Best Marketing Strategies for Life Science Companies in 2026

If you're marketing a life science product or service today, the strategies that worked five years ago simply won't cut it anymore. And over the last few years, we've helped more than 85 different life science companies generate pipeline and close deals with biotech, pharma, academic customers. Working directly with companies selling everything from lab instruments to software platforms. We've seen exactly what's working right now and what's becoming obsolete. And so in today's video, I'm breaking down the marketing strategies that are actually driving results for life science companies today based on real campaigns we've run and the data that we're seeing across the industry. Let's dive in. All right, so the first thing that we're going to talk about is hyper personalized outbound campaigns. And this is our bread and butter over here at Succession. The first thing I want to start about is where we see generic outreach fail, especially when you're targeting a very scientific audience. Scientists are technical in nature, and so they can immediately identify when a message isn't relevant, when it's been templatized, when it's been generically put together and sent out once to many. And so in many of the campaigns that we run, we achieve sometimes over a 10% reply rate simply by using highly specific, scientifically accurate messaging, especially when we're targeting a highly specific targeted group. And so if you compare that to the industry average of your typical cold email rates, those typical reply rates are under 1%. And so if you're getting under a 1% reply rate, you know, at least a number of those people who reply aren't going to be interested, which means that you have to drastically increase the size of your target addressable market in order to simply get positive, positive responses for people wanting to meet with you. And so the main difference that you have to focus on is how can you write personalized messaging at scale to ensure that your message is resonating very specifically with that recipient? And that could be from pulling in different signals around their research area, what their company's focused on, the different technologies that they use, their focus area within their company, their job description, company announcements, events that they're attending. There's all of this data that exists out there. Typically what people will do is data, they'll still take the same template and send that same template to a list, not even thinking about the level of personalization and relevance that they would need in order to actually generate positive responses. I want to kind of outline a couple of different ways that you can personalize that Specific outreach. There's sort of level one personalization, which is information about their job, about the company. You know, maybe they're hiring for specific roles. Whatever it is is sort of like this surface level personalization that anybody can just go and search and find about them. But then if you want to take it, level two is how can you tie that messaging specifically to the science that they're doing, right? The research area, therapeutic area that they're focused on, the modality, the stage of their pipeline that they're at. And that's where it's really important to then pull that information into your personalization. And when I say personalization, I don't mean I saw that you walk your dog Thursday afternoon in the park or I see that you brush your teeth too, right? We're talking about relevant personalization. So something that's relevant to the recipient for why you're actually reaching out to them. And then there's level three, which is going to be insight based personalization. And this is how you can actually connect what it is that you do to a potential problem that they solve. So instead of saying something like, hey, I see you work in drug discovery, you might actually want to flip that and say something like, hey, I noticed your team published on Kras inhibitors earlier in January and many groups that, that we're working with are struggling with X, Y and Z. And so that way you're making it very specific to something that you saw about them that's hyper relevant to them, tying it back to a problem that you can uniquely solve. And the good news is, is as your sales reps, marketing teams, we're in conversations with lots of these different prospects and people on a regular basis. So we should be leveraging those insights from conversation and turning it back into how we can leverage that in our messaging to make that messaging more potent and effective. And so some of the places that you can go to get this data, there's all sorts of different tools out there that you can use, like side leads, global data, BioPharm, IQ, Gosset, Crunchbase, LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, Pitchbook, you name it, right? There's all the sorts of different tools and data sources out there that you can leverage. And then there's other tools that will actually help you monitor, say like news and funding announcements. So you could set up, say like RSS feeds, monitoring some of your top publications where people publish news, where people announce things, you know, like endpoints, genetic engineering news, et cetera. You can also monitor things like job changes, promotions, team expansions. Are they Hiring for a very specific role that your company can help solve for. Or even like going to a company website as an example, looking for specific press releases that they might put out, looking for areas of the pipeline and different applications modalities. These are all data points that live on most company websites. What you really want to be thinking about is how can I leverage all of this data that exists in order to one, create that hyper targeted list of people that you want to target. But then as well make that message as specific to that list as humanly possible. And then when it comes to actual messaging, the things that we see a lot of people do is, well, one they might open the email with, I hope this message finds you well. And the only people that say that are salespeople or marketing people. And then, and that little blurb of text actually takes up the preview text window when you're actually trying to view a message. And so very quickly somebody can dismiss your email. So you want to, as quickly and as short as possible, show that you did your research, show that personalization in the actual outreach right away. So then that's going to increase your chances of actually getting that message