I just received a call from “M”, my totally competent and wonderful household helper.  The call went like this:

“Hi Karen, I just thought I’d call you because I’ve had a cancellation this week, so I’ve got a slot available.  I know you said you wanted more help with the ironing this week.  Do you want me to come round, as well as your usual slot?”

She’d remembered that I had visitors coming and filled in her vacant slot with an existing customer.  Simple.

It got me thinking about the situation I see in life science technology and service businesses who are launching new products and services.  How many times have I seen them include a way to introduce these new offerings to their existing clients, as part of their launch strategy (if they even have one, but that’s another topic)?

Take a new application for a bioanalysis service, or a new reagent for antibody research, or even a new clinical research service that offers a quicker/faster solution for Phase I testing?  The emphasis for these new product and service launches always seems to be on how to attract new business via marketing tactics: direct email announcements, a webinar, a press release and trade journal articles, etc.

Nothing wrong with that, but these activities tend to overlook the obvious “low-hanging fruit”: your existing customers. Out of the top 35 pharmaceutical companies and top 200 biotechnology companies, a certain percentage of these will be working with you already; perhaps on an ongoing project, or planning the next contract, or perhaps they’ve recently completed a project with you.  Are you expecting them to just find out about your new product or service, via your marketing efforts?

How about, as part of your marketing planning for the new service/product roll-out, you prioritise a simple phone call to your key project manager or important decision maker in all of your current, imminent and recent clients, to just let them know about this new offering?  A call from your account manager, business director or even better, your project manager, would be a personal way to introduce the new offering in terms that are relevant and specific to each individual client.  It only takes a few minutes, but being an existing client, you don’t need to overcome the hurdles of winning their trust or embarking on a lengthy contract process, as you’ve already done this.  Plus, it’s a great excuse to just keep the communication channels open.

So, why not include your existing clients in your new product/service launch plan?

Step Away From The Excel Spreadsheet.  Step. Slowly. Away.

I know how hard it is to move away from Excel.  All my account finances are organised in there; I colour in little rows and columns in a systematic way, every month (at least to me) and it all works.  Very slowly.  Not very efficiently.  The challenge is to find the time to find something better, yet I know that once I’ve done this I’ll have more time to dedicate to revenue-generating activities.

The same goes for the CEO or Commercial Director, who has taken sole responsibility for the company’s revenue stream.  Trusty old spreadsheets or basic contact databases work O.K to start with, but keeping track of early leads and seeing how they are (or are not) progressing into closed contracts quickly becomes impossible.  Contact lists, email marketing, lists of contacts made at conferences; business cards from face-to-face sales meetings may be dealt with separately.  Invoicing and forecast generation might be performed on yet more disparate systems.  The result is a cumulative business inefficiency which leads to a lack of transparency for operational managers, board members and investors alike.  Not to mention the completely boring and unnecessary monthly tasks that are created as a result of using different systems that aren’t integrated.

Without a readily accessible and easy to use CRM, it’s worth bearing in mind that a company increases its business risk every day that it’s in operation, because revenue-critical information is kept in places that can’t be easily retrieved if something goes wrong.  What if your best sales person falls ill, or leaves (as they frequently do)?  How will your company quickly pick up the loose ends and progress the deals that are in his/her pipeline?  I’ve seen entire sales territory revenues crash (nearly taking the company with it) when a good sales guy leaves taking valuable deal information with him.

Fortunately (or perhaps, unfortunately), a seemingly endless choice of customer relationship management (CRM) software systems are available to take care of these problems.  Ranging from the simple and free online service for the single business owner, to multi-functional app-ready cloud computing resources for the global enterprise, there appears to be a solution that fits pretty much everyone (see here for a sponsored free guide to the top 40 CRMs).  In my view, this actually puts up one extra barrier to adoption because the market is so crowded and confusing.

