What you’ll learn
- Foundations of commercial strategy in healthcare and biopharma productization
- Innovative ways to improve commercialization
- How product lifecycle management can help ensure your product continues to meet market needs overtime
Healthcare and biopharma commercial strategy
Commercial strategy in healthcare and biopharma is about creating value that aligns with the industry’s rigorous demands and high stakes. With fierce competition, complex regulatory environments, and an increasing demand for innovation, teams and organizations must continually adapt and refine their commercial strategies and tactics to stay ahead.
Three core elements of healthcare and biopharma commercial strategy are:
- Identifying unmet medical needs
- Understanding the competitive landscape
- Strategic product positioning
Core elements of healthcare and biopharma commercial strategy
Identifying unmet medical needs: How does your product improve the lives of patients? Compared to other commercial strategies, what makes commercialization of healthcare and biopharmaceutical products unique is the patient impact. A successful commercial strategy requires early engagement with the patient community to gain a deep understanding of the patient populations and the specific needs not currently being met by existing treatments. This understanding requires robust data analysis and market research to help identify gaps in care and potential patient benefits that competitors have overlooked.
Understanding the competitive landscape: How is your company positioned in the market? By understanding competitors’ products, their drug administration and delivery, sales strategies, and market performance, you can more effectively refine your value propositions. It’s essential to assess not only current competitors but also anticipate new market entrants.
Strategic product positioning: How will you promote and market your product? Once you understand needs and competitors, you can focus on strategically positioning your product to maximize market potential. This includes tailoring marketing messages, choosing the proper distribution channels, and setting price points that reflect the product’s value in terms of patient outcomes and cost-effectiveness compared to alternatives.
Innovative ways to improve commercialization
Traditional commercialization models in healthcare are challenged by more modern and agile approaches that reflect technological changes, patient expectations, and regulatory landscapes. If your organization wants to improve their commercialization strategy, there are a variety of innovative models, tools, and strategies you can implement.
Value-Based Care Models: Value-based care models are increasingly prevalent. These models focus on patient outcomes rather than the volume of care delivered. Commercial strategies in this model leverage data analytics to demonstrate products’ economic and clinical value to insurers and healthcare providers.
Digital Integration: Integrating digital tools and platforms in your commercial strategy is table stakes. From enhanced customer engagement and insights to streamlined operations, digital tools can help you make data-driven decisions and better adapt to market demands. Telemedicine, mobile health apps, and AI are only a few examples of how technology has transformed healthcare organizations. Leverage digital innovation to engage directly with end-users and gather real-time feedback for continuous improvement.
Collaborative Partnerships: Forging partnerships with healthcare providers, technology companies, logistics providers, regulatory experts, and prospects can lead to advantageous commercialization strategies. Partnerships can enhance commercial strategy by providing access to new markets, sharing resources, driving innovation, mitigating risks, providing regulatory support, and improving market credibility. They enable organizations to leverage complementary strengths and capabilities, accelerate time-to-market, and offer more comprehensive solutions to customers.
These are just a sample of the many ways you can innovate to improve your commercialization strategy. As an integrated commercial partner, BioLaunch Solutions can help you determine what strategies would be most beneficial to your product. With our commercial strategy services, we’ve helped organizations proactively address commercialization challenges and identify ways they can improve time to market. Contact us today to learn more.
Ensuring your product continues to meet market needs
For a commercial strategy to be successful, you need a holistic understanding of the product from its initial concept and design, through manufacturing and commercialization, to potential expansion. This is known as Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), and it ensures that a product continues to meet market needs throughout its lifetime.
BioLaunch Solutions empowers pharmaceutical and biotech companies to achieve optimal performance by focusing on their most valuable asset: their people. By fostering cross-functional collaboration and team optimization, BioLaunch Solutions helps organizations navigate the complex product lifecycle from pre-approval through post-launch phases, while driving patient-centricity throughout the process.
Product lifecycle phases
- Before Launch: According to insights from McKinsey & Company’s “Beyond the Storm”, the most effective companies begin their market work long before product launch and there are key indicators of a winning launch, such as cross-functional collaboration, employee enthusiasm, and buzz in the medical community.
- Launch Excellence: Launching a new product in the healthcare market requires meticulous planning and execution. This includes everything from ensuring regulatory compliance and engaging key opinion leaders to executing targeted marketing campaigns and securing supply chain logistics.
- Market Response: With real-time data and analytics, PLM enables companies to monitor market trends, customer feedback, and product performance. This information is critical for making informed strategic decisions, such as when to update or phase out products. Being responsive to market needs ensures that the product remains relevant and competitive.
- Market Expansion: After a successful launch, PLM can help you identify expansion options. This might involve exploring additional indications for a drug, expanding into new geographical markets, or adapting the product to meet local needs and preferences.
- Lifecycle Extension Strategies: Planning and implementing strategies to extend the product lifecycle can be achieved through PLM. Formulation improvements, product updates, combining with other products, or finding new patient segments are all ways of extension. These strategies require continuous investment in research, development, and marketing to adapt to the evolving market landscape.
BioLaunch Solutions creates tailored blueprints to ensure that life-changing therapies effectively reach and benefit the patients who need them most. Additionally, they help your teams to deliver exceptional patient experiences, advocate for patient needs, and maintain a patient-centric approach at every stage. Through strategic guidance and support, BioLaunch Solutions enables teams to work together seamlessly, maximizing the potential of their products and ultimately delivering better outcomes for patients, enhancing patient advocacy efforts, and driving success across the entire organization.
The impact of a custom commercial success roadmap
A mid-sized pharmaceutical company acquired a promising new drug in the psychiatry space. Although their field teams had little experience in this area, they decided to proceed with the product launch using their existing team.
Through interactions with BioLaunch Solutions, company employees collaborated cross-functionally and shared knowledge on assessing the psychiatric care ecosystem and competitive landscape to forge common understanding of the marketplace. Segmentation of stakeholders also helped the company articulate a clear and patient-centric product value proposition that was well-aligned with the needs of psychiatric healthcare providers and patients.
This customized offering allowed the company to convey product benefits, illustrate its usefulness in psychiatric care, and showcase its impact on humanizing patient experiences and outcomes. BioLaunch Solutions’ technical expertise in developing bespoke commercial success roadmaps along with a commitment to mental health advocacy and team performance was critical in helping the company transcend the challenges of debuting in the competitive psychiatry market.
BioLaunch Solutions’ involvement provided a strategy for field force engagement with key psychiatric Centers of Excellence, establishing a schedule of call points to keep mental health providers informed about access processes, and ensuring patient support from the moment they are prescribed this new medication. These efforts led to a successful launch, creating success in a new therapeutic area, improving therapeutic options, and laying the groundwork for expanding market and product share in the competitive psychiatric care market.
Ready to overcome your commercialization challenges?
As the landscape of healthcare and biopharma continues to evolve, there will always be new commercialization challenges to face. Companies that anticipate and prepare for changes in the market through innovative commercial strategies can achieve sustained success. Having a commercial success partner like BioLaunch Solutions can ensure you have the right tools to achieve your launch expectations. Through strategic evaluation, blueprint creation, execution support, and responsive strategy, we can help you navigate the complexities of the market and ultimately improve patient outcomes.
We want to hear about your experiences and challenges. Let’s connect and explore how we can drive success together.