open. The next thing we see is people will write like an entire essay of everything that they possibly do, trying to put in every single data point, sending a bunch of links, talking all about their different product or service. These are all the things that you really want to avoid, want to do is try and keep your message as short as possible, focusing on one specific problem per email or one specific benefit that you could provide per email. Keep those messages to probably a max of like three to four sentences and a max of about 100 to 125 words. The reason we say that is that is about the size that you can fit on a mobile phone and you can see without having to scroll at all so that you can fit your entire message on one screen. And so that way somebody can quickly look at it and be like, okay, wow, this is a short message, I'm going to read it. And they're more likely to actually digest that information that, that you've shared. And then the other thing that you want to do is be very clear about what you want that call to action to be. Do you want it to be a call? Are you trying to share abstract a publication or a data set with them? So be very clear within that call to action so they have one thing that they can do. Again, sort of a call to action issue that we see a lot is somebody might be like, hey, are you available on this time, this time, this time, this time or this time. And then it's like overwhelming for your call to action, so you want to keep it short and concise. The best ones that we see tend to be, I would say, low barrier to actually reply. So an example might be, you know, just reply yes, if you want me to send you over the abstract. And that could be a great example of a very soft call to action where it's a low effort for that recipient to just reply with yes. And so I'll give you an example of a real life use case where we were working with a client, they launched this new product offering and they were really trying to understand what was the right market and what was the right Persona for that specific product. And so what we ended up doing was running about 20 different campaigns to different Personas, different people at different stages in the drug discovery process and ultimately came out to about 20 different campaigns. We were very able to quickly identify where the best product market fit was with a specific subset of that audience. So in this particular case, turned out bioprocessing was the best audience for them. What we were then able to do was provide that data back to them where they could say, wow, this is great. Now I'm going to go and update our product roadmap and we're going to focus more of our efforts around bioprocess. And so if you're thinking about going to market with a new product, a new offering message, testing to a bunch of different audiences with a bunch of different messages is a great way to actually do this at scale and get those insights. So if creating and executing this kind of outbound strategy seems overwhelming, it definitely can feel that way, that's for sure. Especially if you don't have the systems and processes internally to make this happen. But luckily for you, that's exactly what we help life science companies with. And so if you want to learn more, just click the link in the description below.

So now we're going to talk about scientific thought leadership in content and why it's so important, particularly in the life science industry. Your content marketing is different in the life sciences. And when I say content marketing, I don't just mean your marketing team, I mean anything you put out there in the marketing or sales process, right? So whether that be an email, a post, whether it's a whole marketing campaign, whatever that may be, it hits different. In the life sciences, your audience consists of PhDs, MDs, technical experts. They know when you're talking crap, they know when you're Talking nonsense, right? They know instantly that you don't get it. So you need to put out their high quality content hits on their pain points that is relevant and is adding some value or you get ignored. They're not looking for marketing fluff. They want you to solve technical problems. They want you to give insights that they don't know. They want you to provide value where they've not noticed they need it yet. If you can do this and you can provide a piece of expertise, a piece of knowledge or content that is going to help your scientific audience, you instantly build trust and credibility. And you're not just another salesperson, right? You're not just another marketing person. You actually add value to their process. Content serves its dual purpose. It establish cred. It warms up your cold outreach and establish that trust, credibility and that personal touch with your audience. When someone receives a cold email from you later on, but they've already seen an application note, a piece of content, an email pointing out their pain points, you are a trusted resource that they're going to want to reply to. There are different types of content that actually drive engagement and pipeline. So you got application notes. These are detailed pieces of information that are going to tell you how to run a specific process. Whether it's measuring the right outgrowth in the neuronal culture or building a cell organoid or whatever it may be. These are very specific technical details that are going to be very relevant to a niche market that you can provide that to. So it's a really good way of segmenting that audience by knowing which application note to provide to them. You have deep dive case studies with technical detail once again, so the application notes telling you how to do a practical thing. The deep dive case studies may be a technical overview of how your technology has implemented or solved a particular pain. It could be just in one niche element like an application note would solve, or it could be across a whole therapeutic pipeline. Educational webinars featuring your sinus. This is great because it gets you out there there not only talking technical, but showing the technical expertise you have in your company. You get to invite people to a webinar where they can ask live questions and engage with you. And comparison content helps with decisions. So comparing your process of measuring neural outgrowth, for example, with live kinetics or just some static images that you would go to in your normal process. So measuring these deep technical details and comparing them to the change and the difference you get and the outcome that difference drives can be really powerful. So how can