Senior directors of most small to medium technology/service providers need to quickly retrieve a revenue forecast, see a snapshot of marketing return on investment and monitor business development team and individual performance.  Their sales teams just need to view their accounts and active deals, see what to do today, make the calls they need to make and progress the contacts.

The following is a list of essentials that a CRM system needs to make their lives easier, reduce their risk exposure, keep the mundane monthly spreadsheet shuffling in check and keep everyone informed of progress:

1.  Generate short, mid and longer term revenue forecasts, by maintaining information about each deal size, stage, close date and degree of confidence that the deal will close.

2.  Produce a ready overview of the sales pipeline.  For this to work, there needs to be a defined and agreed sales process that every BD member understands and adheres to, but the CRM should be able to generate accessible dashboard graphics of the state of the entire pipeline as well as individual BD staff member performances, at a click of a button.

3.  Be a central repository of all conversations, emails and documents relating to deals and accounts. This should be a simple process which enables the sales people on the road to update deals and accounts even without  thinking – by syncing with their mobile devices, using default settings that remove all the excuses.

4.  Remove ANY need for record-keeping, including calendars and task-setting, outside of the CRM.  Actually, for most CRMs out there, even the big ones, this appears to be a tall order.  It comes down to finding a system that’s easy to use and works with (or instead of) Microsoft Outlook, especially when using mobile devices.

5.  Keep track of where deals are coming from so you know where best to concentrate your budget and time in order to bring in new business in the future. Do they come from market research, conferences, webinars, PR, email campaigns?  What worked?  What didn’t?

6.  Record WHY deals are lost - to develop an unbiased understanding of potential issues that may be hampering business development and long-term growth of the business. Competition in a certain sales territory? Price? Project re-prioritisations in large pharma accounts?  You can use this information to improve products, positioning or pricing strategies.

7.  Make marketing activities transparent and easy to manage.  Use integrated apps to compose, send and track email campaigns, for example. Feed leads from the website directly into the system for sales people to act on.  Automatically record the leads and contacts that have been generated as a result of marketing activities.  Used effectively, a CRM helps communications between sales and marketing so that leads can be quickly acted upon, and doors that have been opened can be stepped through.

The bells and whistles that are being added to CRMs increases daily.  Not all of them are useful (personally I think this might be apply to over 50% of Salesforce functionality).  The key is to find a simple system that does most of these well, with an intuitive functionality which means you don’t have to go on a course to learn how to use it.

Have you found a system that works well for your business?  Let me know!

If you need help choosing, customising or using a CRM effectively, I can help you.   Just get in touch.

This post is by Karen Skidmore of www.CanDoCanBe.com

Clue: it’s not the guy at the helm.

Now, if you were a participant in “The Apprentice” (BBC1, 9pm Wednesdays but really, don’t bother), the skipper would be planted firmly at the wheel, bellowing vague instructions peppered with profanity and a complete lack of strategy or contingency planning.  When it goes wrong, as it inevitably will, he or she will duck the blame and point the finger at a random person (usually the Quiet-But-Actually-Quite-Productive-One). And for that he/she will be handsomely rewarded with a chance to repeat the process the following week.  His/her unfortunate team mates, having observed that finger pointing can be richly rewarded (whereas calmly getting on with the job is not), will follow suit by piling blame on to the Quiet-But-Actually-Quite-Productive-One in a thinly veiled ploy to fend off criticism of their own poor performance.  During this miserable experience, there would be a hefty abundance of manipulation and back stabbing, coupled with cringe-worthy self aggrandisement, just for good measure. Oh, and a sunken boat.

In this case though, Charlie (left) and Andy (right) are two of my friends and ex-colleagues who, along with able SeaPerson Jane (at the navigation charts, off camera) and me (making the tea), ran a tight(ish) ship, calmly and safely navigating coastline and rivers of the East Coast of England.

Despite encountering challenging 35 knot winds gusting gale force 7 and the fact that the nearest I’ve come to sailing is the cross Channel ferry, we sailed this beautiful 34-foot yacht from the River Ore to The Naze on the East Coast of England without a single cross word.  A harmonious team, with good banter and a lot of hilarity.

