Critical factors for emerging biopharmas when building their commercial engine

The Beghou team was at the Fierce New Product Planning Summit this past week, and we had a great time connecting with industry pros and hearing the latest commercialization trends.

Beghou Partner Dennis Fournogerakis joined leaders from Kura Oncology, Orca Bio and Teva on a panel around "Best Practices for Effective Drug Launch Planning.”

One of our focus areas is helping emerging biopharma companies set up and run their optimal commercial infrastructure for a successful launch.

Below we outline a few quick, high-level considerations based on takeaways from the panel.

If you have a more specific question you’d like answered, please reach out to [email protected] - we’ll follow up with our thoughts and industry learnings.

What are key success factors emerging biopharmas can consider when building their commercial infrastructure ahead of launch?

Holistic (and Early) Planning:

• Prep at least two years before launch; the earlier, the better.
• Align commercial strategy, analytics, and infrastructure from the start to avoid silos.

“At Risk” Investment Timing:

• While balancing approval uncertainty and cash flow, consider investing early and “at risk” in critical areas like CRM for medical teams, Customer Master Data Sets, and a central data repository to support initial analytics use cases and scalability.

Flexible and Scalable Platforms:

• Create a flexible, scalable commercial operating system (e.g., CRM, data warehouse) to adapt to market changes and evolve as you grow. User-friendly and customizable CRMs and easy, granular two-way data exchanges between sales teams and home office is especially critical for small patient populations with nuanced treatment journeys.
• Ensure tech and operations can pivot quickly with market and strategy changes without sacrificing stability.

Patient-Centric Data Ecosystem:

• Build towards a rich, central patient data ecosystem that combines structured and unstructured data to provide a more holistic view of health journeys, day-to-day experiences, and key intervention points.
• Establish workflows and culture that enables a consistent customer view, insights sharing, and coordinated actions across functions and the product lifecycle.

Governance and KPIs:

• Establish clear governance structures and KPIs to measure progress, adjust strategies as needed, and ensure everyone is on the same page.

And at the end of the day – really embrace the data and truly take patient-centric decision making to heart. One of our favorite quotes was “So when you get the data, be open to what it says and don't have your blinders on to what it could really mean. That is pivotal because once you have that data and those insights, thinking about the patient as if they were sitting next to you in that room, as you're making decisions on what that value proposition is or how you're going to launch that product – this is going to be essential.”

These are just a few considerations and learnings from our experiences with clients, but we’d love to hear your experiences and thoughts too. Please feel free to comment or reach out.

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