you source this content? It Seems like a lot, right? You got to find all of this content, you got to build it. Many companies already have it. So even if you're you go to your website, I'm sure there's going to be something there. Application notes, case study, testimonial. You can repurpose this in an email or a campaign or a LinkedIn post, but if not, you can just talk to your customers, find out their stories and share those stories. They may have to be anonymous, but it still matters if you even say in something like we helped large farmer increase their process by 30%. So for example, maybe you can take their current process and have a big impact on that by adding in your service. And if you can do that, even as a short overview, that's valuable. Or you can pull in your R and D team, sit down with your R and D team, do a mini interview with them. When we work with customers, when we work with our clients, we run workshops, we sit down, we spend an hour and we just ask questions about what's the biggest impact you've seen this have for a client? What have you done in the lab recently as an R and D team that you've seen really make a difference, really propel your technology forward? Just have these conversations. Scientists love to talk and tell you all the cool things they've done. If you speak to your R and D team, you're going to get some gold fallout of that conversation that you can repurpose into case studies and testimonials. So here's the third strategy we're going to jump in into and that's events. I love events. I'm biased. I'm also on the board of a group called Elrig, which is an events company. So I absolutely love events. I think they're some of the highest value things you can do in your sales process. Often we talk about multiple touch points and we go into that a bit and that's great. Virtual touch points are great and you definitely need to do that. But in person, touch points build rapport and credibility so much more quickly and you can dive into stuff so deeply in a short period of time that events are a must do for me in any sales organization. And they're particularly powerful. Right. You can get 10 to 20 solid meetings in two days. Try and do that over zoom and get those are really key stakeholders on that zoom. Meeting can take a lot of time and effort, but if they're there already, they're going to come talk to you face to face conversation, move deals forward so much Faster virtual meetings are great and people expect them now, but that face to face interaction still moves things even just that bit quicker. Events work across the entire funnel, so you've got new leads unblocking mid cycle, deepening customer relationships. So if you think about that, you're at a conference, there's been that guy ghosting you, suddenly comes by the booth, you find out why they were ghosting you, maybe it wasn't. And things are slowing up in that pipeline. You can have that conversation to help move that forward. You can find new lead that you've never even met before because you didn't know they was in your ideal audience, you didn't know that company existed. But they're at the event and you have a conversation and you meet with those guys and then you've got somebody you're already in process with. Something's held up in legal, suddenly you're at a conference, you can talk it through face to face and get this solved. It really drives every deal forward. And then the other piece is not only are you looking for direct ROI at a conference, 80% of deals and buying decisions are made by the first company that the person thinks of. So if I was to mention a product to you now, the first company you think of, eight times out of ten, that's the company you're going with. So building brand reputation at conferences by being there, wearing cool T shirts, jumpers, whatever you need to do to put that brand out there is really, really important for helping you when it comes to your next touch point with that client. The biggest mistakes companies make with events is going well. There's several, but going to the wrong events is one of the biggest ones. You see an event and you say, I've heard of that event, that's cool, let's go there. It's a big event, we should be there. However, it doesn't have a biggest. Over a big enough overlap for your market, you can barely serve 10% of the audience. It costs a lot of money and it's hard to find a needle in a haystack that's the wrong for you to be at, right? Maybe it's even in a geography you don't cover. So just picking events based on their notoriety is not always the right decision. You should spend time as well, not only going to those larger ones, but identify niche events. If you're going to identify a niche event, let's say you're in flow cytometry and imaging and there's an event for flow cytometry scientists every Single person at that conference is going to be valuable to you to talk to, to understand, to get feedback, to sell to the presentations. All of those people are presenting their data within your field. It's gold dust to go to those conferences. And if you think about that, a 200 person conferen of everybody in your ICP is way better than a 10,000 person conference with hardly anybody in your ICP actually running. For a process of whether this is a valuable place to be and that's the right conference to be at, you should definitely do. And this often will just come down to knowing the right event. So just keep your eyes out, reach out to people. There's some great resources online or which events are relevant in your industry. Make sure you're attending the right places. Another big mistake people make is not networking at events properly. I always say no matter what, attend the meeting. And by that I mean for networking too. You don't know what's going to come out of it. I've often gone to networking events and thinking, oh well, I'm done for the day, nothing else going to happen here. And two more opportunities that come out of that because everyone's relaxed. Most companies are just attending there chilled out. Most people are there having a beer or a coffee and then people let their guard down a bit and you can have a much better conversation and a genuine connection with them. So networking at these events and then networking things after the conference can be great, but also during the event making sure you're networking. But one of the key factors there is don't pitch, understand. So if you're a networking and your sole purpose is to pitch people, then you're not networking properly, meant to be understanding about them, having a conversation and getting to know each