An Example Of Good Leadership

It made me think about what makes good leadership and why some companies manage to retain their staff and nurture them to their full potential even during challenging times, whilst others fight against high staff turnover, miserable morale and poor performance.

Our skipper, Andy would never fit the Apprentice Mould.  He issues polite, calm and clear instructions and he’s perfectly happy to let others take on critical tasks on his ship.  He’s also happy to wade in when it gets a bit dicey.    It’s amazing to see what a few words of encouragement, support and good humour can achieve.  The critical thing in sailing, which also applies to business, is the preparation and planning:  outline what you need to achieve, discuss how it might be done, but also what options to implement, in case things go wrong.  We approached our berth in a sideways 35 knot wind and I was struck by the discussion of how to tackle the various scenarios, and how clearly everyone received their separate instructions to achieve safe docking without chopping a chunk out of any neighbouring boats.  And we docked with quite a bit of aplomb, I must say.

How Can We Fix Apprentice-Like Business Environments?

Obviously The Apprentice isn’t Real Life, but there are elements of human behaviour on display that I recognise from certain organisations and I’m fearful that there is an increasing percentage of business people who emanate  Lord Sugar et al in a bid to take the next step up their wretched career ladders.  If it were up to me, I would change the Apprentice format so that the participants form teams to trouble-shoot real business issues for real businesses with the best solution being judged by a panel of business leaders.  It would be far more varied, interesting and relevant to the “flog-as-much-as-you-can-and-the-highest-revenue-wins” scenarios that are continuously replayed in different guises in this tired program.  And let’s replace Lord Sugar with someone who can actually spot talent when they’re not screaming “I’m so brilliant, hire me and I’ll prove it”, ignores hearsay and actually gets a new team to pull together to deliver great results.

I think if every potential leader were to take a trip on Andy’s boat and take the learning to the office, the business world would be a far less stressful, more productive and pleasant place to work.

fight choreography? Definitely niche..

I was driving along to a meeting last week and caught an interesting snippet on BBC Radio 4′s Woman’s Hour about an interesting woman with an unusual career.  Kate Waters is one of only two women out of the 22 theatre fight directors on the Equity Register and works regularly all over the country. Kombat Kate, as she’s known, is fight director on two current National Theatre productions in which the exciting fights are crucial to the drama – Nicholas Hytner’s award-winning Hamlet and Nick Dear’s new play Frankenstein.  She’s also choreographed pub punch-ups in Corrie.

So Why Did I Find Kombat Kate So Interesting?

Kate did an intelligent thing at drama school. Realising that she wasn’t going to cut it as an actor, she decided to focus on the thing that made her heart pump louder: choreographing fight scenes.  It seemed to combine her interest in performing arts with her skills in the martial arts, which she had begun at the (not so) tender age of seven.

It piqued my interest because she had the foresight to channel her energy and her future career development strategy (that she had one at that age is impressive in my book) towards something that was very niche.  Now that she’s a highly sought after director, her strategy seems to have paid off.

Small Technology Company?  Think Niche.

Considering the marketing strategies for new technology start-ups in the life sciences, I think many of them could take a leaf out of Kombat Kate’s book.  The tendency is always to go broad.  Think of the biggest potential market for your product and go for that.  Investors will love the potential $$$ presented to them: “all we have to do is go out and flog it”.

In fact the opposite may well be true, or at least worth considering – especially for small companies with limited marketing budgets (ie all small companies).  Better to be a niche, specialist provider of a product that matches a specific market need precisely than try to compete with, say a large CRO  or life science catalogue company who has the marketing muscle to squash you into insignificance when it comes to a broad technology or service offering.

Niche Marketing?  Think Internet.

