What’s one piece of advice you’d give to a biotech CEO as they approach a commercial launch?
So I am thinking primarily from the forecasting perspective, and I think that often we see when we’re working in biotechs that the forecast will develop from an initial financial perspective, fairly early on in the product cycle, you don’t necessarily have a big commercial team around it. And as a product develops and gets to which you build up that commercial team, I think that developing a commercial focus and driven forecast is critical. It’s not that finance-driven forecasts are wrong. It’s not that they’re bad, but they come from a financial lens or finance perspective. So to give an example, we’re working with a customer a year or two ago, and they had a finance-driven forecast. And when we looked at it, there wasn’t a split of the market in terms of the patients. This product could target two or three different groups of patients, and ultimately it would achieve different things in those different groups of patients and be used in different amounts.
Just wasn’t in there. These patients were just lumped into one. And that ultimately meant that the forecast was not very transparent and not very flexible to run different situations. And that’s because from a finance team’s perspective, that wasn’t the most important aspect. They didn’t focus on it. So if you don’t shift, or at least take your finance forecast and enhance it with a commercial perspective, as you get close to long-term line, the forecast with the strategy of the product, it’s going to become more difficult because the commercial strategy of the product is not reflected in the forecast. Resourcing for biotechs. They need to be quite flexible in resourcing, they don’t have the massive teams that big pharma have. So finding people to work with and solutions which allow that support to dial up and down and that resource to be available. We have several offerings which allow customers to be quite independent or draw on resource.
So if they’re in times of need where suddenly someone turns around and says, I need another forecast for another indication for that product that they’ve never looked at, pick up the phone day or two sorted. But if it’s like, oh, next month we plan to do this, I’ll do it on my own because I’ve got capacity, because they don’t have the CapEx to be able to expand their teams and have residual resource sitting there. And they’ve got to stay quite lean typically in biotech. So approaching a flexible resourcing perspective from the forecast and then embedding that in how you approach it, can bring real value and give you lots of flexibility.