other. Here's how to select the right events. Build an event database where you can search filter by therapeutic area application technology platform size of event overlap with your technology track who actually attends these events, not just who organizes them and who the organizers claim to be that are going to be there. So a great way of looking at this is often people say oh I want to go because it's got X amount of key decision makers. But really that could be a load of purchasing people that don't have the final decision but they're a decision maker, right? So you need to make sure that the right people are at your conference for the right for your product, for your offering. And there's various ways you could do this. Here's some selection criteria. Are your target customers attending? You could take a Look at this. It's a great place on LinkedIn. If you look at any conferences, a lot of times people will check attending this conference, that's a really good way you can see because that's self selecting existing pipeline opportunities. Going to this. So are your current customers or people in your pipeline going to this event? Is the event niche enough or is it too broad or is it a brand awareness? So you want it to be broad. So actually look at what the event is going to be and what your purpose is at the end event. Do you need a booth to attend this event? Can you go as a delegate or should you have a presentation? Each of these things serve different purposes. So having a booth is often about brand awareness, having somewhere to meet, being a delegate is more about that networking approach and educating yourself about your industry. And having a presentation puts you out there as a thought leadership. So think about what your purpose is at the conference and make sure you drive the right results through the right activity. You've decided you're going to go to event. Now what do we do before the event? There's things you want to do. Don't just turn up and think that everything's going to be great. That event was expensive. They are great for roi, but you have to put the effort in to get the ROI out of that event. You need to book as many meetings as you can before you arrive at the event. Aim to fill your schedule with meetings. Know the opportunities in your pipeline and who's attending from those opportunities. Reach out to them, see if they're going to be there. Add them into your meeting schedule. Get the attendee list up front where you can get speakers and attendee lists. Go through them, categorize them. Get your top segment of people, your cream at the top that you know you want to meet with. Try and get your meetings with them first. Then you've got your B players. Get your meetings with them and then any slots you've got less. Anyone else that could be interesting that could add value or add to a deal. Spend time, try and personalize in those meeting requests. Don't just write one template, hit send all. Personalize it. Look at what the people do, what you do with the overlap with them. Write a very personalized message that is targeting to them and try and get them to meet. Try and get them to schedule an actual appointment, not visit the booth. You've got two options. First and the best case is we've got a meeting booked at set time to meet to talk about X. Next best case is they'll pop by the booth. You have very little control over that booth pop by. So it's a lower value outcome. So drive the meeting first and then during the event. This is one of my biggest bugbears, something I've always had people who hear me rant about. This is make sure you're getting value. That booth is your shop front. So don't sit at the booth. Always be standing, be present, be open and welcoming. Try not to have too many barriers in front of you. We're salespeople, we're generally outgoing. Not all scientists want to walk up to somebody sat behind their laptop and engage with them. That can be quite daunting. So be out in front, be open, don't eat at the booth. Looks unprofessional, looks messy, and I'm not going to interrupt you if you're eating. I wouldn't want to be interrupted while I was eating. So just don't eat at the booth. Get out in front, engage with people, pull them into your booth and start talking to them about your content. Be prepared with thoughtful questions to ask, not your what brings you here to the booth? This is a great place where you can actually ask questions that are even qualifiers. What research are you in? What's your technical area of interest? Questions like that that actually start to tell you something about them so you can self qualify and then either move on or engage further with them. Because you've got a certain amount of time at that booth with only so many people. Take detailed notes of your conversation and detailed specifics about follow up after the event. What are we going to do now? So we've spen spend all of that time and money getting there, all of that time at the booth, all that time networking. Post event is just as critical and often gets forgotten. Most reps will go take their first few people they thought was really hot leads, follow those up if you're lucky and forget everyone else. So what we recommend speed and personalization matter most follow up the same day. Why are we waiting until after the event to follow up? You can go sit down somewhere. Follow up with a few of your events at lunchtime that you met during the morning. In the afternoon follow up at the end of the day you will be the first person in their inbox that's following up after that conference that avoids being captured in all of that noise because everybody else is going to wait till after. Every person at the event should not be getting the same generic follow up but they will be from every rep. So make sure you personalize your message and follow up with those notes you made. Reference anything from personal details you discussed the holiday that are going on through to technical project details, just so it anchors them back to the conversation you had. And make sure every person at the event is getting a follow up. Some will be more, you'll spend more time on some of them because they're in that a profile of person and you really want to dive deep and make sure you do the work. Everybody else, you're still going to want to personalize, still going to want to follow up quickly. But make sure you follow of everyone and make sure you segment your follow up. Like I said, hot lead, warm lead, cold leads, get them all out quickly. But you that will depict what level of effort and time you spend on each of them.

