Pharmaceutical Business Development – Best Practice tips – Part 2

Tip #2 – There is no such thing as location, online.

Your traditional pharmaceutical marketing efforts will naturally focus on pulling in leads for sales from your specific region, and you will be tempted to aim for the same online. But online is different. There is no such thing as “where are you from” online.

You can look at this from two angles – it literally opens up the whole world for your lead-gen team; and at the same time it makes things a little more complicated for business development as they may face the prospect of having to follow up on fully qualified, cash-rich leads in Sydney, Singapore, Shanghai, Saint Petersburg, Stuttgart, Sao Paolo and San Antonio. (We have seen this before – and it is a nice problem to have.)

So how is your pharma business development team going to handle the situation? Are you going to insist on leads from your country only? Are you going to risk taking a bigger geo-focus? Here are a few pros and cons.

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If you stick to your existing geo-region market, you have a tighter control over the entire process, have the benefit of the home turf and have the experience to service these customers better. However, you are also stuck in the same competitive landscape, without the opportunity to grow substantially. You do not have the ability to significantly restructure or influence the market to your advantage. You are relying on the same lead-gen channels and practices and compete for the same limited number of potential customers that all your local competitors are. So while you should definitely treat leads from your primary geo as sizzling hot, for growth opportunities, sieze the day and consider lead carefully from other geos as well.

The very nature of biotechnology business development is that the whole industry is global, and although your business may have started out as a very local venture, growth and business scalability require a vision of a global business. This is where taking pharmaceutical marketing online can help your business explore opportunities while mitigating risks. For example, you can still set up your booth and make a presentation at a conference in your region, but you can safely explore what the global markets look like with reasonable investment into online channels. Your hottest local leads will still come from your face to face meeting at the conference, but your business development directors will have the opportunity to follow up on leads from the larger region or even from other continents without exposing the business to excessive costs or unwarranted investment.