that you’re just waiting things out until the money dries up.
6. Make a tactical marketing strategy for the year.  Your founder may have been asked give talks or chair meetings or forums.  You can achieve the same level of external presence but it takes planning and sometimes you have to pay for a speaker slot (by sponsoring a conference for example).  All these require advance planning – they won’t drop into your lap any longer.
7. Define the fundamental business development process.  Until now, forecasting may not have happened regularly or formally.   Break down your business development pipeline into leads, prospects, opportunities, contracts, and record those that have been closed/won and closed/lost (along with the reasons).  I recommend Salesforce.com to help you do this – it will make the business pipeline more transparent and help you to understand the sources of your leads and marketing ROI.
8. Develop a set of marketing materials that will be used by a BD team. They are not the same as those used by the technical founder who will undoubtedly be used to giving a lecture-style presentation.  Slides need to be strongly visual with clear key messages backed up by sufficient supporting evidence.  See here for how to develop a good slide set.
9. Identify and develop your next generation of technical experts. As you develop the business and recruit more operational team members you will spot the rising stars – those technically- minded individuals who can also communicate well.  Take them on road trips to see your clients, let them present at posters and on podiums and get them on the exhibit stand at a busy conference.  Not only will you develop your next scientific gurus but you’ll also reduce that yawning chasm that often exists between the business development team and the people who work in the lab.  Good will come out of this!