All right, the fourth strategy that we're going to talk about is targeted paid advertising. I think a lot of companies typically will avoid LinkedIn ads for some reason. So we hear constantly people are running some sort of Google Ads, but they're not really running ads on LinkedIn. And if I think about the main differences between these two channels is Google Ads are great if you have a product that people are actively searching for where you can capture that search demand and then be able to convert that search demand. But if you have a product that require or service even that requires some form of education, I actually think LinkedIn ads are going to be a better format to actually reach those people. And one of the advantages of using LinkedIn ads is you can create, take that targeted list that you've already built that you're doing outbound to. You could take a that same list, create a matched audience on LinkedIn and run targeted ads specifically towards that group as well. So now you're hitting them across multiple channels. And it's a great way to promote webinars, to promote that thought leadership content that we've put out there that we mentioned earlier. You know, imagine you put a great organic post out there and it got lots of engagement from different people. You can promote that post now to a very select set of people that you know, care most about, about that piece of content. And so LinkedIn ads are going to be a great way to take your brand and actually disrupt what somebody's doing. So putting that ad in front of them. And one of the key pieces with LinkedIn ads is you want to avoid just like your generic like here's our product, buy it now. Unless you have something that is super transactional that everybody knows about, your LinkedIn content should actually be more Very visually appealing. So you imagine as you're scrolling through LinkedIn there are certain things that are going to capture your attention and so you want your ad to stand out visually from everything else in the timeline, to capture somebody's attention, to get them to actually then take action on whatever it is that you want them to take action on. And so I kind of view this in a couple of different buckets for how you would set up your ad funnel is you sort of have this top level funnel which is your, call it your cold audience or sort of this awareness set of ads. So these are people who don't really know who you are, they haven't come to your website. And so you want to, to basically put ads in front of them for your target audience to try and get them to click or convert on your website. And so this sets of ads are typically going to be brand awareness, problem focused, solution oriented. So trying to educate and get them to draw, to draw them in. And then those people are going to ultimately land on your site. And if you have the LinkedIn tracking pixel set up, you'll then be able to retarget those people again on LinkedIn or, or other channels. And so you'll be able to start to capture all of this website traffic to then where you can retarget those people back on LinkedIn. And that sort of creates this other bucket of ads that you would want to target which are around like retargeting. And there you want to actually focus your ads to be different, you want to have more trust building type of content like case studies, application notes, customer interviews, things that are taking somebody further down that problem and awareness funnel to where now they say, cool, I trust this company more and more. I'm going to then click on one of these ads and then I'm more likely to actually then convert on the website. The other thing that you can do along the way here is you can actually capture a subset of the people that come to visit your site. So this is separate from retargeting where you can then retarget them on LinkedIn. You can actually figure out to some degree who are the individual people tied to their LinkedIn profile that are actually coming to your website. And then what you could do is you could funnel those people, people into say a tool like Clay, enrich their profile information, filter out to make sure they're an ICP fit, and then actually draft a direct message to reach out to those people. You probably don't want to say, hey, saw you were on our website. But you can imagine how the timing might be super relevant if somebody clicked on one of your ads, came to your website and then the next day they get a highly targeted and relevant prospecting message directly to you. You can imagine the level of conversion that you're going to increase along the way is going to be drastically higher. And so by combining the sort of like awareness bundle to this cold audience retargeting layer and direct outreach together, you're creating this sort of ecosystem where you can put as many messages as you can in front of people as possible so that they are aware of who you are, they know what you do, they know the problems that you solve, they know the value that you can drive for them. And so when that problem comes up, they're more likely to choose you as that vendor. You know, as Nick mentioned, I think 80% of people are choosing choose that first vendor that they think of. And so we want you to be that first vendor that they think of.

One quick question to talk through before I take it. What would you say is the best use and worst use for an abm? I know what's in my head. I just want your opinion before I start.

