Estimated reading time: 5 mins
Avoiding common mistakes enables businesses that serve pharma and life sciences companies to launch new services faster, engage more prospective clients, accelerate the sales process, and maximize profitable outcomes.
In our experience working both within the industry and as consultants to companies who offer products and services to biopharma, we’ve found that common business mistakes generally occur around these three areas: Messaging, Marketing, and Management.
We’ll explore each of these types of mistakes in a 3-part series, beginning with messaging.
Overcoming the Obstacles that are Preventing Your Message from Reaching Your Target Audience
Messaging mistakes center around failing to communicate your company’s value proposition in a way that resonates with your target audience. For businesses that serve pharma companies, it’s paramount to articulate the main benefits prospective clients will receive instead of conveying information about your brand or the mechanism behind your solution. Prospective clients don’t care about your product, they care about the benefits your product delivers.
Messaging Mistake #1: Selling the product instead of the insight
Solution selling has been a go-to sales tactic for several decades now. The main principle behind it is sound: by promoting the solution to your clients’ problems, rather than your product, you give your prospects a more tangible reason to do business with you. The pharma industry in particular “demands expertise in solutions selling, based on the needs of the customer rather than the attributes of individual products or services,” writes James Robinson, Eye for Pharma.
But, in a changing landscape where 77% of B2B buyers educate themselves before beginning the purchasing process, selling solutions is becoming more and more difficult because buyers have a better grasp on their current problems and how to fix them. Companies marketing to today’s pharma market should focus on selling insights.
“B2B buyers are coming to the table more prepared and better educated than ever before. In many cases, they’ve already honed in on a desired solution and, as a result, they no longer appreciate a solution selling approach that relies on open-ended questions aimed at diagnosing their needs,” writes Falon Fatemi, Forbes.
This creates opportunities for companies that can offer insights to prospective clients. “The key to insights selling is to leverage a deep understanding of customers to establish trust and rapport with buyers. Instead of probing the buyer with questions (as per the traditional solution selling approach), sales professionals must come to the table prepared to be a proactive source of value for customers.”
The sage advice to “sell the problem, not the product” works well using an insight-driven strategy because the insights you develop are what set you apart from others in your niche. By offering these insights, you provide value to your prospective clients and demonstrate your expertise.
This approach is so powerful that as many as 94% of B2B decision makers want to do business with companies that can provide insights into their problems. And, these buyers are 5x more likely to engage with salespeople who offer insights about their business.
Here’s a way to illustrate the difference between solution selling and insight selling: solution selling is telling your prospects what is keeping them up at night; insight selling is telling them what should be keeping them up at night.
This strategy “provides a new angle on the situation” rather than “aligning with a company’s prevailing outlook,” write authors Philip Lay, Todd Hewlin, and Geoffrey Moore, Harvard Business Review.
To actually sell insights requires identifying emerging problems that will resonate with your target company, developing insights around these problems that align with your capabilities, and offering these insights to a decision-maker who has the power to bring you on board to implement your solution.
Messaging Mistake #2: Focusing on promotion instead of education
As we noted above, most B2B buyers today research the solutions to their problems before reaching out to a company to help them. This requires businesses to focus more on developing resources for prospective clients to learn and less on pushing out purely promotional material. “By educating your target audience, they will be more likely to think about your offering when they need a solution to that particular problem you solve,” writes Thomas Oppong, Entrepreneur.
Recently, our team received a request from one of the top 10 international consulting firms for help with positioning themselves as an authority within their target pharma audience. We didn’t attract this prospect by promoting ourselves. Instead, they found us through the content we’ve published on the value of inbound marketing for businesses that sell to pharma companies.
Promoting your product and educating your prospective clients are two different activities. “A lot of companies believe they're educating their consumers because they're elaborating upon the features, advantages, and benefits of their products. What's relevant to the consumer, however, isn't what the company values about its own product, but what the product can do to solve a problem for him,” writes Mark Quinn, Business Insider.
Buyers who have a fuller understanding of the industry and how changing dynamics can impact their companies are more open to learning about how your solutions can help them.
“When you're marketing to people, you're trying to sell them on your products. When you're educating people, you're helping them understand the benefit of a solution. Consumers can find information anywhere these days, but when it comes from you, the benefit is twofold: you establish a more knowledgeable customer base while you develop loyalty.”
Messaging Mistake #3: Communicating features instead of value
Businesses that serve pharma companies often get bogged down in communicating the features of their solutions instead the value it offers to prospective clients. While it’s important for prospects to understand features, your product’s bells and whistles aren’t likely to close the deal. To hook prospective buyers, they need to understand the positive outcomes of working with you.
For pharma, the main benefit they are usually most interested in is how your product affects their bottom line. Whether it’s through saving money or increasing profit, leading with the tangible ROI of your product is often a good strategy when marketing to biopharma and life sciences companies.
Creating value for pharma companies “demands a creative assessment of what…services can provide a more commercially-attractive proposition,” writes Robinson. Businesses that serve pharma “must first determine what each individual buyer perceives as value as part of a more consultative sales approach, before an appropriate proposition can be put together which can have a winning appeal.”
To communicate your value, “start with the business goal that the customer would like to achieve–then tie that value to a specific benefit generated by a particular feature,” writes Geoffrey James, Inc.
By aligning your value-add with your prospects’ goals and challenges, you can demonstrate that you understand their needs and are the best choice for delivering the ROI your prospects are seeking.
A Winning Combination: Cultivating Insights, Educating Prospects, and Delineating Value
To attract prospective pharma clients and convince them to purchase your solution requires developing relevant insights on emerging problems, educating them on how to address these problems, and delineating the value you offer and your approach to solving their problems.
When your business is ready to amp up its pharma prospects and close more deals, contact us to learn more about how we help companies like yours succeed.
In the meantime, visit our expanding library of resources to explore proven strategies for reaching your target audience and converting them into clients.