The beauty about niche is that you can centre your website, social media marketing strategy (you’ll have to get one) around your niche – focusing your key messages towards a specific market need and stuffing your site/tweets/blog with related keywords, for example.  Soon you’ll be on page one of the search engine ranking pages, and then you’ll start to get interest in your technology/services just from people doing searches in Google.  And none of it needs to cost a lot – just knowledge of how social media and search engine optimisation (SEO) work.

So your marketing costs can be considerably less than if you aimed your sights at the broader market, but your revenue stream need not be.  You’ll attract interest from the global marketplace to your niche product.  Think of all those strange book titles in Amazon.  See this post for more reading – it’s called the Long Tail.

Relevant to Life Sciences?

Say you’ve got a particular bioanalysis technology.  Rather than focusing your efforts on servicing all of the potential applications in pharmaceutical drug discovery and development, for example, think where one or two specific unmet needs are and focus on those.  A particular part of the early development of biologics/biosimilars, for example?  A highly targeted internet campaign on this issue may yield more relevant business leads than a scattergun approach involving flying your BD team all over the US.

So what are your experiences?  Do you agree or disagree?  Let me know your thoughts.

This is the second part of a series of posts on biomarkers.  For the first one, click here…

The pharma industry, investors and company founders are now realising the potential of biomarkers to transform drug discovery and development.  Worldwide, major bio industry conferences are discussing new applications, potential collaborations and emerging technologies in well-attended, dedicated biomarker sessions.

The growth potential of this field is staggering.  Recent estimates predict that the global biomarker industry will be worth in the region of $26.5billion in just over four years time. This would represent growth in the size of the industry of 20.2 per cent since 2007.

Why Now?  Environment and Appetite for Biomarker Deal-Making

The buzz is understandable: the success-to-failure ratio has declined over the last decade while the cost to bring a new drug to market has skyrocketed.  So the heat is on to find objective, valid, and measurable ways to determine whether a drug works or doesn’t work—and what patients it works in—as early as possible in the discovery process.

Oncology leads the way in applying biomarkers as companion diagnostics, prognostic markers and as surrogate endpoints.  In 2006 it represented 30% of the biomarker discovery market, trailed by cardiology at 25% and neurology at 20%. New applications in Alzheimer’s Disease (for prognosis evaluations) and other CNS disorder, anti-infectives, immune disease and inflammatory disease are next in line.  Using a companion test — whether it looks for genetic, proteomic, or gene expression markers — to predict whether a drug will work in someone or what kind of dose that person should take is becoming more common and, according to some experts, will eventually become the norm.

The environment for the uptake of biomarkers is conducive: payers can see how biomarkers could cut costs by identifying the patients who will benefit most from expensive therapies; patients will get a better idea of their prognosis and experience fewer unnecessary side-effects; pharma could potentially rescue drugs by identifying and removing clinical trial subjects who would otherwise exhibit toxic side-effects.

Collaborations Will Be Critical To Bring New Biomarkers to Market

The challenges to newcomers in biomarker discovery are substantial though, as outlined in this previous post.  Companies need to assemble a wealth of clear clinical correlation evidence in order to gain regulatory approval necessary for companion diagnostics and clinical diagnostics, and neither big pharma nor the typical biomarker start-up will have the internal resources, funds, access to clinical data, niche expertise and analytical capabilities to achieve what is necessary here.

The answer lies in collaborations and deal-making between pharma, academia niche CROs, discovery platform companies and data analysis experts and resources.  The number of biomarker deals recorded in PharmaVentures’ PharmaDeals® database shows a rise from just seven in 2001 to 130 in 2007.  Clearly we’re seeing the start of things to come.

Valuations Need to Be Realistic: Biomarker and Therapeutic Need Each Other!

Of the deals done in 2007, pure biomarker deals were of less total value than the therapeutic deals, and there were significantly fewer of them. Only one biomarker deal exceeded $1 billion. Only two involved an upfront payment. By comparison, all therapeutic deals in the same period involved an upfront payment to the licensor.