Like, ABM is probably not relevant for every product or service. Like you probably want a certain contract value that's worthwhile or some sort of like larger purchase where there's multiple stakeholders that have to be involved. But then also like not every account is going to get this right. So this comes down to like account prioritization. How do you prioritize your accounts to make sure you're actually like, if you're going to spend these efforts on them, that you spend them on the right type of accounts. And just because you say you want to work more with pharma doesn't mean like pharma should be, you don't, doesn't mean you have to take an ABM approach for pharma.

So strategy 5 account based marketing ABM. It was at one point a little while ago that everybody thought you had to do this. I'm not sure it's right for everyone, but it's definitely right for some. And we're going to go through some of the reasons you should, shouldn't use it, when to use it, why to use it, all of that, all of a good stuff. So first of all, what is ABM and what does it mean in the life sciences? It's basically a targeting marketing approach. But rather than thinking about your marketing in a geographical audience or a therapeutic segmentation, what you're going to do is you're going to take an account and treat it as its own market. So this is a lot of work and it's really powerful if done correctly in the right market. Just because a large pharma, for example, is one of your key accounts doesn't mean it has to be an AVM account. And I'll go into that. ABM is generally, you've got an account that has, I'd say, at least 50 potential target people within it and you're going to go out after them and really try and get all of them engaged in your company. For example, you don't want to be targeting a company total of 50 people and thinking that's ABM because it's probably not big enough for you to go after. So what makes sense, what doesn't? I started to touch on this. You want, the company needs to be large enough. It has to have a large enough ICP within that company. So you could take for example, a large farmer, but you can only serve their oncology team. And their oncology team is 30 people max. They're probably not an ABM strategy because ABM means you're going to link your marketing, your sales team, your collateral, your content, your ads, and you're going to put of the energy into all of that to get to that company. Whereas if there's only 20 people and there were only one department in oncology in that team, you could probably get there on your own with your sales team. Really think about how you're going to go into an account and expand out to take that whole account and is your energy worthwhile? That's when I would use it is when you know there's lots of potential and lots of people accounts and teams that you need to impact to get your biggest value out of that client.

So one thing that you want to think about with ABM is also like, do you have a product or service that is required to be used by a number of different people within an organization? Or there's lots of stakeholders involved with making that particular purchase. If you have a large instrument that costs, I don't know, a million dollars, that is probably a good play for abm because there's going to be different stakeholders that have to be involved to ensure that that instrument gets placed within that particular account. However, if you sell like a reagent, picking Pfizer as your target audience may not actually be the best approach. And ABM probably isn't even the right approach for you to take. Right there you're really thinking about how can I Target the right people, no matter where they work. When you think about ABM and where it actually fits, it's not just like, cool, we're going to target these specific accounts. It's I actually have something of high value that can be less leveraged broadly within an account where it takes a concerted effort to get in front of all of the different stakeholders involved in order to make that purchase. This could be things like large software deployments, large instruments, maybe clinical services, large scale service organizations, maybe where you're doing like drug testing, things of that nature. Whatever it is, it's gotta be something that's high value where you know that it's going to be a good fit for that specific organization and not something where you can sort of sell to the long tail, which is more of just like an individual end user type of sale.

How do you identify, prioritize your target accounts and how do you break them down and start to target the people within those accounts? So you've got your ABM accounts and you're now going to go after them. You need to define your ideal customer profile, your ICP with extreme efficiency and extreme accuracy. So often people will go after an ICP and they're like, oh yeah, it's people working in cancer that tells you very little. That's about as good as saying it's a scientist. Right. So you need to, to really start to define your audience. And I remember working in one company and we did this, we got to the level as we'd make up imaginary profiles for each product within each segment. This was a company doing their own differentiation. We had Macrophage Mike, so we were selling macrophages and Mike was one of the ideal customer profiles. You could have had Macrophage Sally as well. Right. And we were really thinking about who is this person, what do they do? What do they care about? What does our product do for them? What is their outcome and what are their pain points? Right now we've got a battle card for each person for each product and we know who we targeting. You may only have one product and multiple segmentations. You may have multiple products with a few different segmentations. But either way, understanding in that level of clarity and detail, you can actually go out and really segment your audience and target them with specificity. Because you know their ICP so well. Saying we want all scientists in oncology at AstraZeneca is not going to help anybody.

