Preparing to launch a new therapeutic option
Clinical superiority alone does not guarantee the success of a therapy. Launching a new biopharmaceutical product is a demanding process, with 90 percent of clinical drug developments failing. Without meticulous preparation and research, poor strategic planning accounts for 10 percent of these failures. For a successful launch, your organization must have a deep understanding of the market, a strong commitment to meeting customer needs, and influential real-world data.
As you prepare to introduce your therapy to the market, answer these five essential questions to evaluate your launch readiness.
1. What is your strategic evaluation process?
You developed your product to fulfill a need in the market and it is essential to understand the overall landscape thoroughly. This involves market research and competitive analysis—a deep dive into what sets your product apart and identifying potential challenges. Leveraging data and research allows you to position your product for success, gaining a competitive edge and identifying potential challenges early on. “The right data at the right time is a linchpin in the drug commercialization process underpinning every decision and action from bench to bedside,” said Yasser Ali. “It enables a more streamlined, efficient, and effective path to bringing new therapies to market, ultimately enhancing patient outcomes, and achieving commercial success.”
When collecting data, it is crucial to engage all stakeholders—from healthcare professionals and patients to payors and distribution partners. Diverse perspectives provide a holistic understanding while ensuring everyone feels included and valued. Physicians, nurses, and pharmacists contribute valuable insights into clinical needs and patient care, while patients and caregivers share real-world experiences that highlight challenges and expectations. Collaboration with patient advocacy groups, payors, and regulatory bodies ensures product accessibility, affordability, and compliance with industry standards. Engaging market access teams, commercialization experts, and educational partners enriches the understanding of market dynamics and helps craft targeted strategies.
By adopting a comprehensive and inclusive approach to strategic evaluation, you can better understand patient demographics, prescriber behavior, and the challenges in educating healthcare providers and patients about new treatment options. This approach ensures that your product reaches the market, making a meaningful impact on patient lives.
2. What level of execution support do you have?
Given the constantly evolving market trends and regulatory changes for healthcare and life science industries, it’s essential to implement mechanisms that allow for adaptive strategy execution. This includes establishing robust feedback loops, fostering an environment of continuous learning, and leveraging data analytics to inform decision-making.
To ensure seamless collaboration among team members, you need to assess how your teams are communicating cross-functionally and how they are sharing feedback and insights in pursuit of the company’s goals and objectives. By actively engaging in these aspects of execution support, your team members feel involved and integral to the strategic planning process.
Incorporating a maturity assessment can significantly enhance your execution support now and in the future. As your organization matures, you become less reactive and more data-driven, making informed decisions based on performance metrics and financial results. A mature organization also empowers its workforce, providing them with the information, training, and authority to address issues and seize opportunities autonomously. This level of maturity not only fosters agility but also instills a sense of confidence and control, enabling your organization to adapt to problems or capitalize on emerging opportunities swiftly. By aligning your execution support with your maturity level, you ensure that your strategic plans are actionable, resilient, and adaptable to change, providing a sense of reassurance and security to your organization.
3. How are you supporting your leadership?
According to Bain & Company, “The most consistently undervalued factor contributing to a successful launch is the way leadership teams organize and manage the launch process.” To effectively face operational and strategic challenges, your leaders need specific skills and resources. Supporting your leaders starts with identifying and addressing any skill and competency gaps through extensive training and development resources.
Since every leader is unique, it is essential to tailor any training programs to specific roles and individual needs. Conducting a baseline assessment will help you recognize and leverage your leaders’ existing capabilities while pinpointing specific areas that require focused development. Incorporate various leadership development strategies like mentorship, workshops, and continuous learning into your overall plan for targeted development and growth. Additionally, creating a leadership playbook can help standardize best practices and foster a future-focused leadership culture that can evolve and adapt.
4. How are you communicating with key stakeholders?
It’s a stark reality that nearly half (46 percent) of new drug launches fail to meet expectations because of inadequate understanding of the market and customer needs. For a successful market entry and growth, you need to ensure a continuous frontline feedback loop—requiring an optimized field force team and robust communication strategy. Field force teams play a crucial role by receiving real-time feedback from healthcare providers and expertly managing relationships with multiple stakeholders. Their efforts in educating providers, improving patient identification, and enhancing overall experiences are vital for the success of healthcare commercialization.
Your communication strategy should include detailed instructions for how your field force team shares the product’s unique value to healthcare professionals and patients and outlines communication efforts to ensure there is a continuous evaluation of feedback throughout the launch process to keep leadership informed. By relaying challenges to leadership, they can better provide support, remove roadblocks, make necessary adjustments, or evaluate ways to reposition in a dynamic market. Additionally, with effective communication and ongoing education, you can improve internal stakeholder buy-in, increase business efficiency, minimize bias, and manage risk through informed decision-making.
5. What is your acquisition integration strategy?
According to PwC’s 27th Annual Global CEO Survey, over half of health industry CEOs plan to make at least one acquisition in the next three years. With the substantial trend of biotech acquisitions, it is important to consider what your organization’s strategy is. Acquisitions of any size can cause major disruptions in culture and operations.
During times of organizational change, focus on how communication and collaboration can help create alignment for cross-functional teams. By addressing your organization’s approach to managing change, you can mitigate the risks of sticking to old processes. It’s essential to develop and implement mechanisms that will drive true process transformation to ensure accountability and transparency throughout the newly integrated organization. Additionally, creating a framework that fosters a diverse, people-first culture will encourage innovation and collaborative problem-solving. Aim to create a patient-first, business-focused environment where the new organizational objectives are the central focus.
How can BioLaunch Solutions help?
At BioLaunch Solutions, we are committed to ensuring our healthcare and life science partners achieve seamless product launches in complex markets. With a proven track record of launching over 23 groundbreaking therapies, we provide strategic guidance and innovative solutions to enhance product performance, cultivate meaningful patient advocacy engagement, and ultimately, better patient outcomes.
Our full-service approach to biopharma commercialization has helped our clients proactively navigate complex health ecosystems and optimize time to market. By working as an extended member of your team, we can help ensure cross-functional collaboration, effective communication, and continuous improvement to execute your strategic planning. We provide tailored solutions from commercial and digital readiness assessments to leadership skills and competencies assessments. We also specialize in post-merger integrations to mitigate risks and ensure alignment between cross-functional teams. Our tailored process assesses your organization’s governance, operational goals, retention strategies, and cultural alignment to build a holistic strategy.
By addressing these five critical questions and leveraging the expertise of BioLaunch Solutions, you can confidently navigate the complexities of launching a new therapeutic option and be well-prepared for long-term success. If you want to learn more about the problems we solve, or you are ready to start developing a tactical plan, we look forward to discussing your organizational goals.
