Workshop: Shape your message specifically for each partner
After months of work you are finally face-to-face with a potential partner who can change the future of your company. Now what do you say?
BIO-Europe offers participants a powerful business development toolkit and the perfect setting for pure partnering. More than 10,000 meetings will take place over two days as 2,500 executives gather in Vienna.
Yet success depends on the first five minutes of conversation between the two partners.
An impressive panel of business development executives will focus on this issue in a special interactive workshop at the start of BIO-Europe 2009 on Monday, November 2 at 9:00, entitled, “Honing the Perfect Pitch: Using Communications to Get Results.”
“People who still believe they can just throw things out there in a meeting and see what sticks will not be successful in partnering today,” said Gayle Mills, CEO of ROXRO Pharma , who will participate in the panel discussion.
Joining Mills on the panel are executives from Johnson & Johnson, Sorrento Therapeutics and Merck Sharp & Dohme.
“At heart, business development people are sales people, and the same passions and skills that have always worked will also work today,” she told partneringNEWS™. “Getting past a business development mindset is essential to success.”
“Proposing programs or technologies today requires getting to know your potential partners very, very well. You need to expand your relationships throughout the partnering organization. And you need to tell them in a compelling way how your product or technology will change the world for that partner,” Mills said.
“It is crucial to articulate a very differentiated story,” she said. “More than saying your project is important, everyone wants to hear that at a future point your program is going to deliver a significant value, a demonstrable benefit.”
“A compelling message will be built around these points and honing your pitch means having a message specific to each company and not just memorizing a general sales pitch,” she explained.
“Explain the unmet medical need your proposed product will meet, this is a critical topic today,” she said. “Talk about the patient populations being addressed and ultimately why this process or product will be different or better.”
“Partners are asking reimbursement questions even for Phase I projects, and this is new,” she said. “A business development person needs to be knowledgeable about pricing and reimbursement policies in the category where they are working. They also need to know what they are allowed to say about their product, as well as what they are not permitted to say.”
“On the technology side there is a different challenge,” she continued. “Here you need to demonstrate tangible benefits as well, and these include showing your technology will shorten development times, or else increase the probability of success, or else generate a product that will be distinct.”
“In the past a more intuitive sell of benefits could work,” she reflected, “there was more enthusiasm for any new technology, there was more willingness to try new new ideas. There was less focus on getting to endpoints and how a new product or process was going to ultimately distinguish itself.”
“Today it is crucial partners are convinced that you understand the commercial environment your proposed product will enter. It is not just more difficult, it is more expensive. There are companies in pre-clinical development that are conducting very detailed marketing research with physicians regarding their product.”
“A very positive development is the amount of information and the tools for communication available today,” she concluded. “Both big pharma and small biotechs are reaching out to share information, and business development people need to take advantage of this.”
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