Yeah, I think the key part with this too is as you identify what that ICP fit is, then you actually have to Go through the data process to figure out where are those people, what companies do those people work at? And then you're going to ultimately sort of identify what is the like account potential. Like how many of these people exist at this company. If we were to say get all of them on board, what is the potential that this account could be worth for us? And then also like your act, your current engagement level within a particular account as well, if you already have a lot of different points of contact within an account, it might not be a great ABM target, that might be a better sales led motion where your sales team goes and tries to get more referrals. You want to think about your level of engagement and the account potential. And ultimately what you're going to try and do is create a list of top accounts. So you might say your top 10 accounts that you want to start with. Where you're going to run this ABM approach that is going to be what I would recommend is starting with a small number. Oftentimes I see teams try and do, hey, we're going to start with 50 accounts or 200 accounts. And that's a lot of work to do to put in the effort to create ads, content, messaging, pulling the lead list, everything that's going to matter in order to make ABM successful. And so what you want to do is if you're just starting ABM or just thinking about doing it, pick like your top 10 accounts where you think if I get in the door to these accounts, if we break in where we think we have the best ideal customer profile fit based on all of the different parameters that we've kind of talked through starting, start there and then track success of abm not at like how many people you reach out to, not at tracking reply rates. But are you actually booking meetings in those key accounts? So if you have 10 accounts, start to measure how many meetings are we booking within these accounts on a regular basis. And that's what you want to start to look at from your success metrics that's going to give you that positive indication that like ABM is starting to work. And then obviously you'll be tracking those things through to close close eventually, but start with 10 and then as you start seeing success, expand further beyond those. And so there's lots of different tools and things that you can use to help make this happen. So like all of the different data tools that you're going to need to build a company list to find the right people, the tools that you're going to use to distribute this Messaging, whether it be through email, LinkedIn, Google Ads, LinkedIn ads, running webinars, whatever it might be, right? There's all sorts of different tools that have to come together and it takes an orchestrated effort across marketing and sales. This isn't like it's just, it's account based marketing, but it's not just marketing, right? It's also sales involvement. When reaching out to and making ABM.

Successful, one mistake most people make is you sit down and go, who are ABM accounts? Who are we going to target? Great, give me a list of the top 10 pharma. As Harrison said, the potential is the important piece there. If your growth in that company is only say a couple of hundred thousand, yet there's a much smaller company that you could target and do an ABM account strategy across and you're going to get 5 million out of it doesn't matter whether it's in the top 10 farm or not, that's your ABM account. So looking for that potential, that difference between baseline of what you've got and what you could potentially have, the sixth.

And final strategy that we're going to talk about today is the multi channel integration or the multichannel orchestration, which is how can you be everywhere all at once for all of your prospects that you're trying to get in front of you? If you, if you sit around and wait for, you know, marketing leads to come inbound to you. If you're only using cold email, email as a channel and you're not using LinkedIn, if you're not using ads, you're missing out on a lot of the different channels at which that you can engage with potential buyers. And different people react to and respond to messaging in different channels. For example, if you wanted to get a hold of Nick, probably shouldn't email them, right? You might want to send them a WhatsApp, you might want to give him a call, you might want to message on LinkedIn. There are different channels that people tend to respond to messaging. There are people who won't click on ads, there are people who won't pick up the phone. However, on the flip side, there are people that do click on ads and there are people who do pick up the phone. Trying to figure out how you can be in all of these different channels all at once is really what's going to make you successful nowadays. Like there is so much noise out there in the industry with content, with ads, with messaging, everybody's inbox is flooded. And so you really want to try and figure out how can I be as many places as I possibly can and then get that message of across to your ideal customers. So that way when they have the problem that you solve, they come specifically to you. So, and then, so when we think about like how you might actually integrate all of these things together, there's a couple, I would say like foundational layers that you want to set up. The first being you want to have some sort of organic content engine where you're creating content on a regular basis and you're putting your messaging, brand awareness things out into the world and it's free, essentially free to do that. So creating organic content, that thought leadership piece that we've talked about, then I would say the second piece that's really important is that orchestrated outbound prospecting engine. So that's going to be your email outreach, your LinkedIn outreach, your phone calls, whatever the different channels are that you want to leverage. It's how can I get my message to as many people in my ideal customer profile as possible and how do I get it to them as quickly as possible? Right. There's only going to be about 3 to 5% of people that are in the buying window at any given time. Outbound is really good at capturing that 3 to 5%. But it's also really good at setting the seed for future conversations because you know, they'll recognize your name, they'll recognize your brand, and then maybe it's the fifth email after three months of outreach that finally hits them at the right time. As you kind of want to