Picture the scene. You’ve got a new, hugely promising new drug in the pipeline and all the clinical signs are looking good. Which means you have to start focusing on your launch strategy to ensure commercial success. You need to refine your list of potential opportunities and threats, and develop forecasts that will ensure the right resources are available at the right time. How do you achieve launch excellence?
This was exactly the topic that Penny Wills and Andrew Ward covered in our latest webinar, “From Trials to Take Off: The Road to Launch Excellence”. If you missed it, you’ve got a lot to catch up on so I recommend taking the time to listen to the on-demand version. Until you have a moment to do that, here are three things we learned in the session to give you some food for thought.
- You need to adapt your forecasting models. As you approach launch, your forecasting models need to become more sophisticated to reflect market readiness. A key challenge here can be a lack of historical or comparable data, particularly for a first-in-class drug. Here, use of analogues can help, combined with insights from KOLs and epidemiology data. As you approach launch, your forecasts also need to move from strategic evaluations to providing the basis for commercial strategy and marketing plans.
- Resource allocation is crucial for a successful product launch. You need to balance resources – potentially shifting people and budgets from existing inline products to new product launches. The marketing team, field force and BI teams all have different resource needs to ensure they can be effective. You’ll also need to consider elements like the phasing of resources across different country launches and the timing of when to begin the shift. Effective forecasting is key to ensuring that you can transfer the right resources at the right time.
- Data becomes more critical than ever as you approach launch. There is a huge amount of data to feed into a successful launch so you can fully understand your place in the market and how to maximise it. But data isn’t necessarily easy – or cheap – to access, and when it comes to your own sales data there is a lag between a product hitting the market and actual sales numbers being available. There are ways to mitigate this, such as using your sales force to survey clinicians to understand the patient pool, patient cohorts on the new treatment and, in time, to capture patient and clinician feedback and advocacy.
This really is the tip of the iceberg of what Penny and Andrew covered in the webinar and there are a lot of really useful tips and ideas about how to adapt forecasting models to ensure a commercially successful market entry.
The full recording is available here and you can check our full webinar back catalogue as well as register for upcoming events here.