have this always on engine of outbound prospecting happening. And then if you combine that with organic content, you're again you're just much more visible to everybody at all times. And then once you kind of have these foundational layers, this is when you want to start stacking in these other channels such as paid ads. So Google LinkedIn, kind of some of the main channels you could do third party advertising with other like publication type providers. But then you want to start layering in this sort of awareness layer as well. And so now they're getting hit from multiple different angles and they're going to be more likely to convert when they see your messaging and then also layering in events with all of their is going to be key as well. As Nick mentioned, they're great for brand awareness, they're great for driving meetings and actually getting face to face conversations, they're great for actually progressing in progress deals and they're great for networking, meeting new people who can give you referrals into other potential companies. That you could potentially work with. And so you sort of have all of these different efforts happening simultaneously. But then the key where most people drop the ball is they don't have any sort of like nurture or follow up process to take these people forward through the sales process. So it's like, great, we're getting all of these leads at the top of the funnel, but there's no systematic way to continue nurturing them over time. And again, great ways to do that are going to be with content, with ads, with direct email, outreach, marketing automation. So sending weekly newsletters, sharing publications, sharing those application notes, whatever it may be. You again also have to nurture these people on an ongoing basis. So that way, when the timing is right, they come to you. And we see a lot of people drop the ball on simple, you know, follow up. You get a hot lead, they say you'll follow up with me in three months, and that person just never gets touched ever again. So make sure while you're building this, you also have that nurture and follow up layer in place as well. Some of the metrics, when you think about all of this, you know, orchestration across all of these different channels, some of the places where I think where people go wrong is they try and measure each and every channel in, in isolation, right? So you're looking at, you know, how many people opened our weekly newsletter email, how many people clicked on our ad, how many impressions did our ads get. You're looking at how many leads did we get from the booth. You're thinking about what's our reply rate to email, what's our positive response rates. And so you're looking at all of these channels in isolation when in reality you want to be thinking about, are all of the efforts that we're taking actually driving pipeline? Are we actually seeing, seeing an increase in pipeline over time? Are we seeing new opportunities enter? Are we seeing opportunities progress quickly through the funnel? And these are the types of things that you want to be measuring. So it's less about is one channel being the attribution measure to driving pipeline? You really want to be looking at all of these efforts and are we systematically increasing pipeline over time? And this is also one of the downsides with, you know, when you think about your attribution, if you look at your first touch or last touch attribution, somebody might have seen you at an event one year ago and the first touch attribution is events. But then they received four ads, it went to a webinar, and then they responded to an email. Now all Of a sudden, how do you know what is the thing that actually helped convert this person? It's really a collection of all of these things. And so if you're only looking at attribution for first or last touch, you're missing like this whole messy middle where a whole bunch of other great activities are happening, building that sort of, sort of awareness for your brand or for your company. And so you really want to be figuring out how do you track all of that information and all of those different touch points across the customer journey? And what are those things in concert, working together that actually drive pipeline? And then when you're doing all of this and you're thinking about, hey, what is our actual cost of acquisition and what is our cost on ad spend, what is our return on outbound, all of these different costs that are associated, you really want to try and think about how do I combine these things together to give me like a real customer acquisition cost. And then from there you can determine how does that compare to our lifetime value of a customer. I often will see people look at the roi, if you will, of just the first order. So somebody comes in, maybe it costs you $1,000 to acquire that prospect and then, or see me to acquire that customer, but then the first order is, you know, $1,200. Like that doesn't look like a great ROI. How about, however, if that customer continuously buys 10 times over the next year, you're not looking at like a 10x11x return on that investment to acquire that customer. And so if you think about these things in isolation, you miss the bigger picture, which is what is a customer actually worth to you in the long run?

The reality is each of these strategies work and they work well. They take a lot of effort, they take a lot of time, they take a lot of resource, but they work well. Most companies simply don't have the infrastructure, the specialized tools, the dedicated resources, and the team to implement all of them. That's exactly what we've built over the past last few years. We've worked with over 85 life science companies. We have the data sources, we have the technology stack, we have the processes. We all have scientific expertise to help translate your message and the team to fully execute this system for you. So if you're serious about generating more pipeline and you don't want to spend the next six months building it yourself, hiring the right team to do it, I suggest you click the first link in the description below and book a free strategy call with us. We'll look at your specific situation. We'll look at your technology, we'll look at your target market, and we'll show you exactly how we'd implement these strategies for your business. And we'll also see if we're a good fit to work together. So again, book your strategy call below. And if you want to learn more about sales and marketing as a life science company, then watch this video next.